College Football is broken and only Nick Saban can save it

Nick Saban is enjoying retirement. He's got a cushy gig on ESPN's College GameDay and has helped deliver the best ratings in the show's history through the first few weeks. He's a natural on television, and is finally settling in and enjoying himself after so many years of late nights, weekends, and never being able to catch his breath.

But at his core Nick Saban is a college football guy. He loves the sport because it has done so much for him. He devoted the majority of his life to this game, and while I'm happy to see him enjoying his beach house in Jupiter and playing golf everday, unfortunately college football needs Nick Saban now more than it ever has.

The sport is broken. We've seen the warning signs of years. Left unregulated, NIL has spiraled completely out of control. This is not a criticism of (now former) UNLV QB Matthew Sluka, who released a statement on Tuesday announcing that he would be sitting out the rest of the season due to UNLV's inability to live up to their end of the bargain in his NIL payments.

For all intents and purposes, if what Sluka's camp is saying is correct, it's hard to blame him. If he was promised $100,000 that never came, how can he be expected to continue doing a job he hasn't been paid for? Would you? And that's the reality of what this is now: college football is now a job for the athletes. There's no longer playing for your teammates and the love of the game; you are playing for a paycheck, just like the guys on Sundays.

This is also not meant as a criticism of NIL. I've long been a proponent of athletes receiving fair compensation for their value. Athletic departments, universities, brands, TV networks, etc. have been getting fat off of unpaid labor for far too long. These kids put everything on the line, sacrifice their bodies, and they deserve to receive a share of the pie that they've helped bake.

NIL in and of itself is not the problem. It's the unregulated nature of NIL that has turned college football into the wild west. The NCAA has never really been in control, but that's gotten more clear in the past few years.

Money runs the world, and that's the truth in college football, too. Conferences are in charge, not the governing body of the NCAA. There's tampering all over the place. There's nothing stopping coaches from reaching out to disgruntled players on your roster. This practice is now commonplace. Kadyn Proctor accidentally admitted it after he transferred to Iowa, telling a reporter at an Iowa basketball game that members of the Hawkeyes coaching staff were texting him throughout his freshman season at Alabama.

Matthew Sluka will not be the last player that walks away from his team over an NIL dispute. Players like Sluka are not going to play in the NFL - they have a finite amount of time to maximize the value they have playing the game of football. There's nothing stopping any player right now from taking the money and running. They can enter the portal every offseason and go to the highest bidder.

Perpetual free agency is not a thing in any sport for a reason. If the athletes are going to get paid, there needs to be some sort of written contracts. That protects the program, and more importantly it protects the player. If Sluka's story is the truth, and there's no reason to believe it isn't at this point in time, then a signed contract would have made sure he got the money he was promised from UNLV. He wouldn't have to take the drastic step of walking away from his teammates, a decision I'm sure he did not arrive at lightly.

Nick Saban has been prophetic for a long time. From his epic "is this what we want football to be?" rant in regards to the hurry-up no huddle offenses, to the many times he's sounded the alarm in regards to NIL.

Saban's ability to see into the future and understand the changing landscape of the sport and being able to adapt to it, makes him the guy most equipped to be the first commissioner of college football.

The sport needs someone to oversee it, and why not make it the best coach in the history of the game? Someone who understands the game at a deep level. Someone who is deeply respected. Someone who has been a champion for student-athletes. Someone coaches trust.

Those of us who are already addicted to the college football experience aren't going anywhere no matter what. That's why ratings for Alabama-Georgia on Saturday night will be massive. But appealing to a future generation of fans is so much more challenging than it used to be.

The real ramifications of what is happening right now will be felt 10 or 20 or 30 years from now. College football is a high-speed train reaching the end of the tracks. We can call see it coming. Someone, somewhere, has to reach out and pull the emergency brake.

Nick Saban would be the ultimate emergency brake, and him stepping in as the inaugural commissioner of the sport might be the only thing that can save the sport from itself.