Trump Says ‘Lunatics’ in Congress Are Blocking Reform of College Sports

With tensions rising in the Middle East, President Trump is trying to fix college sports. Mr. Trump convened a high-profile White House roundtable on Friday bringing together powerful figures from athletics, politics, professional leagues and major universities and conferences. Despite the celebrity guest list, there’s little indication that meaningful reform is imminent.If anything, two realities emerged from the two-hour “Saving College Sports” roundtable. First, repairing the rapidly evolving financial structure of college athletics will likely require federal legislation. Second, there is little expectation that the “lunatics” in Congress will agree on such legislation anytime soon.“You’re not going to get it through the Senate, and you’re probably not going to get anything through the House because you have a bunch of lunatics,” Mr. Trump said.The president called the current landscape of college athletics a “threat to the integrity and culture of college sports,” due to “the inability to set rules on eligibility, transfers, name, image and likeness and much more.”The chaos in college sports largely stems from Supreme Court rulings that allowed athletes to receive compensation tied to their name, image and likeness, commonly known as NIL. In the three years since, endorsement deals and booster-funded collectives have poured millions of dollars into college programs, transforming recruiting and reshaping the traditional amateur model. “We have college players who don’t want to go to the NFL because they’re making more money in college,” Mr. Trump said.Frustrated by congressional inaction, Mr. Trump signed an executive order in July aimed at limiting so-called “pay-for-play” arrangements and protecting scholarships for athletes in women’s and non-revenue sports.During Friday’s roundtable, Mr. Trump said he intends to write another executive order within a week “based on many of the statements made today, many of the statements I’ve been hearing over the last year, about what a disaster this is for the colleges, for the players, for the families, ruining families, ruining everything.”He added, “I think it’s going to be an executive order that the people in this room and the students and the colleges will be proud of.”What the executive order can accomplish, if anything, remains unclear. Friday’s gathering was mainly a sounding-board to pressure Congress to come up with a way of capping the compensation given to athletes that will hold up in court .More than 50 people gathered in the East Room of the White House to offer their opinions. Among the attendees were Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida; the New York Yankees president, Randy Levine; the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson; and Senator Ted Cruz.Former college football coaches Nick Saban and Urban Meyer attended as did the NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, and commissioners from the Power 4 conferences. There were no current college athletes at the meeting, though Mr. Levine said they would be included in future discussions.The group discussed many of the issues the NIL era has created, including college athletes putting big-dollar payouts ahead of educational opportunities.Mr. Saban said, “Instead of making decisions about creating value for their future, they’re making decisions about how much money they could make at whichever school they could go to or transfer to.”Complicating matters further is the emergence of revenue sharing, which has created pressure on universities to distribute up to $20.5 million a year to student athletes. The added financial burden is forcing some schools to tighten budgets in other areas to stay competitive in major sports. Meanwhile, eligibility rules are in a constant state of flux with players granted a seventh or eighth year due to court rulings.Questions also linger over the enforcement of NIL contracts.“A lot of really bad things are happening,” Mr. Trump said. “Basic questions like who is eligible to play are unregulated and decided randomly by judges rather than reasonably agreed upon rules that could be simply drawn. This has grown into a major challenge.”The roundtable discussion at times felt like a rally for the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements Act, a bipartisan bill driven by Republican support. The SCORE Act passed through committee last summer and could be on the verge of a vote in the House of Representatives,The bill addresses many of the issues facing college sports, including a limited antitrust exemption to provide protection from lawsuits; and a preemption of varying state laws that address athlete compensation and prevent college athletes from becoming employees.If passed in the House, the bill still faces a stiff challenge in the Senate, where Democrats want broader protections and representation for college athletes regarding compensation, benefits and potential employment status.“The SCORE Act has many good elements, it’s a very good first step,” Mr. Cruz said. “But the challenge is for this to be passed into law and put on [the president’s desk], we need 60 votes in the Senate, which means we need at least seven Senate Democrats. Right now, there are zero.”In a joint statement, commissioners from the Big 4 Conferences — Jim Phillips (ACC), Greg Sankey (SEC), Tony Pettitti (Big Ten) and Brett Yormark (Big 12) — endorsed the SCORE Act.“Federal action on college sports is long overdue, and we stand with a broad coalition of conferences, student-athletes, coaches and advocates in supporting the SCORE Act. We look forward to working with both President Trump and Congress to enact meaningful reform for student-athletes across the country.”

Trump Says ‘Lunatics’ in Congress Are Blocking Reform of College Sports

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