Why some college coaches prefer broke and docile athletes

The Thursday Thoughts!

Well, I woke up this morning on this, the last day of my 40's, and the first headlines that I read were from the college football world where the University of Alabama's football coach Nick Saban made comments about two of his fellow coaches that landed him in hot water on traditional and social media all day!

Coach Deion Sanders and Coach Nick Saban in an AFLAC commercial

Speaking to his school's boosters about the NCAA's Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) rules that allow college athletes to FINALLY get paid, Saban blasted not only his former assistant coach (and current Texas A&M head coach) Jimbo Fisher, but he launched the following verbal salvo towards Deion Sanders, Coach of Jackson State University, a prominent HBCU:

“Jackson State paid a guy a million dollars last year that was a really good Division I player to come to school. It was in the paper. They bragged about it! Nobody did anything about it."—Nick Saban

Well, anyone who has watched Coach Deion “Primetime” Sanders through the years just knew that he wouldn’t let that slight ride.

Tweeted Sanders:

“You best believe I will address that LIE Coach SABAN told tomorrow. I was & awakened by my son Shedeur Sanders that sent me the article stating that WE PAYED Travis Hunter a Million to play at Jackson State! We as a PEOPLE don’t have to pay our PEOPLE to play with our PEOPLE.”

That last sentence from Coach Prime, about our PEOPLE, should be engraved on his statue someday in Jackson, Mississippi!

A little before noon, Coach Fisher followed Prime's lead and sat down with the media and promptly ripped Saban to shreds by reminding everyone that he used to work for the man, and that the world doesn’t know the half about how sketchy the seemingly squeaky clean icon really has behaved during his Hall of Fame career!

Frankly, I appreciate Saban for being frank about the proverbial elephant in the room, which is that predominantly white colleges and universities have made an absolute killing over the past four decades off of the backs of mostly Black football and basketball players. Especially in the South where, in a twist of irony, flagship state universities like Alabama, Florida, Georgia, LSU, and Tennesse started recruiting Black players that used to star at Tuskegee, Florida A&M, Albany State, Southern, Grambling, and Tennessee State before Jim Crow ended in the late 1960’s and early 1970's.

But hypocrites will be hypocrites, which is why when Saban has a quarterback, Bryce Young, who earns close to a million dollars, it's cool but, when the #1 high school football player in America, Travis Hunter, signs with Jackson State, that’s not so cool.

Alabama’s Bryce Young won the Heisman Trophy in 2021—and nearly a cool million in NIL revenue!

The absurdity of Saban's position is nauseating when one realizes, again, that the billions of dollars in revenue that these schools split each year derives from the blood, sweat, and tears of thousands of Black athletes—much like the trillions of dollars that the American economy derived from its inception in 1787, to the mid-20th Century, was based on the blood, sweat, and tears of Blacks who picked the cotton, harvested the sugar and tobacco, cleared the lands, and built the buildings that fueled trade with Europe and Asia.

Yes, this game is old—and lame!

To put matters into clearer perspective, Football Scoop Magazine recently broke down statistics from the (2018) U.S. Department of Education figures for predominantly white major colleges and universities and their annual profits from football:

Power 5 — Top 15
1. Texas — $156 million
2. Georgia — $123 million
3. Michigan — $122 million
4. Notre Dame — $116 million
5. Ohio State — $115 million
6. Penn State — $100 million
7. Auburn — $95 million
8. Oklahoma — $94.8 million
9. Alabama — $94.6 million
10. Nebraska — $94.3 million
11. LSU — $92 million
12. Tennessee — $91 million
13. Wisconsin — $90 million
14. Florida — $85 million
15. Washington — $84 million

Power 5 — Bottom 5
1. West Virginia — $25 million
2. Rutgers — $27 million
2. Wake Forest — $27 million
4. Vanderbilt — $32 million
5. Boston College — $32.3 million

As you can see, even the bottom earning Power Five schools are getting paid in full off of the backs of their majority Black laborers, sorry again, I meant “student-athletes.” And, as Coach Prime tweeted this afternoon, at Jackson State, he isn’t even making $1 million per year to coach—let alone any freshman football players under his watch.

Jackson State freshman phenom Travis Hunter, the nation’s #1 high school player last year, clapped back at Nick Saban's suggestion that he received $1 million to play for the Tigers.

Now, I get the argument some have made that Coach Saban was simply trying to inspire his Boosters to reach into their pockets so that his dominant program can compete in the modern recruiting era. But in so doing, he is misleading the public into thinking that all of these kids have become millionaires overnight, which is far from the truth.

One of my little brothers and good friends, former Florida State star fullback James Coleman, told me over lunch last week that many of these student-athletes are making only a few hundred dollars per month from NIL—that's it! The lucky ones are getting $1k or a couple-few grands per month, but not the exorbitant pay that the social media chatter is floating. Which is fair because unlike regular students, college athletes often cannot work due to their practice, study hall, and class schedules; Coleman, a NIL developer with collectives that sponsor both FSU and FAMU athletes, is working to expand the public’s knowledge in hopes that these kids can earn their fair share of the money that ordinarily pours into their college's coffers.

But the lies about millions being tossed around liberally are being told because, sadly, some of these overseers, I mean coaches, miss the days when poor boys would just shut up, play ball, and provide relatively free labor—all the while living in fear that their scholarships would be yanked by the coaching staff. Well, those days are gone with the wind, just like slavery, and sharecropping, eventually came to their ends.

Thank you for subscribing to the Hobbservation Point—have a wonderful evening!