U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a round table on collegiate sports in the White House in Washington, D.C., March 6, 2026.
Nathan Howard | Reuters
President Donald Trump on Friday vowed to issue an executive order to “fix” what he described said was a “mess” in college sports created by so-called NIL payments to football, basketball.
Trump said he fully expected such an order would be challenged in the courts, but added that he hoped there would be a judge who ultimately would support the order’s goal.
“We’ll be sued, and we’ll go before the courts, and here we go again,” he said.
Trump’s comments about the Name, Image and Likeness system and other issues came at a White House roundtable on college sports that he was hosting.
“if this doesn’t work, college sports will be destroyed,” Trump said. “Women’s sports will be destroyed.”
“The amount of money being spent and lost by otherwise very successful schools is astounding, just in a short period of time,” Trump said. “It’s only going to get worse.
“It’s crazy,” Trump said. “Young people are being signed, 17-year-old quarterbacks for $12 million, 13 million, 14 million.”
“We have a seven-year freshman,” he said. “We’re seeing things that we’ve never seen before. We have college players that don’t want to go to the NFL because they’re making more money in college, right?”
“A lot of really bad things are happening, but basic questions like who is eligible to play are now virtually unregulated and decided randomly by judges rather than by reasonable, agreed-upon rules that could be very simple and very simply drawn,” he said.
“So this has grown into a major challenge.”
Critics of the NIL compensation system in college sports say that it undercuts the finances of schools and their educational mandate.