With all due respect to Big Daddy Kane, Alabama head coach Nick Saban railed against the insidious role of player agents in collegiate athletics during his SEC Media Day press conference earlier today. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jeff Schultz finds something a tad suspicious about the timing of Saban’s remarks.
Saban has been coaching football for a lot of years and for a lot of teams, college and pro. This issue of agents preying on college players isn™t new. It predates 8-tracks. So it must just be an amazing coincidence that the Alabama coach is only now speaking so passionately about this issue, the day after his best defensive player, Marcel Dareus, was reported to be on an agent™s party list in Miami.
What prompts a coach generally so guarded in public to say of agents, œHow are they any better than a pimp? (and that should go over well with Saban™s agent, who was pimping the coach to NFL teams, including the Falcons, when Saban was still at LSU and then back to the SEC when he was with the Miami Dolphins, for roughly 10 minutes).
And what do we call it when Saban, in expressing how this issue affects everybody in the big picture, has an epiphany: œMaybe we need to not be so self-absorbed about how it just affects us and the NFL and see how it affects everyone and do something about it. Because somehow œironic or œdisengenous just don™t seem strong enough. (Breaking news: Elvis living on Neptune, and Nick Saban wants what™s best for everybody.)