“Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play football? We ain’t come to play school.” – former Ohio State University quarterback Cardale Jones

More and more I am seeing interviews with college coaches about how recent rule changes on compensation for collegiate athletes are ruining their respective sports.

If you do not know what I am talking about, you may not be a college sports superfan, and that is OK. In short, a few years ago the NCAA, college sports’ governing body, begrudgingly began allowing college athletes to profit from use of their name, image and likeness (NIL) and maintain their amateur status to compete for their universities.

NIL money is not provided by the university itself; only outside sources provide it. The idea was to let student-athletes be compensated for purposes like appearing in local commercials and sales of jerseys with their name and number.

However, people with money and a desire to win championships by any means necessary, almost instantly attempted to use NIL benefits as inducements to recruit star high school athletes to come play at their respective universities.

This was against NCAA rules until last month when a federal court ruled the NCAA could not enforce this rule because it limits athletes’ leverage to negotiate prices in a free labor market for their services. In other words, the judge ruled the NCAA was behaving like a monopoly with this rule. It is still unclear if the NCAA will appeal the ruling.

Now enter two people with whom you are likely familiar, sports fan or not. Nick Saban, recently retired as the football coach at the University of Alabama, and Tommy Tuberville, who once coached football at Auburn University and currently is the senior U.S. senator from Alabama, do not like the changes caused by NIL.

While neither are opposed to student-athletes making more money than they could pre-NIL, they do not like the compensation environment created in the current NIL format. USA Today quoted Tuberville last year saying, “We will not graduate as many students through education, and it will be a disaster when it comes to having only a few people able to afford this across the country.”

Saban participated in a roundtable discussion with several U.S. senators on the topic last week. During the discussion he said, “It’s whoever wants to pay the most money, raise the most money, buy the most players is going to have the best opportunity to win. I don’t think that’s the spirit of college athletics, and I don’t think it’s ever been the spirit of what we want college athletics to be.”

The values Tuberville and Saban discuss – education, development of life skills and athletic talent, the value of teamwork, discipline, long-term success over short-term benefits – are, indeed, what I want college athletics to embody.

What I do not want is to hear these two men lecture us about the importance of promoting these values in athletics.

Ask Miami Dolphins players about Saban’s commitment to the team when he unequivocally stated he was not taking the Alabama coaching job only to do exactly that a couple of weeks later. Tuberville told Ole Miss fans the only way he was leaving Oxford, Mississippi, was when they carried him out in a pine box before accepting the job at Auburn days later.

Tuberville was coaching at Auburn when several football players were taking sociology courses with little to no academic rigor.

Saban was in his first year coaching at Alabama when wide receiver D.J. Hall was announced as suspended for the game against Louisiana-Monroe for violating team rules. Hall took the field in the second half when the team was struggling with what was supposed to be an inferior opponent.

But what is most egregious is for both men to say how the involvement of outside money cheapens college athletics when both men profited millions upon millions of dollars from college sports.

Neither seemed to have any problem with utilizing free-market competition to negotiate raises to their own salaries and extend the years on guaranteed contracts while both universities commercialized their players’ achievements to generate huge television contracts to pay these salaries.

I agree with both men the current environment may be more harmful than helpful, in the long-term, for many of the young men they recruit and coach. They say some guardrails for this system should be put in place. Let’s start with a coach cannot make more money than the team’s highest-paid player. This should ensure no one person is placed ahead of the collective team. There is no “I” in team, but I can count a few of them in “millionaire.”