President Trump Hosts College Sports Roundtable Aimed at Reshaping College Athletics

By Max Adox

The tumultuous world of college athletics has yet again been disrupted. This time, not by a judge, but by Congress and the President of the United States. 

On Friday, March 6, 2026, President Donald J. Trump held a “Saving College Sports Roundtable” with many prominent figures present, including the commissioners of all four power conferences, NCAA President Charlie Baker, leaders of Fox Sports and ESPN, big-time former football coaches like Nick Saban and Urban Meyer, and an assortment of college athletic directors and pro sports executives. Also present were a number of Trump’s cabinet members, senior advisors, and elected officials. 

Notably absent from the meeting about the future of college athletes were college athletes themselves. 

Throughout the nearly two-hour meeting, attendees put forth their goal of increased regulations in college athletics. There was much talk about using the SCORE Act, which is currently stalled in the House of Representatives due to a lack of bipartisan support, as the starting point for national legislation. Trump acknowledged the rocky road ahead of the bill and suggested an alternative option, saying, “I’d do an executive order… I have a really nice, simple idea.” While an executive order could provide guidelines and perhaps temporary changes, it cannot achieve some of the meeting’s major goals, like overriding the patchwork of NCAA policies and standardizing NIL laws through a national policy, state NIL laws with a national policy, or providing antitrust protections for the NCAA. Executive orders can also be taken to court or overturned by a judge more easily than a law. 

How Did We Get Here?

Until recently, college athletes have been forbidden by the NCAA from making money, neither from their Name, Image, and Likeness nor direct payments from their school in the form of revenue sharing. That began to change in 2014, when a district judge ruled that the NCAA’s use of UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon’s image and likeness in their college basketball video game violated antitrust laws. 

The primary outcome of O’Bannon’s case was that it changed people’s perspective. For the first time, large groups of people began to think, “It is unfair that the NCAA can use his image and not pay him.” 

Jump forward to 2021, and athletes are going after the NCAA again. This time, it’s Shawne Alston of the West Virginia Mountaineers, who felt that he was worth more than the benefits he was then receiving for playing on behalf of the university. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court. The NCAA argued that, in essence, “not paying players is our business model.” The notoriously divided Court came together and ruled 9-0 in favor of Alston, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh ending his concurring opinion with the simple statement that “The NCAA is not above the law.” On the back of the Alston case and various state laws, the NCAA finally allowed players to profit on their name, image, and likeness. 

Perhaps the most significant court case was brought a few years later by Arizona State swimmer Grant House. In the face of a potentially very expensive decision against the NCAA, college sports’ governing body decided to settle. The ensuing settlement paid many former college athletes damages totaling $2.8 Billion, removed scholarship caps for individual teams, allowed schools to directly share portions of athletic revenue with players, and established the College Sports Commission to oversee athletes’ NIL deals. 

The Legal Debate

United States antitrust laws are designed to be a “comprehensive charter of economic liberty aimed at preserving free and unfettered competition as the rule of trade." In other words, they’re designed to protect free trade and keep markets open for people to buy, sell, and work as they choose. That means no monopolies, price rigging, or anything that a judge might consider a “restraint” of trade. 

To apply it to this situation more clearly, we can look at the pre-NIL world. Players could not profit from their name, image, or likeness, and colleges were forbidden from directly paying their athletes. The NCAA and its universities were profiting from the labor of athletes who were not getting paid. Eventually, the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA’s rules on limiting player compensation were an anticompetitive restraint of the labor market, violating the bedrock of US antitrust law, the Sherman Act of 1890.

Now, the questions shift to the future: Should the NCAA be exempt from antitrust laws in some way? The exemption would allow them to override state laws and impose stricter regulations around eligibility, transfers, NIL deals, and revenue sharing without the threat of lawsuits. An exemption would likely eliminate the possibility of student-athletes becoming classified as employees. As employees, the athletes could come together to collectively bargain or strike, as we have seen in US pro leagues. One way we may see this happen is through congressional legislation. 

What is the SCORE Act?

Throughout the recent meeting, President Trump and others repeatedly referenced the SCORE Act as the potential future of college sports. The Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements Act is a piece of legislation introduced in the US House of Representatives in the summer of 2025. The main goals of the bill are to codify the name, image, and likeness rights of student athletes and to establish a national framework for college athletics. Currently, the ability of an athlete to profit from their NIL is allowed by the NCAA, but is not protected by national law and is overruled by state laws, leading to an uneven playing field. The SCORE Act establishes rules and regulations on a number of hot topic issues. The number of transfers an athlete can make without the penalty of sitting out of sports for a year would be capped at one. Student-athletes would be explicitly barred from attaining employee status, and the NCAA would be granted legal protection from antitrust laws in a number of different categories. 

In general, the SCORE Act is backed by Republican members of the House, the power conferences, and the NCAA. 

The House democrats proposed their own piece of legislation to govern the future of college athletics. The Student Athlete Fairness and Enforcement (SAFE) Act also restricts the number of transfers an athlete can make prior to losing a year of eligibility (2) and does not give the NCAA any antitrust exemptions. The SAFE Act does not take a position on whether or not student-athletes could be considered employees. Alongside the Democratic members of the house, the SAFE Act is also supported by smaller conferences. 

Both bills are currently stalled in the House of Representatives, and neither looks likely to become law in the near future. 

What’s Next?

The last major foray into college athletics by a sitting US President was in 1905, when Theodore Roosevelt held a meeting with three Ivy League football representatives (who were the leaders of the game back then) to address the pressing issue of players literally dying on the field. 

With President Trump eager to reshape the landscape of college sports, government involvement seems likely on some level. Whether signing an executive order or pushing for a substantial piece of legislation, Trump may ultimately be remembered as the president most deeply involved in the regulation of intercollegiate athletics.