The number of university athletic directors and administrators increased during the week, as did the number of college conference commissioners.<\/p>\n
Former head coaches Nick Saban and Urban Meyer were steadfast in their access to the president when it comes to the topic of the current dilemmas that plague college sports. Former Florida State football and basketball star Charlie Ward was the only current coach on the panel. Ward is currently the head men\u2019s basketball coach at Florida A&M.<\/p>\n
There was also a notable increase in the number of politicians added to the panel. The president saw the need to add Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgman. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Louisiana congressman Steve Scalise, and Senator Ted Cruz were also at the table. The Texas senator has been at the forefront of draft legislation, along with New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, that attempts to make sweeping changes in the college sports landscape.<\/p>\n The meeting was scheduled for 4 PM, but did not start until nearly 4:20 PM. President Trump then spoke for 15 minutes before comments from around the table were delivered. Scheduled to last one hour, the meeting went for nearly two hours.<\/p>\n The president said he would like to return to the system that college sports operated under for decades. In his view, it would be better with players receiving only scholarships and, perhaps, a stipend, he said, could be as much as $50,000 per year. In describing his desire to go back to a pre-NIL era in college sports, the President said, \u201cI\u2019d like to go exactly back to what we had and ram it through a court.\u201d<\/p>\n The landmark court cases that make that impossible are O\u2019Bannon v. NCAA, where federal courts ruled that college athletes had the same rights to monetize their name, image, and likeness as every other US citizen. The other was Alston v. NCAA. That affirmed that the NCAA is not exempt from antitrust scrutiny, allowing schools to provide enhanced academic and financial support. That came with a 9-0 Supreme Court vote that included three Trump appointees to the High Court.<\/p>\n But Trump, on multiple occasions, seemed to place blame on a California judge. US District Court Judge Claudia Wilken approved an out-of-court settlement in the House v. NCAA case. The $2.8 billion settlement allows for school athletic departments to revenue share with their athletes up to $20.5 million. The money can be spread throughout the different athletes in different sports; however, a school wishes to do it. Trump did not recite the House case specifically, but referred to a \u201cliberal California judge\u201d who he claims \u201cdestroyed\u201d college sports. Wilken was also the presiding federal court judge in the Alston case. In the event he was referring to the Alston case, Trump was advised by SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey that it was affirmed by a 9-0 SCOTUS vote.<\/p>\n Meyer, the former Utah, Florida, and Ohio State coach, said what he really wanted to see was an elimination of the Collectives from college sports. Almost as soon as the ink was dry on the court rulings in the O\u2019Bannon case, college booster groups had a plan in place to funnel money to athletes above and beyond the now-allowable NIL system. What was essentially legalized money laundering quickly became a pay-for-play system. Tens of millions of boosters\u2019 money per school.<\/p>\n Trump said he is inclined to sign another executive order mandating these changes in college sports. That comes with the likely knowledge that they are outside of the jurisdictional scope of the president. He said he knows that he would be sued, but he hoped to find a favorable federal judge. \u201cSo we\u2019re going to do an executive order \u2026 whether it stands up in court, I can\u2019t tell you that. But you\u2019re not going to get it through the Senate, and you\u2019re not going to get it through the House.\u201d \u00a0That new executive order is expected within a week.<\/p>\n There is potential legislative movement on the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Eric Schmitt (R-MO) have a bipartisan bill that would allow the conferences to pool their media rights negotiations. It would be in an effort to manage costs and revenue better. The current system of each conference for itself, with media contracts, was a major player in the massive realignment of recent years, with schools moving conferences for more money.<\/p>\n There is also support for the SCORE Act. But that backing primarily comes from school administrators. The bipartisan bill includes the establishment of federal standards for NIL. It alsio has regulations for agents representing college athletes, preventing universities from revoking scholarships due to injury or performance, mandating schools to provide specific levels of academic support and out-of-pocket healthcare coverage for ex-athletes up to three years after leaving school, maintaining that schools have a minimum of 16 varsity teams, and restrictions on using student fees for athletics. There is a challenge as to who would enforce the new rules. The NCAA loses cases in federal court on a regular basis because it does not have any antitrust protections. This bill would have to be amended to empower a governing body. It would also face lawsuits because it would take away some of the rights currently enjoyed by college athletes.<\/p>\n Among the groups not represented at this meeting were any current or recent college athletes.<\/p>\n Main Image: Reuters<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" President Donald Trump led a White House meeting on Friday with approximately 50 people, designed to address growing financial issues in college sports. As we reported on Sunday, the list of attendees was evolving in the days leading up to the event. Some of the attendees were comparative experts in college sports. Others were dealing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1534,"featured_media":85773,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,7,6,5,17,3],"tags":[35075,655,35088,41,231],"class_list":["post-85768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-acc","category-big12","category-bigten","category-news","category-sec","tag-donald-trump","tag-greg-sankey","tag-judge-claudia-wilken","tag-nick-saban","tag-urban-meyer"],"modified_by":"Tony Siracusa, CFB Managing Editor","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85768"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":85775,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85768\/revisions\/85775"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/85773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Trump](\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/collegefootball\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2026\/03\/HCwbNmCaIAAV17P.jpg\")
Lots of Longing for the Old Days<\/h3>\n
Blaming It on a Court, but Which One?<\/h3>\n
Progress?<\/h3>\n