Nick Saban said Thursday that the NCAA’s denial of a postseason eligibility waiver for James Madison was “unfortunate” without necessarily offering an opinion as to whether or not it was just.

The Dukes, coached by former Saban assistant Curt Cignetti, are 10-0 this season and in first place in the Sun Belt Conference East Division. However, NCAA rules bar JMU from winning the conference championship, playing in a bowl game or being ranked in the College Football Playoff Top 25 because they are in the second of two years transitioning to the FBS level from FCS.

Saban was asked his opinion on the matter — which also involved Jacksonville State — during his regular Thursday appearance on the Pat McAfee Show on ESPN. The Alabama coach tried to be diplomatic to both sides of the argument.

“Sometimes we have rules that are the rules and people are going to force people to abide by the rules,” Saban said. “I won’t give an opinion on whether I think this is a good or bad thing, but the one thing that I do think is, it’s unfortunate for the players, the school, the university that they’ve worked so hard to have this success and now they’re not being allowed to participate and take advantage of what they’ve created for themselves.

“I don’t quite get the significance of why it’s an important thing for them to not play (in the conference championship game or a bowl game) or play or whatever. That kind of beyond my pay grade, I guess.”

McAfee followed up by asking how much interaction Saban might have with the NCAA while awaiting any sort of ruling or during any sort of investigation. He said that’s handled mostly on the conference level, and sometimes the NCAA gets unfairly demonized.

“we have an opportunity, if we need to, we usually try to go through the conference office and the conference sort of expresses our opinions,” Saban said. “But you know, I think the NCAA gets beat up quite a bit over some of the things that have happened the last 3-4 or five years in college football. A lot of these things are legal issues that got decided in the courts that put the NCAA in a position where they couldn’t enforce their own rules. So they got caught in a little bit of a dilemma and that’s been a difficult management for all of us in college football actually.”