President Trump delivers new executive order attempting to regulate college sports
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — On the eve of the tip-off to the
Final Four, the president of the United States is making a splash.
President
Donald Trump issued his latest executive order to regulate college sports on Friday.
The 10-page order comes a day before the NCAA’s crown jewel —
the men’s basketball tournament — reaches its pinnacle event here in central Indiana.
The order grants the NCAA the ability and suggests the organization limit athlete transfer movement, cap player eligibility, implement funding requirements for women and Olympic sports, and prohibit NIL collectives. As an enforcement lever, the order relies on the reduction of a university’s federal funding — an incentive for schools and conferences to abide by the concepts.
The order directs the NCAA to update its rules by Aug. 1 — to the maximum extent permitted by law — to “bring order and stability to the landscape in certain key areas,” a source who has reviewed the document told Yahoo Sports. Most notably, one of those areas is transferring.
Compliance with these rules will be relevant in determining if schools will continue to receive federal funding.
Many — including the president himself — expect the order to be challenged legally.
President Donald Trump gestures as former Alabama football coach Nick Saban (right) speaks alongside U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles during a roundtable discussion on college sports on March 6. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
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Perhaps the most significant concepts in the document are efforts to regulate athlete movement and compensation.
The order not only grants but commands the association to create strict guardrails around booster-backed NIL collectives — what it describes as “fraudulent NIL schemes” — and limit the movement of transfers by reinstating the NCAA’s “one-time” transfer rule. The courts deemed that rule unlawful through antitrust rulings. The rule would permit athletes to transfer once before requiring them to miss one season as a penalty for any subsequent moves.
The order does not unilaterally and immediately change the transfer rule, a critical concept. The language is key as thousands of players — some of whom have already transferred once — are preparing to enter the basketball portal, which opens Tuesday.
The order prohibits professional athletes from returning to play in college and encourages the NCAA to define an athlete’s eligibility window at five years. The NCAA eligibility standard is currently four competitive seasons over five years. This is a critical topic that even the most ardent NCAA detractors believe should be regulated.
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Trump signs executive order on college sports rules
The White House now requires tighter NCAA transfer rules and eligibility caps for athletes, adds new funding mandates for women’s and Olympic sports and sets national guidelines for NIL collectives. Power Four conference leaders respond as rules take effect.
In the last year, more than 70 athletes have filed suit against the governing body, as players use state and local judges to grant them an extension of their eligibility. The NCAA has spent $16 million alone litigating eligibility cases.
Trump writes in the order that the NCAA should implement revenue-share that "preserves or expands scholarships" in women's and Olympic sports; prohibit federal funds to be used for NIL or rev-share; and prohibit "improper financial activities ... including collectives."
Women’s and Olympic sports are said to be a focus for Trump, who believes that non-revenue programs are being eliminated or at least defunded, as schools shift more resources to football and men’s basketball in an intense and competitive recruiting environment where athlete compensation has been legalized.
Lastly, the order invalidates certain state laws that conflict with the order, which are likely to include several state statutes governing NIL.
But the order’s true impact remains unclear and is in doubt considering that Trump’s previous executive order, released in July, has created no real results within the industry. This one, however, is more comprehensive and direct as opposed to the last one, which only directed his cabinet members to create rules — which never materialized.
Executive orders are subject to legal scrutiny, especially those that disregard court orders. In fact, courts have struck down several of the president’s orders over the last several months, rendering them moot and unenforceable. In a
White House roundtable event last month, the president himself predicted that any order would be legally challenged. He said that he “hoped” for a favorable judge.
Why can’t the industry “go back to the old system?” Trump asked a room of dignitaries at the March 6 roundtable event. “I’d like to go exactly back to what we had and ram it through a court.”
Like the roundtable event itself, the order is likely geared toward bringing attention to the issue in effort to pressure Congressional lawmakers to reach an agreement on a more concrete solution: legislation. That’s something of which lawmakers have failed to do in seven years of lobbying from the NCAA for a bill to, most notably, permit college sports leaders to enact and enforce rules without them being legally challenged — in other words, an antitrust exemption.
However, divide rages among those on either side of the aisle over an issue that many originally thought to be bipartisan in nature. That hasn’t proven to be true.
Republicans support a more narrow NCAA-leaning bill with athlete restrictions; Democrats, many of them harsh critics of the NCAA and power conference leadership, are supporting a more broad bill with athlete freedoms.
Despite confidence from Republican leadership in the House, the Republican-authored SCORE Act — the one piece of all-encompassing legislation to emerge from a committee — has twice failed to reach the House floor for a vote. Lawmakers are working to bring SCORE to the floor by the month’s end, but they continue the process of whipping votes. Holding a slim House majority, Republicans cannot afford to lose their own members, some of whom oppose portions of the bill.
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