The NCAA Power 4 conference commissioners & athletic directors will attend a White House roundtable discussion hosted by Donald Trump on March 6. Invited guests include: Tiger Woods, Nick Saban, Mack Brown, Urban Meyer, Tim Tebow, Condoleezza Rice, New England Patriots president Jonathan Kraft, NBA commissioner Adam Silver, Fox Sports president Eric Shanks, and ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro.
The issue is NIL (Name Image Likeness) spending for top athletes, which has quickly turned into a Frankenstein for the NCAA, which was caught flatfooted from the start and has never come up with a fair & rational system to regulate NIL spending & the transfer portal, so they are now seeking Congressional & Presidential intervention. It seems like there is an athlete suing the NCAA every week now over eligibility, etc, and it’s become a right-to-work issue beyond its institutional control.
The NCAA’s “Power 4” is about football money, most of which comes from television & streaming. The Big 10, SEC, ACC & Big 12 are the Power 4– in that order. SEC commissioners & AD’s are upset because they collectively feel their athletic programs are vastly superior to those of the Big 10, but the NCAA is staffed at every level with Big 10 alumni, so they get favorable rankings, seedings, officiating, national television exposure, etc, which creates friction between the top dogs.
The ACC has suffered greatly in football during this NIL era of the transfer portal and conference expansion/reshuffling, so their school officials aren’t happy. The Big 12 had to rebuild itself after losing Texas & Oklahoma to the SEC a few years back. The Big 12 is doing better with Texas Tech committing $28M to its football program in 2025, which yielded them a coveted CFP playoff spot. But most schools can’t spend like that, and those that can’t are upset about competitive imbalance.
Everything is about football, as it generates the most viewers & largest wagering handles. Therefore, a basketball conference like the Big East has become irrelevant to the NCAA. UConn is still a top national men’s basketball team, but it won’t be able to recover its glory of just a few years ago when it won back-to-back national championships because it doesn’t have football revenue coming in to pay for top NIL basketball athletes like Power 4 conferences can.
On the NCAA agenda now is expanding its football playoffs from 12 teams. Sixteen teams makes the most sense, and always has, but it appears the NCAA is looking at possibly jumping to 20-24 teams for their playoffs. Top Big 10 officials (University of Michigan) insist on byes for Power 4 conference champions, etc. This makes it easier for their teams to win the football championship (as Indiana University did in 2025), verses having a 16-team playoff with no first-round byes.
Understand that the NCAA doesn’t want a fair & level playing field, it wants the Big 10 to win every year and put as many of its teams into the big tournaments (football & basketball) as possible. Generally speaking these days, the SEC qualifies & wins a lot because it spends the most money on NIL athletes, coaches & infrastructure. Everyone is lobbying for rules that give them the biggest advantage, so in the end their is little agreement. Money wins is the bottom line, and there is no way to change that fundamental under capitalism.
The Winter Olympics just concluded and the US had its best medal count ever. The last two Olympic games, Paris 2024 and Milan 2026, excluded Russian athletes, which affected medal totals. NIL spending, particularly for summer games sports such as track & field, swimming & gymnastics means these sports are now NCAA dominated, which is pushing up US Olympic medal wins.
Foreign athletes now get visas to come to a US university and train in their particular sport so they can get paid. Ed O’Bannon v NCAA in 2016 changed everything. College & high school sports are now openly professionalized as the concept of a “student-athlete” has been largely obliterated in bigtime NCAA sports. Today, the top girls high school softball & volleyball players across the country have a NIL profile. That’s how far it has proliferated.
AAU hoops & traveling soccer teams are corporate sponsored and the spending is only going up. The next tennis & golf prodigies are nurtured at ING academies and the like. Everybody wants to win, and seemingly every parent wants their son/daughter to get an athletic scholarship to a Power 4 school where they can play on TV & get paid.
Major universities have become sports factories more than institutions of learning. Back in the 1980’s, SMU and the University of Miami were outlaws in this regard in the eyes of the NCAA. Today they would be heralded as models of excellence in this age where winning in football is all that matters.
So how is Donald Trump going to fix this? To ask the question is to answer it– he won’t. Donald Trump & many of his invited roundtable guests are at the heart of this corruption that is destroying athletics. They don’t care about the athletes or the integrity of the game, they only want to profit & accumulate power from sports.
Conclusion: The issue for the NCAA is that college athletes are now paid free agents and this is getting very costly for universities that want to compete in sports. Power conferences dominate the NCAA because they have the deepest pockets and thus monopolize the top talent. What used to be hidden booster activity to avoid NCAA sanctions is now organized into university NIL collectives. Alabama will still win at football because their alumni are willing to spend whatever it costs to win. Whatever rules spending limits the NCAA sets, they will be covertly by-passed by universities that want to win– everyone knows that.
This mechanism change of paying athletes through NIL rules allows all schools to do what only the most competitive did in the past– pay their players. But the amounts are what matter, and just because Marquette can now pay its basketball players doesn’t matter so much when the University of Wisconsin can pay theirs so much more. The result is the Wisconsin Badgers are a NCAA Tournament team in 2026, while Marquette stinks. Marquette doesn’t have football so that program won’t have the revenue to rebuild through high-school recruiting or the transfer portal. Marquette was a consistent men’s Tournament qualifying team as of a few years ago, but that era is over.
These NIL issues have filtered up to the WNBA and have affected CBA negotiations which are currently at an impasse and are threatening the start of the upcoming season scheduled to tip-off on May 8. Top women’s collegiate players are now well-compensated through NIL deals, and this has raised expectations for the current WNBA players. WNBA owners still want to treat the WNBA players as “lucky to have a job,” so CBA negotiations have been non-productive thus far.
Every adult has the right to work and be paid. The question is: who gets the most money from their labor? This NIL era has transformed athletics and how young people look at sports. It’s now more of a business than ever, and at a younger age. This is double-edged in that it can take away the youthful love of the game, but also raises the level of consciousness of the young athlete in regards to what sports are.
The earlier one learns what sports are, the better that young athlete can decide whether it is worth it to compete seriously. It’s just as important to know what you are up against, as it is to know what you are competing for. It quickly becomes about a lot more than the game itself.
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