Trump rents Alex Ovechkin from Washington Capitals during Carney Pressher
At a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, President Donald Trump seemed to confuse the ice hockey player Alex Ovechkin as Canadian.
If you can put yourself in the mental space of President TrumpIt is quite easy to understand why he wants to fit into the cauldron of University Sports.
With Approval assessment taken on water, Wars around the world extend rather than concluding and a year Prevailing economic uncertainty In front in the middle of 2026, to be able to say: “I am the guy who saved university sports” – whether he really does it or not – seems politically attractive. He even has the goat, Nick Saban, Registered to be his face.
You can already imagine the oval office ceremony where Saban is held behind the desk resolved, giving a boost and a: “Sir, we could not have done so without you” when Trump puts the pen on something that will undoubtedly be found in a courtroom – just like any other attempt to restore order to university sports by its old business model.
This is why, even if some administrators through university sports will welcome Trump’s involvement because nothing else seems to move the needle, many others roll your eyes.
After all, what is a presidential commission on university sports will really accomplish when the solutions have already been well established?
Without pre -start the intentions of the proposed commission or the voices it plans to include – so far, the only names linked to it are Saban, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R -Ala.) And the Texas Tech Booster Campbell billionaire – neither them nor Trump has the capacity to change reality.
And the fundamental truth that each attempt to “repair” college sports is manifested is that its future can only be one of the two ways.
The first: Congress will adopt a law, and Trump will sign it, which gives the NCAA the ability to enforce its rules book without fear of continuing each time it denies a zero contract or an additional year of eligibility.
The second: a group of large income schools will have to regroup and propose a new system which allows them to collectively negotiate athletes, jointly establishing road rules and providing the order which will benefit on both sides.
That’s it. There is no third option.
Even if Trump took a coil of everything Nick Saban has complained publicly With regard to Nile and the transfer portal, transformed it into a decree and signed it, the overall net effect would be … not much.
If you think that lawyers have been the greatest winners of all this so far, wait for it to obtain an executive decree that arbitrarily limits someone’s potential or freedom of movement. Economic news today can be trembling, but there is never a recession on billable hours in university sports.
Again, all the respect due to Saban for what he contributed to the game and what he believes to be the best for university sports. Much of its current environment criticism is correct.
But the objective of this commission, and by extension of Trump’s involvement, cannot be mainly to erase what has happened in the past four years and come back to the way things were. This will not happen, and any attempt to make things go back could lead too much to the most afraid of universities: a revolt of organized university athletes which disrupts a weekend of university football or a basketball tournament in the NCAA where hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake.
And this is where another university sports commission gives people stomach burns.
First, the history of Blue-Ribbon panels sufficiently tackling these problems are extremely poor. Just look at the condoleezza rice commission on university basketball, the remains of which would not support heat for more than 30 seconds if you throw them into a fireplace.
Second, everything the committee offers or Trump puts in a decree will not be worth much unless the congress has passed a kind of law that protects the NCAA.
There are also some big problems with this. The obvious is that the NCAA has been pressure for a bill for almost six years, and nothing is particularly close to being voted. There have been a bunch of audiences and boastful, but there are few indications that chaos of university sports is really at the top of the list of priorities in Congress these days.
The other obstacle, quite frankly, is Trump. If you are a Democrat in the Chamber or the Senate, and you measure the winds in 2026, what is the incentive to soften a mountain of major major titles on the economy or international affairs by giving it the opportunity to present itself in the Final Four next year and to boast in the way in which he “fixed” university sports?
In an ideal world, would we want better than our leaders to resolve a problem? Of course. But we are not talking about a national emergency here. These are only university sports, and when you are a problem such as university sports in the middle of the political arena, politics will occur. It’s just the way the game is played.
And that brings us back to the place where we have probably always been. Only university sports can solve what is wrong with university sports – as it should be.
Will it be difficult to get the right people on the same wavelength? Of course. Will there be pain for some people when the system is exploded and will become fully professionalized? No question.
But a chairman of lightning who has not demonstrated a lot of knowledge of the real problems here putting Saban and Tuberville in charge due to a perceived political advantage is a last inevitable harassment of the presidents of the ineffective colleges who refuse to face the reality of the location of their business.
They can either wait until the congress saves them, or they can continue to save themselves. If anything, the addition of Trump to the mixture delays only the inevitable.