Nick Saban isn't thrilled about any potential NCAA action regarding staff sizes
Could the NCAA make a move to limit the size of support staff a top-level football team employs?
As the sanctioning body approved a 10th assistant coach for coaching staffs beginning in 2018, discussion regarding the number of people a program utilizes quickly became a discussion. Big 12 commissioner and Football Oversight Committee chairman Bob Bowlsby said the committee would look at the sizes of support staffs in the upcoming year and that one unnamed program employed 97 people.
“I think that door has been open for a while,” Bowlsby said via Al.com. “We’re seeing very large staff. We see non-coaching personnel doing coaching duties. It is one of our two priorities for the Football Oversight Committee for the coming year … looking at personnel and how personnel should be deployed in the football coaching staff environment.”
It’s fair to assume that the program with nearly 100 support positions is a big revenue program, possibly Alabama. After all, Alabama coach Nick Saban has hired former FBS coaches like Steve Sarkisian and Mike Locksley to analyst positions. Analysts can help with play design and game-planning but they can’t have a coaching role.
On Friday, Saban was happy that he would be able to officially add a 10th assistant coach next season. But he wasn’t too happy with any dive the NCAA and its committees could be doing to potentially limit the size of support staffs. From Bama Insider:
“All these people that complain about staff sizes, I mean, we pay interns really, really little money,” Saban said. “Very small amount of money. You would be shocked at how cheap the labor really is. It’s almost criminal. And why we have administrators complaining about how many cheap labor people you have, trying to promote the profession, trying to do something to develop our game and the coaches in the game, because how else do you develop guys?”
A former head coach at New Mexico and offensive coordinator at Alabama, Locksley was making $45,000 as an analyst in 2016 before he was promoted to a full-time assistant in 2017. And it’s fair to assume that other staffers without Locksley’s résumé were making even less than that. Saban, meanwhile, was the second-highest paid coach in 2016 with a salary near $7 million.
Given Saban’s salary, it’s hard to hear him say it’s “almost criminal” what Alabama pays its interns when $1 million from his annual pay spread to dozens of positions would have a far greater impact per-person than the pay cut he’d be getting. And while it’s universally true across professions that entry-level jobs pay far, far less than CEO-level gigs, Saban is in a very unique position to be able to change the pay structure at his employer.
He also doesn’t have to. Alabama is an incredibly attractive place to get a start or restart in coaching because of Saban’s excellence and the prestige of the program. And the same goes for other big programs like Michigan, Ohio State, LSU, USC, Texas and on and on.
But we’re a relatively long way away from any potential action by the NCAA regarding staff size and it’s unclear just how the NCAA could regulate the number of people a team employs. Given the NCAA’s lengthy enforcement process when it comes to current infractions, it’s OK to wonder if an additional realm of oversight is a good idea.
And if staff sizes do end up being limited, then programs will figure out a way to spend the money they rake in another way. Like maybe installing 60-inch televisions above players’ lockers instead of measly 43-inch ones.
For more Alabama news, visit BamaInsider.com.
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of Dr. Saturday and From the Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
