Saban Tells Pat McAfee 'I Never Paid Attention To The Spread,' History Says Otherwise

As the College Football Playoffs draws closer, the rhetoric surrounding the tournament and its games is starting to ramp up.

Talking heads are giving out their last takes before we dispense with the words and get to the actual games being played, though some of said heads are more qualified than others.

One such qualified individual is former college head coach and seven-time national champion, Nick Saban, who was on The Pat McAfee Show earlier today to chop it up with Pat and the boys about the upcoming CFP action.

READ: Using Analytics To Predict The 2025 College Football Playoff

Coach Saban is a frequent guest of the show and always gives out some good soundbites with his dry yet sneaky good sense of humor and knowledge of the game, but today he let something slip that caught my ear and I just couldn't let it go.

When discussing the big Group of 5 underdogs participating in the Playoff, McAfee playfully ribbed his Hall of Fame guest about being cognizant of point spreads, to which Saban clapped back that he "never paid attention to the point spread."

The whole exchange made for a pretty good and entertaining piece of live television, but I'm old enough to remember when coach Saban tried to use that very same point spread logic that he claims to be ignorant of as a tool to get his two-loss Bama team into the CFP a few years back.

That's right, back in 2022, Nick Saban was talking to FOX Sports' own Joel Klatt about his Crimson Tide being left out of the College Football Playoff when he brought up the fact that Alabama would be favored over three of the four playoff teams on a neutral field.

"But do you really get the best teams?" Saban opined, "When they told me that we would be favored against three out of the four teams that got in the playoff, I'm like, 'Why aren't we in the playoffs?'"

I understand why Saban took this position, and I completely agree with the 2022 version of him when asking why we aren't putting the best teams in the tournament, but it's a tough look when, just a few years later, the GOAT is saying he never cared about what the sharps in Vegas thought.

Did he forget? I doubt it.

A coach like Nick Saban has a mind like a steel trap and can probably recall what defensive plays he called in the 1995 Wild Card Game for the Browns, so there's no chance he doesn't remember what he said just three years earlier.

Plus, this is the guy who coined the phrase "rat poison" when discussing all the hype surrounding his teams over the years, and point spread was definitely factored into those equations.

Who's to say why Saban said what he said to McAfee today, but there's a good chance he was just trying to say something quote worthy to make for some good TV.

Saban is still the GOAT, but he may want to work on those PR skills a little.

Ah, who am I kidding? The man has seven rings, he can say whatever the hell he wants!