It’s a time of transition in college football. The Pac-12 is all but dead, killed by the endless quest for more television money, while other realignment across the sport, kicked off by the SEC’s poaching of Texas and Oklahoma, is leaving smaller brands out in the cold and ending historic rivalry games.

From the outside, the sport appears headed to an era of superconferences, regardless of the impact on historic games. Alabama would almost assuredly remain at the top level of college football, however it changes, but head coach Nick Saban still didn’t seem thrilled by the current direction.

“What we see as college football right now is being completely disassociated from the traditions of what we’ve seen in the past,” Saban said Thursday on The Pat McAfee Show. “And we’ve had some great traditions here as all schools do in all sports, and some of those things are gonna go by the wayside because decisions are made for megaconferences. These decisions are getting made, probably financial reasons in terms of, on one hand, to make a better program, so you can invest more in players, but on the other hand you may be eliminating some opportunities for some other people.”

Speaking before his team’s appearance in the LA Bowl, UCLA head coach Chip Kelly proposed a super league, separating football from other sports and starting a 64-team conference with divisions and paying the players. NCAA president Charlie Baker recently proposed a new subdivision allowing participating schools to pay players using trust funds.

That would all work fine for certain schools, likely including Alabama. But rivalries and other traditions will be lost along the way, something Saban acknowledged on the show.

“I think there’s a great argument for traditions of college football,” Saban said. “College football has been great for a lot of people. It’s been great for fans. It’s been a great opportunity for many guys, not just in football, but in all sports. I think I read a stat where 82% of people who won medals in the Olympics got trained in college. So some of that is all going to change.”

Saban said he didn’t anticipate the wave of change stopping, at least until an unforeseen circumstance comes up.

“I think it’s going to continue in the same direction that it’s going until something happens,” Saban said. “I call it a ‘thunderbolt,’ where maybe people start dropping sports because the finance part can’t make sense in terms of what you can reinvest in non-revenue sports, or some players out there don’t get what they were promised and there’s lots of lawsuits and stuff. I mean, there’s going to be some kind of a thunderbolt, because this is not a system that we have right now that has any guardrails, and in most competitive venues there are some guardrails.”