When the most successful CEO of the anti-trust syndicate is calling for unionization of the workforce, then that’s when you know something’s not exactly right with college football.

Thanks to Nick Saban’s comments on Tuesday at SEC Spring Meetings, we have college football’s current problems in a perfect little box. In one breath, Alabama’s coach said that college football isn’t a business. In another, Saban indicated he thinks players should be employees.

“I think the big mistake that people make is college athletics is not a business,” Saban said. “People say it’s a business. It’s not a business. It’s revenue-producing.”

And then, when asked about paying players as employees, Saban dropped one of his bombshells: “Unionize it, make it like the NFL.”

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It doesn’t take a corporate attorney to understand the competing forces of those two ideas. If college football has employees like the NFL, then good luck convincing anyone it isn’t a business.

By the way, for the record, college football is absolutely a business.

I am convinced that the average college football fan doesn’t really care about how players are paid, though. My proof is that a whole lot of politically conservative, pro-capitalist folks are going to agree with Saban that college football needs to be in some way more appropriately socialized. The current system of using third parties to pay players for their name, image and likeness has major problems because it is a workaround for a corrupt system.

The upshot? The transfer portal has created bidding wars for players. Recruiting is all about NIL compensation packages put together by NIL collectives. It’s the Wild West out there. Is that a bad thing? For fans of the game, for me, the answer is yes. For Saban, the answer is yes. For the presidents of the universities in the SEC, the answer is complicated.

A short history lesson is in order. More than 100 years ago, universities with football teams did something revolutionary in an attempt to rein in corruption. Things were getting out of hand. Fans had fallen in love with college football. Money was flowing in. The problem way back then? Third parties were paying players. The solution? Conferences were formed to regulate the game.

And now here we are again, turning back time with a golden hamster wheel, forever chasing cheese.

On the current NIL scene, Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz offered a colorful perspective: “People are making more money on NIL than my brother-in-law who is a pediatrician who saves lives.”

Drinkwitz isn’t against players being paid. He’s just concerned that maybe more money isn’t always the best answer. The market will dictate the financial worth of workers, though. Otherwise, garbage men maybe should be making more than anyone. Public sanitation has saved more lives than any hospital ever could.

Is this what we want college football to become, Saban said. Saban was asked about paying players and its effect on college football. He answered rhetorically with one of his own.

Quite the loaded question to propose at the annual beach trip for the SEC that’s funded by the revenue created from the unpaid hard work and talent of college football players. I’ll give him this. Saban certainly knows how to spike the Kool-Aid down at SEC Spring Meetings.

It’s easy enough to point out the problems. Finding solutions while at the same time pilfering Texas and Oklahoma from the Big 12 is proving to be more difficult for the richest kings of them all in the SEC.

Let’s be honest. As unions go, the SEC is more about breaking them up these days than creating them.

Joseph Goodman is the lead sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of “We Want Bama”, a book about togetherness, hope and rum. You can find him on Twitter @JoeGoodmanJr.