Donald Trump college sports roundtable takeaways: Trump plans executive order, Nick Saban decries portal chaos
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Donald Trump college sports roundtable takeaways: Trump plans executive order, Nick Saban decries portal chaos originally appeared on The Sporting News.
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Many major figures in college sports believe something in the industry needs to be fixed. Few agree on what that fix is, and even fewer agree on whether a fix is even possible.
More than four dozen college football and college sports luminaries met at the White House on Friday to try to find some common ground as the possibility of addressing the new landscape legislatively looms.
The SCORE Act, which aims to regulate college sports but hasn't advanced in Congress, was one of the many topics addressed by names such as Nick Saban, Tiger Woods, Urban Meyer, Adam Silver and more as U.S. President Donald Trump and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson oversaw the discussion.
Here's a look at the top moments from Friday's college sports roundtable at the White House.
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Donald Trump college sports roundtable takeaways
Trump plans executive order
Trump announced Friday that he plans to sign an executive order regarding college sports within the next week.
While the exact details of the executive order don't appear to be ironed out, Trump hinted that he wants college sports to return to a system that resembles the pre-NIL era. He previously signed an executive order in July that attempted to set guardrails for revenue sharing in the non-revenue sports, but Trump said his newest executive order will be "more comprehensive than the first."
The order "will be based on common sense and let colleges and players survive and everybody will be very happy," Trump said. "If this doesn’t work, colleges will be destroyed."
The SCORE Act, which was proposed in 2025 with the intention of regulating college sports in the NIL era, has yet to advance through Congress, and Trump admitted one reason for a new executive order is the low odds of getting a bill to pass both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives.
Trump, however, also admitted his executive order would almost certainly be challenged in court.
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Urban Meyer calls NIL collectives 'cheating'
Former Ohio State and Florida coach Urban Meyer called out NIL collectives, which began as an alternative way to recruit and pay players. The two-time national champion labeled collectives as a form of "cheating" and explained the system to Trump.
While NIL began as a way for players to profit off of their likeness and sign sponsorship deals with brands, many schools created collectives that accepted donor money and paid it out to players without those players being directly paid by the school. In Meyer's eyes, those collectives skirted the rules.
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ACC commissioner calls out rulings from 'local judges'
As the NCAA fights a judge's ruling allowing Ole Miss QB Trinidad Chambliss to play a sixth season of college football, ACC commissioner Jim Phillips decried the current system.
"Lawsuits are killing us," he said. "You don’t like a rule, you just go to a local judge."
The NCAA's recent track record in court is poor, which has opened the floodgates for even more confusion regarding eligibility. Chambliss was initially ruled ineligible by the NCAA before a Mississippi judge overturned the decision, while men's basketball was recently hit with the saga surrounding Charles Bediako, who briefly returned to Alabama three seasons after declaring for the NBA Draft after a local judge tossed out the NCAA's ruling of ineligibility.
Notre Dame AD says college sports near point of 'no return'
Notre Dame AD Pete Bevacqua had some of the harshest words of anyone at Friday's roundtable, arguing college sports are nearing the point of "no return" and calling for people to be "held to the fire" to create guardrails.
Bevacqua claimed the "runaway financial train" of college football will force more schools to make difficult decisions regarding non-revenue sports and suggested schools be required to dedicate a certain amount of money to Olympic sports based on their college football spending.
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SEC commissioner takes aim at constant player movement
SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey called out the constant player movement in college sports, telling the panel, "I have a basketball player in my league on his sixth campus."
Sankey has been a central figure in some of college sports' biggest changes in recent years. His additions of Texas and Oklahoma to the SEC set in motion the major conference realignment earlier in the decade, and he has advocated for expansion of both the College Football Playoff and NCAA Tournament.
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Nick Saban expresses concern over transfer portal
Former Alabama coach Nick Saban was on hand for the roundtable and expressed concern over both player development and fan interest as a result of constant player movement in the transfer portal.
"Fans and support groups don’t like" such a high number of players entering the transfer portal, Saban said, also arguing that the system can stunt a player's development if he is constantly moving from program to program.
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