By DUGAN ARNETT
HOOVER, ALA. — Nick Saban knew the questions were coming, so the fourth-year coach of the Alabama football team offered a preemptive strike Wednesday.
Before fielding inquiries from media representatives during the first day of the Southeastern Conference’s annual Media Days, the coach acknowledged that administrators at the University of Alabama were working in conjunction with the NCAA officials to gain information on allegations that Tide defensive lineman Marcell Dareus might have illegally attended a party held by an agent in South Beach.
“We’re not really going to make any comments, nor do we have any information that he did anything wrong or he didn’t do anything wrong,” Saban said. “But we’re going to find out with the due diligence that we look for.”
The lack of immediate information on the matter, however, didn’t keep Saban from sharing his thoughts on the policies regarding agents and their contact with college athletes.
During an animated 20-minute question-and-answer session, Saban echoed the sentiment of SEC commissioner Mike Slive, who insisted earlier in the day that the current system in place involving a player’s ability to get information about his professional prospects is in need of tweaking.
Among the coach’s assertions was that agents who put a program in jeopardy by inappropriately contacting players were akin to “pimps” — something that prompted surprised chuckles from the sizeable media contingent.
“How are they any better than a pimp?” Saban asked. “I have no respect for people that do that to young people. How would you feel if they did it to your child?”
Saban called upon the NCAA and National Football League’s Players Association to do whatever is in their power to prevent agents from making illegal contact with players — an issue that has gained national attention and brought a number of schools some unsightly publicity in recent days.
A month after the Southern California football program was hit with major NCAA sanctions stemming from former running back Reggie Bush’s interactions with agents, a number of similar cases have sprouted up across the country.
On Monday, for instance, reports surfaced that former Florida offensive lineman Maurkice Pouncey allegedly accepted $100,000 from an agent, and at least one player from both Alabama and South Carolina have been associated in some way with investigations involving agent-athlete relationships.
“It’s a significant problem,” said Tide quarterback Greg McElroy. “Agents, they’re just so relentless. … Those guys, they don’t have anything to lose, they just go out there and bring in a lot of negative consequences to a lot of college players.”
Saban, for his part, offered no lack of solutions to the problem.
Foremost, he said, consequences need to be put in place for agents who approach athletes in an inappropriate manner. The idea of hoping agents operate within the rules because it’s the right thing to do, he added, isn’t realistic in today’s sports world.
“Hey, we all should drive the speed limit because it’s for safety,” Saban said. “It’s all for public safety. But I’ll be the first one to admit, like 90 percent of the rest of you if you’re honest, that I drive the speed limit because I don’t want to get a ticket. Whatever we need to do to create some consequences for people who are not doing the right things here, which starts with the agent, in my opinion, who is entrapping and taking advantage of young people at a difficult time in their life.”
The agent-athlete dilemma has developed into a hot topic so far here in Hoover — Mississippi State’s Dan Mullen, Kentucky’s Joker Phillips and Florida’s Urban Meyer were all asked about the issue — and on Wednesday, Saban was adamant in his assertion that the NFL Players Association has the ability to curb the problem.
“They could fix it,” Saban said. “It could get fixed. You have a standard of behavior and conduct that we have as coaches, that you have as professionals in what you do, that they should have as professionals in what they do. If they don’t meet that conduct, they can’t make a living doing that, it would straighten it out now.”
If NFL representatives fail to do so, however, the former Miami Dolphins head coach didn’t rule out the idea of barring NFL representatives from Tide practices.
“The NFL can (remedy the situation),” he said. “We don’t need to not let them come to practice to do that. There’s already people that don’t let them come to practice. I’ve never had one minute of our practice ever restricted to NFL scouts, anything we do, in benefit of our players. I would absolutely hate to do this. But I would also hope that the NFL and the NFL Players Association would do something about this without us having to do that.”