Former Alabama football head coach Nick Saban has stayed involved in the game of football since retiring as a head coach. He joined the College GameDay desk and has become a staple in the media, providing his insights. Recently, he told Pat McAfee that a key aspect he looked for in recruiting was whether a player played multiple sports, because each sport requires different skills compared to just football.
Multi-sport athletes are not as common as they once were. Athletes are increasingly specialized in one sport now, but when you find multisport athletes, they usually possess more unique skills, which is why Nick Saban loved recruiting them. He told Pat McAfee on the Friday episode of “The Pat McAfee Show” that playing multiple sports reveals something about a person's competitive drive and can tell you a lot about someone, especially in conjunction with their other honed skills.
Saban said, “That says something about them as a competitor. … Other sports tell you a lot about a guy. Baseball is basically boring, but you have to have more athletic intuition than other games.”
A prominent example Saban used was his recruitment of the cornerback position. He said he used to recruit track athletes for the cornerback position for speed and to stay with receivers step for step. However, he also said that they were bad at judging the ball, so in that case, he went out and recruited baseball players for the same position because they were already skilled in that area.
“I used to like to recruit track guys to play corner,” Saban elaborated. “After they'd give up big plays because they couldn't judge the ball, I'd recruit baseball players, because they could judge a ball.”
One of the biggest arguments against athletes playing multiple sports is that some believe it stunts development if an athlete is trying to excel in any given sport. However, Saban thinks it's the opposite and actually helps players get better.
One of the best examples of a multi-sport athlete who has continued to excel at the highest levels of sports is Patrick Mahomes, who was also a talented baseball player. Not everyone is Patrick Mahomes, but he is the poster child for the fact that you can be great in one sport while playing multiple sports at once.
