Saban and Smart go head-to-head on transfers
Nick Saban and Kirby Smart have gone head-to-head on transfers at the SEC Spring Meetings this week.
The Alabama head coach has long been derided for denying players the right to go where they want – particularly inside the SEC. This year he’s getting the heat for not allowing graduate student (and back-up center) Brandon Kennedy the right to transfer to Auburn or Tennessee. This comes a couple of years after the Maurice Smith debacle, where the SEC eventually had to intervene and let the player transfer to Georgia.
Smart wants to do quite the opposite – and let players transfer to whatever school they wish.
Typically, Saban shrugged his shoulders during a press conference and said that it is not him who makes the rules, but the SEC. “I don’t think it should be on me,” he said. “If we agree in the SEC at these meetings that we’re going to have free agency in our league and everybody can go where they want to go when they graduate and that’s what’s best for the game, then I think that’s what we should do,” he said. “”And Brandon Kennedy can go where he wants to go. But if we don’t do that, why is it on me? Because we have a conference rule that says he can’t do it. And he can do it but he’s supposed to sit out for a year. So why is it on me? It’s not even my decision.”
In one of his well-known sermons/rants from the media plinth, Saban added: “”Let me ask you a question: If we make a rule that guys can transfer whenever they want, how are we supposed to get people to do what they should do?” Saban said. “I’m not talking about as football players, I’m talking about as people. I’m talking about making good choices and decisions. … If a guy is missing class and I say you’re not going to play in this game because you’re missing class, which I’ve done on occasion, and he says, ‘I’m transferring,’ is that good?”
Of course, with every Saban speech there’s always something underlying. Losing Brandon Kennedy would leave no-one (that we can work out) behind starting center Ross Pierschbacher. Remember Saban decrying football played a lightning speed? He worked that one out pretty quickly.
But Smart thinks that the ban on interconference transfers should be lifted. “I certainly feel philosophically that if the person graduates from undergrad, they’ve done their graduation work and they choose to go somewhere else.”
He noted that the rationale that players would take information from one school to another simply was stupid. “You mean just like we do with coaches, right?” Smart said. “Just like I left Alabama and all of the secrets that I learned when I was there went with me. Muschamp took all those secrets from LSU. Jimbo took all those secrets from LSU. Now Jeremy has all those secrets. I don’t see it that way.”
He added this on graduate students: “”Most people get a graduate degree where? Where they got their undergrad or somewhere else? Usually somewhere else,” Smart said. “So if they’re going to graduate school for that purpose somewhere else, I don’t see the issue. … If they want to do that, they should be able to do that.”