President Trump urges college sports leaders to return to pre-NIL era: 'I'd like to go exactly back to what we had and ram it through a court'
"While disregarding and disparaging court decisions that have opened a path for athlete compensation, Trump announced plans to release a second executive order — this one “more comprehensive,” he said — that is intended, it appears, to reimplement unlawful policies of the pre-NIL era.
The executive order will be strong enough in its language that Trump expects it to invoke legal challenges. His hope is that the lawsuit and subsequent appeals find favorable judges, he says, that will rule differently than a host of judges who, he says, have “destroyed” college athletics with their deeming of NCAA rules to be in violation of antitrust. And that includes, he exclaimed, the Supreme Court, whose 9-0 decision in the NCAA v. Alston case, though not about compensation specifically, paved the path for the industry’s current unregulated market.
While writing this order — which is expected to be issued in a week, he said — Trump demands that lawmakers continue and expedite negotiations for federal legislation, despite the president himself believing that passage of a bill is virtually impossible because of “lunatics” in Congress, he told the room.
Friday’s meeting, scheduled for an hour, turned into a wild near-two-hour political meltdown of sorts — a president criticizing his enemies: the courts for "destroying" college sports, and congressional Democrats for preventing legislation to pass that might fix it.
The industry is nearing the “point of no return,” Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua told the room, describing football as a “runaway financial train” that is gobbling up resources meant to fund Olympic and women’s sports.
“Lawsuits are killing us,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips told the room. “You don’t like a rule, you just go to a local judge.”
Meanwhile, college athletics — its leaders resistant to collective bargaining — twists in the winds of soaring player salaries, unenforceable rules, mounting legal threats and budget deficits.
Present in the room during Friday’s roundtable, House Republican leadership, Speaker Mike Johnson and majority leader Steve Scalise, told dignitaries that they have the necessary votes to pass the SCORE Act and that it should reach the floor for a third attempt at a vote this month. The SCORE Act, a Republican-backed college sports bill, would mostly grant the NCAA and conferences their antitrust protection to enforce rules, prevent athletes from being deemed employees and create a new governance model in college sports.
However, problems brew in the Senate. Even if SCORE passes the House, a long fight awaits in the other chamber, where a 60-vote margin for passage means seven Democrats must vote for legislation that, many of them believe, grants too much power to the conferences and unnecessarily prevents employment."
Trump announced plans to release a second executive order that is intended, it appears, to re-implement unlawful policies of the pre-NIL era.
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