The White House has decided to wait before making an official foray into college sports.
Plans for a presidential commission on college sports co-led by former Alabama head coach Nick Saban have been paused, Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger reported Thursday. The move is possibly rooted in the commission’s potential impact on current Senate negotiations over legislation in the same sphere.
It’s unclear how long the pause will last, but it will give a group of five senators, including Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) more time to reach an agreement on legislation for a sport whose leaders have been begging for federal intervention in recent years.
Cruz said earlier this month the talks were a work in progress, via The Athletic:
“That is actively moving forward,” Cruz said on May 6. “We are negotiating. I think we are close to having a bipartisan product that can move. … I think college athletics is in crisis, and Congress has an obligation to step in and solve this problem.”
Planning for the commission had reached the point that President Donald Trump and Texas businessman Cody Campbell, the other potential co-leader of the commission, had started to pool recommendations for membership and send out invitations to stakeholders.
The commission was also paused amid private concerns from Big Ten and SEC officials over its concepts and after Saban, the man tasked to lead the group alongside Campbell, outright questioned the necessity of its existence.
“I don’t know a lot about the commission first of all, secondly, I’m not sure we really need a commission,” Saban said on ‘The Paul Finebaum Show’ on Wednesday. “I think that a lot of people know exactly what the issues are in college football and exactly what we need to do to fix them. I think the key to the drill is getting people together so we can move it forward. I’m not opposed to players making money, I don’t want anybody to think that. I just think the system — the way it’s going right now — it’s not sustainable and probably not in the best interests of the student-athletes across the board or the game itself.”
Saban has emerged as a prominent voice in the debate over how to rework college sports after several years of structural and financial upheaval, which has seen student-athletes gain the right to receive NIL compensation, transfer at will and, if the House settlement finally goes through, get directly paid by schools.
The court system, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, has taken a dim view of the NCAA’s legal authority to limit its athletes’ rights.
Saban, who has railed against the NIL system for years, met with Trump earlier this month about the matter. Trump was later reported to be considering an executive order addressing NIL payments, though a law passed by Congress would likely be far more welcomed by the NCAA and its leaders considering the executive branch’s lack of oversight over college sports.
