Nick Saban spent thirty years building the most dominant college football dynasty of his generation, and he’s now spending his retirement testifying in front of the United States Senate, warning that the sport he built his legacy on is coming apart at the seams. Alongside Texas billionaire Cody Campbell, Saban is co-chairing a presidential commission examining the wreckage left by name, image, and likeness deals, the free-agency chaos of the transfer portal, unresolved questions about athlete employment status, and the always-fraught application of Title IX to revenue-sharing payments now flowing to athletes. Saban has thrown his weight behind the Protect College Sports Act, testifying alongside Notre Dame’s athletic director, a Pac-12 commissioner, and a former university president that Congress needs to “bring order to a system that badly needs fixing.”
He’s not wrong about the chaos. Since NIL rules opened the floodgates and the transfer portal turned roster construction into something resembling free agency without a salary cap, college sports has become genuinely disorienting even for people who’ve followed it closely for decades. Boosters funnel money through collectives with minimal transparency. Athletes transfer multiple times in a single career chasing better deals with no penalty. Programs with the deepest-pocketed donor bases are pulling away from everyone else at a rate that threatens to make the sport uncompetitive at anything below the top fifteen or twenty programs nationally. Saban’s proposed fix — a federal framework distinguishing “real NIL” compensation from what he calls “disguised pay-for-play,” paired with actual enforcement mechanisms — is a reasonable starting point for a conversation Congress has avoided having for years.
Here’s what’s missing from the version of this conversation happening in Senate hearing rooms, though, and it’s a gap UNJ is specifically positioned to point out: almost nobody testifying about how to fix college sports is talking about what any of these reforms mean for HBCU athletic programs, or for the majority of Division I programs outside the sixty or so schools that generate the television revenue driving this entire crisis.
The current NIL free-for-all has been, on balance, good for individual Black athletes at the top of the sport — a long-overdue correction to a system that generated billions off the labor of predominantly Black athletes in football and basketball while restricting them from earning a dollar off their own name. That part of the reform conversation deserves to be protected, not rolled back in the name of “order.” But the same chaos that’s benefited a five-star recruit at Alabama or Georgia has been genuinely destabilizing for HBCU programs, which already operate with a fraction of the resources of Power Four athletic departments and are now watching their most talented players get poached mid-career by transfer portal offers no HBCU athletic department can realistically match. Jackson State lost a Heisman-caliber talent to the portal within a season of arrival a few years back — a preview of a pattern that’s only accelerated since. If Congress writes a “Protect College Sports Act” that stabilizes the compensation structure for blue-blood programs without a single provision addressing the competitive collapse happening at HBCUs and other under-resourced programs, it will have protected college sports for the schools that were already winning and done nothing for the ones getting hollowed out.
There’s also a Title IX dimension to this reform push that deserves more scrutiny than it’s getting. As revenue-sharing payments to athletes become formalized, the question of whether those payments must be distributed proportionally between men’s and women’s programs under Title IX is not a side issue — it’s a legal question that could reshape how every athletic department in the country budgets its revenue sports going forward. Saban’s testimony, according to reporting on the hearing, largely glossed over this tension in favor of focusing on transfer portal chaos and NIL enforcement. That’s a notable gap for a commission whose stated purpose is comprehensive reform.
The solution-oriented path here isn’t to romanticize the pre-NIL era, when the NCAA enforced amateurism rules that were themselves a form of institutionalized exploitation of predominantly Black labor. It’s to build federal legislation that protects what’s genuinely new and good about this era — athletes finally getting paid — while adding guardrails specifically designed to prevent full competitive collapse among the programs and athletes with the least leverage: HBCUs, women’s programs facing Title IX ambiguity, and non-revenue Olympic sports that college athletic departments have historically funded using football and basketball revenue that’s now being redirected toward athlete payments.
Saban has the country’s attention and a direct line to Congress. That’s an opportunity UNJ hopes doesn’t get wasted on a reform bill that stabilizes the sport for the schools that already have everything, while the programs that built the sport’s cultural foundation, including HBCUs whose bands, traditions, and talent pipelines shaped American football long before ESPN existed, get left to fend for themselves in a marketplace that was never built with them in mind.
Marcus Hart is a combat veteran, journalist, and founder of The Urban News Journal.