I personally believe that any school that provides a legitimate degree with the chance to compete while taking legitimate majors is already paying the student athlete. But many schools - especially Saban's school was not offering anything meaningful wrt a degree. They were merely using the players, and they had complete and utter control over them. As a result, Saban comes off as a hypocrite to me. He was never selling the academic side to his recruits as Notre Dame, Stanford, Navy , Wake Forest, Northwestern, etc. were. He was selling the football factory "I'll get you to the NFL if you're good enough, and I've arranged fake majors that don't mean the same work and thus doesn't mean the same degree as other actual students get" to his recruits like Tennessee, Alabama, Michigan, Oregon, etc do. And for the kids who tried to pursue the actual degree, they were handicapped compared to their teammates with whom they were competing for a position, and they were penalized for it. I know of a specific instance where the recruit was told by one of these school that if he pursued engineering, he could kiss his scholarship good bye. Heck, they try to avoid the real student recruits unless they are super good, and then they simply dissuade them from it when they get there.