Trump Says Entire Higher Ed System Is Doomed if “College Sports Are Not Fixed”

President Donald Trump predicted the destruction not just of college sports but the entire U.S. collegiate system unless the industry is fixed quickly — something some sports leaders who joined him Friday at a White House summit agreed could only happen by raising more money to pay players.

The President expressed these views at a college sports roundtable on Friday, Mar. 6, that was convened to examine solutions to key challenges, including NCAA authority; name, image and likeness (NIL) issues; collective bargaining; and governance concerns. 

Athletic officials in attendance included NCAA President Charlie Baker, former Alabama head football coach Nick Saban, OutKick founder Clay Travis, New York Yankees President Randy Levine and each of the Power Four commissioners, among others.

“This is the future, I think, beyond college sports. This is the future of colleges,” Trump said to kick off the roundtable. “The amount of money being spent and lost by otherwise very successful schools is astounding just in a short period of time. It’s only going to get worse. We have to save college sports, and, I believe, colleges.

Trump suggested he would write an “all-encompassing” executive order within a week in hopes it would spark action from Congress. He said he expected the order to trigger a lawsuit that could put the issue back in front of the court system that approved industry-changing payments to players for their name, image and likeness.

That new system has left many schools drowning in red ink, while rules governing their payments to players are only slowly taking hold.

“The whole educational system is going to go out of business because of this,” Trump explained, when asked why he was devoting time to college sports with the war in Iran and other issues seemingly more pressing to average Americans.

As the discussion unfolded, Trump said, “I thought the system of scholarships was great.” He was harkening to the recently ended era in which players received little to nothing beyond financial aid.

He said the “horrible” court settlement that led to the current system — a settlement that virtually everyone in the room agreed to — “threw the sports world and the college athletic world into ‘tithers.’”

Everyone at the meeting agreed that the industry needs to be saved from the spiraling costs associated with the onset of NIL payments.

They also mostly agreed that a bill called the SCORE Act that would provide the NCAA with a limited antitrust exemption and would preempt state laws regarding NIL could be the base of any change. Not surprisingly, most Democrats oppose the Act.

Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., said the act “hurts” women’s sports, and strengthening Title IX “has to be part of the SCORE Act.” She also said the SCORE Act “represented a consolidation of what we have today, which is the SEC and the Big Ten” getting a boatload of the money college athletics garners.

However, House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested the bill, which has struggled to get through the lower chamber, could now have enough support to pass.

After deliberations, Trump said he’d write an executive order “based on great common sense.”

“It’s gonna let colleges survive and players survive and let a lot of people be very, very happy,” Trump said.