College-athletics programs are poised to enter a new reality. They have been for some time.
A major settlement that would upend colleges’ relationship to their players — and commit millions of dollars to those athletes, their successors, and their predecessors — sits unsigned on a judge’s desk. Players who have already been cut by their teams as a consequence of that settlement are waiting to find out if they’ll be welcomed back. And federal lawmakers are working on legislation that could introduce yet more changes, though its passage is far from certain.
Into that uncertainty stepped another stakeholder last week: President Trump. Yahoo Sports reported that he is creating a commission on college athletics to examine a wide range of issues, including “the frequency of player movement in the transfer portal, the unregulated booster compensation paid to athletes, the debate of college-athlete employment, preserving the Olympic sport structure, the application of Title IX to school revenue-share payments and, even, conference membership makeup and conference television contracts.”
Nick Saban, a former University of Alabama football coach, and Cody Campbell, an oil billionaire and chair of the Texas Tech University system Board of Regents, will lead the commission, according to Yahoo Sports. Very few other details have emerged since.
The news has jolted a sector used to seismic changes. Those reached by The Chronicle late last week expressed uncertainty that the president’s commission could solve the complex issues that plague college sports. But some also said they were hopeful that if a commission took a wide view and made careful recommendations, it could be a step on the path to helpful reform. College athletics’ challenges can feel like a web of interconnected problems that is so messy and gnarled, it may take someone with a bird’s-eye view to fix it.
“I always felt something like this would be needed to really get global reform,” said Tom McMillen, a former congressman, Division I basketball player, and a current regent for the University System of Maryland.
The closest thing to global reform was, as of Wednesday, still waiting to be approved. The House settlement, as it’s called colloquially, would conclude three big antitrust cases brought by current and former players against the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the five most powerful athletic conferences. Athletes sought damages for past use of their name, image, and likeness (NIL) and challenged the NCAA’s amateurism principles.
About a year ago, details of the settlement emerged in press reports. Its provisions create a new de facto set of financial rules for colleges that compete at the highest levels of football and basketball. The NCAA’s Division I Board of Directors voted to adopt changes laid out in the settlement, pending a judge’s approval.
One of the settlement’s most significant components was that it would allow the colleges in the five defendant conferences to craft NIL deals with their players, totaling up to $20.5 million the first year and more each following year. It also pays millions in damages to past players and stipulates that participating colleges would have to adhere to roster caps in each sport.
Though the settlement only applies to the colleges in the five conferences that were sued, any Division I college can choose to opt in and agree to all of its terms. Many colleges have said they intend to do so. The judge in these cases, Claudia Wilken of the U.S. District Court in Oakland, Calif., is widely expected to give the deal her stamp of approval. As a result, many colleges have already started to prepare to implement its provisions. In some cases, that meant telling players that they no longer have spots on teams that exceeded the settlement’s roster caps.
But Wilken has not signed the settlement yet. She objected to the idea that players — likely those who will not benefit from the new NIL rules — will be cut from their teams. The parties then agreed that colleges would be allowed under the settlement to invite back players who had been cut and that those players would not count toward the roster caps.
If the latest agreement satisfies Wilken, then House will become the new rulebook. Colleges that have been planning to comply with its provisions will set those plans in motion. But that doesn’t mean that everything is settled. Critics of the agreement have raised questions about how the financial shift will affect gender equity among programs, or possibly harm Olympic sports. Wilken may not view it as her role to consider how the case will affect those issues, said Andrew Zimbalist, an emeritus professor of economics at Smith College.
“As a public-policy matter,” he said, “that’s very perilous.”
But public policy on college athletics has been hard to formulate, especially at the national level. Judges like Wilken have become some of the most consequential decision makers in shaping college athletics in recent years — thanks to a rash of lawsuits against the NCAA — along with the California Legislature, whose passage of an NIL bill eventually prompted the association to enshrine the ability of athletes to make NIL deals in its rules. That adoption has ushered in an era in which campuses use those deals to entice prospective athletes, with a wink and a nod, to enroll. Rampant criticism of unfairness has followed.
Charlie Baker, president of the NCAA since 2023, hoped to use his political experience as a former governor of Massachusetts to lobby Congress to give the association the power to make rules without fear of endless litigation. To do that, it would need an antitrust exemption.
Legislation to deliver such an exemption — or any sort of reform — is uncertain. A presidential commission could give lawmakers a shot in the arm. In practice, the group could come up with recommendations for lawmakers, who could then incorporate them into a bill.
It is hard to get any type of legislation through Congress, and legislation about college athletics is no exception. McMillen pointed out that there have only been three bills passed in recent memory: in 1990, 1994, and 2004.
“To push this over the top, you really need all hands on deck, including the president,” McMillen said.
Open questions that emerge from the House settlement would be logical for the group to take up. One of them is the preservation of Olympic sports. The United States does not fund Olympic programs the way other countries do. Colleges train athletes, but they lose money on those programs. At many institutions, football and basketball fund sports like swimming, track, and tennis. As calls to share the revenue generated by football and basketball with players are answered, concern over how to fund all the other sports has grown.
NIL rules and an antitrust exemption also could be on the table, although observers hoping for the commission to recommend the latter be granted might be disappointed. Campbell, the reported co-chair and Texas Tech board member, has written publicly in opposition to the granting of an antitrust exemption, saying it would empower the four biggest conferences to break away into a “super conference,” starving less lucrative programs.
It’s too early to tell what a commission would take up. But for it to work, Zimbalist said, it should be populated with people who will take a broad view of the issues, not those who are self-interested. Saban was one of the highest-paid college-football coaches in history and benefited enormously from the current system, Zimbalist noted. But “in the abstract,” he said, “it’s a very good idea.”
Others saw the announcement of a commission as potentially disruptive to recent progress. The terms of the House settlement have been known to colleges for more than a year, and many have already started to prepare for it to become the law of the land.
“If you have the president’s commission putting out a different message, that can only add more turbulence to the House settlement agreement,” said Michael H. LeRoy, a labor and employment-relations professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. LeRoy also wondered how a commission made up of people from big-time athletics could agree on how to reform the enterprise when years of effort have yielded only the current messy situation.
Finally, LeRoy said, Trump lacks legitimacy in matters related to higher education. His administration has cut billions in research funding, jeopardized the ability of thousands of international students to remain in the United States, threatened the tax-exempt status of universities, and begun to dismantle the Department of Education.
“He wants to bring major universities to their knees,” LeRoy said. Why should they welcome his effort to reform their athletics programs?
Then there is the question of how a presidential commission will affect federal legislation. “What is the timeline?” wondered Amy Privette Perko, chief executive officer of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. “We’re aware that there have been years put into legislative efforts. Those legislative efforts, it would seem, would not go forward until the commission’s work is complete.”
Like others, Perko hoped for a government entity that could resolve big-picture issues. The Knight Commission has advocated for a separate governing structure for college football that would operate independently of other sports. She hoped the commission would consider it.
With few details emerging by early this week, it was hard for most people to know what to think about the commission. Sean T. Frazier, athletic director at Northern Illinois University, said that what mattered to him was who was on it. The landscape has gotten so chaotic that any guardrails and oversight are welcome.
“It’s got to have people who know what the hell they’re talking about,” he said. They will need “expertise around the House settlement, roster management, revenue sharing, the transfer portal, I could go on and on.
“If the commission can help any of those areas,” he said, “I’m all for it.”
