Nick Saban Says The Big Ten Has An Advantage Over The SEC Because Southerners Won’t Go To The North Unless You Pay Them

He may be on to something…

Nick Saban has a theory for why the Big Ten has been so dominant in this new NIL era of college football: He thinks it’s because people from the south are finally willing to go to school up north.

The Big Ten is on the verge of winning their third straight College Football Playoff National Championship tonight, if the Indiana Hoosiers can take down the Miami Hurricanes of the ACC.

Indiana’s first national championship would come on the heels of Jim Harbaugh and the Michigan Wolverines taking the crown in 2024 (amidst their sign-stealing scandal), and Ohio State destroying Notre Dame last year in the championship game.

The midwestern conference’s dominance comes after seemingly decades of trying to dethrone the SEC as the top conference in college football. Since the College Football Playoffs started in 2014, SEC schools have won 6 championships, along with two for the ACC (and by the ACC I mean both were from Clemson) and one for the Big Ten prior to their current run. It also happened to align with the NIL era of college football, when schools became legally allowed to pay their players and started throwing big money around to recruit the top players to their teams.

Of course this has led to a lot of chatter about other schools finally being able to do what the SEC has done under the table for decades: There’s long been rumors that the SEC and schools like Alabama were paying players long before it was legal under NIL.

In fact, former LSU coach Ed Orgeron basically confirmed as much during a recent podcast appearance:

“You know what? It’s all good. (I’ve been asked), ‘Hey coach, you’ve been out of coaching for a while. How are you going to adjust to NIL?’ I say, ‘Well, it’s a minor adjustment.’ They say, ‘What do you mean?’ I say, ‘Back then, we used to walk through the back door with the cash. Now we just gotta walk through the front door with the cash.’”

(He insisted that it was a joke…but was it?)

Well Nick Saban doesn’t take kindly to suggestions that he was cheating by paying his players when he won all those national championships as the head coach at Alabama. Last year, when comedian Shane Gillis joked about the Tide paying players, Saban was visibly not amused:

But today on the Pat McAfee Show, Saban shared his own theory for why the Big Ten has been able to catch the SEC thanks to NIL:

“To me in this day and age, of the culture we have now in college football, paying players, name, image and likeness, transferring, it’s an advantage for the Big Ten. I don’t care. You will never convince me otherwise.

Because people from the south would not go to the north unless you paid them.”

I mean, he might be onto something. I’m sitting here in Nashville looking at the forecast for snow this weekend and trying to figure out how I can move even further south in the next 3 days. Not to mention the food we have here in the south, the culture, the southern hospitality…it would take a lot to get me to move further north.

Maybe it’s not because the SEC was cheating all along: Maybe the north is just finally able to throw enough money around to get some southern boys to play for them.

Makes you think…The post Nick Saban Says The Big Ten Has An Advantage Over The SEC Because Southerners Won’t Go To The North Unless You Pay Them first appeared on Whiskey Riff.