It's unclear what the next steps will be after Donald Trump's College Sports Roundtable on Friday afternoon at the White House. The President tends to say he's doing one thing, and then completely goes the opposite way.
It's unclear if his calls to return to the pre-NIL era hold any weight. If anything, his actions during his second presidency have gone against almost everything he'd supposedly set out to accomplish during his campaign. Maybe rev-share will only continue to see bigger and bigger salaries, in the name of American capitalism. That seems to be Trump's guiding principle these days. Particularly, Lockheed Martin and RTX.
Trump's College Sports Roundtable may have been a distraction from the state of the world more than an honest attempt to solve any problems, though. As USA Today's Matt Hayes pointed out, the SEC and Big Ten didn't even address Cody Campbell's "Saving College Sports" push to negotiate media rights as a single league, as opposed to individual conferences.
"And speaking of money, very little was said about Cody Campbell’s idea to use the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, and allow conferences to pool their media rights and make more money — so everyone can share the wealth," Hayes wrote.
"The SEC and Big Ten don’t want to pool television media rights, and they certainly don’t want a billionaire businessman — who just so happens to be the president of the Texas Tech Board of Regents — telling them how to financially structure their swindle. I mean, their system."
Donald Trump called out Ole Miss' Trinidad Chambliss and Alabama's Charles Bediako lawsuits
Trump went hard at the SEC for recent rulings that granted eligibility for the Ole Miss Rebels' Trinidad Chambliss, which is up in the air again, and the Alabama Crimson Tide bringing back Charles Bediako despite his having played in the NBA's G League.
“We have a seven-year freshman. 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," Trump said.
We'll see how simple Trump makes it. It's just too bad we didn't hear about what the sport's future media rights will look like, and we instead got empty platitudes about Trump supposedly caring about women's sports despite having never gone to a collegiate women's event as President.