President Trump passed an executive order on Friday to help regulate college athletics.
Friday was a potentially monumental day in College Athletics as President Trump signed an executive order to regulate the state of college sports.
When NIL burst onto the scene, it packed a punch. It basically made every single athlete in all of college sports a 1099 employee, a freelancer, that, paired with the new transfer rules, could come and go as they pleased.
Initially, the idea behind NIL is absolutely the right thing. Players at the top of the biggest sports were absolutely being exploited for who they are on the field. Stadiums were packed, jerseys were sold, video games were sold, TV deals were made, and none of the players on the field were being compensated.
That is not right.
However, the execution and implementation of NIL went totally off the rails. It got too far down the path, and now, as we sit here, it feels impossible to reverse the course of action.
Unless the President of the United States gets involved. That is exactly what President Trump did on Friday.
According to On3's Pete Nakos, the order hits on five main topics: transfer movement, player eligibility, funding requirements for women, Olympic sports, and reining in NIL collectives.
The headliner here in this order is that it directs the NCAA to mandate that players can only play in a five-year period. On the NIL front, the White House released a statement that said, “College sports cannot function without clear, agreed-upon rules concerning pay-for-play and player eligibility that can’t be endlessly challenged in court, as is the case now."
These orders can be legally challenged in the courts, and the main sticking point in this will be whether the presidential position has legal authority over the NCAA eligibility rules.
There is a lot to still unpack with this, but Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti released a statement thanking the President for his continued "leadership" in this space and urged Congress to pass this quickly. He cited that this legislation will help solve critical issues with long-term sustainability in college sports.
There is a chance that this news and this executive order that was released on Friday is a monumental day in College Athletics and specifically college football. It is no surprise to anyone that these decisions and these issues impact the football programs more than any of the other ones.
Once there is some direction in these areas, the closer that we can get to some uniformity in the sports that we love.
Until then, the chaos that we have come to know is what we will continue to know.
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