Inside the Fight Over College Sports: Who Really Benefits From Trump's Push for NCAA Reform?

On May 9, 2026, President Donald Trump's presidential committee on college sports issued its most detailed set of recommendations yet: cap coaches' salaries, pool media rights, rewrite transfer-portal rules, and above all, urge Congress to act quickly [1]. The committee — chaired by Trump himself and vice-chaired by New York Yankees president Randy Levine and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — includes power conference commissioners, former Alabama coach Nick Saban, NBA commissioner Adam Silver, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice [2].

Trump has warned repeatedly that without federal legislation, college sports could be "lost forever" [3]. His April 3 executive order, titled "Urgent National Action to Save College Sports," threatens schools' federal funding if they fail to comply with new eligibility and transfer restrictions by August 1, 2026 [4]. The NCAA and its conferences have spent over $15 million lobbying Congress to pass legislation that would give them what courts have steadily taken away: the power to limit how much athletes earn [5].

But the question at the center of this fight is not whether college sports face disruption. They do. The question is who benefits from the specific version of "reform" being pushed — and who pays.

The Money: Where NIL and Revenue Sharing Stand

The 2025 House v. NCAA settlement fundamentally changed the economics of college athletics. Approved by a federal judge on June 6, 2025, the $2.8 billion settlement authorized schools to directly share up to 22% of their average athletic revenues with athletes for the first time, capped at $20.5 million per school in 2025-26 and projected to grow 4% annually over a 10-year term [6][7].

Source: House v. NCAA Settlement Terms

Data as of Jun 6, 2025CSV

Beyond the settlement's revenue-sharing framework, the broader NIL ecosystem has ballooned. An estimated $932.5 million was spent on NIL products and services for men's and women's basketball alone during the 2025-26 season, with more than $500 million of that coming from direct revenue-sharing payments [8]. Football NIL spending dwarfs all other sports, with estimates placing total football NIL and revenue-sharing expenditures near $1.8 billion [8].

Source: On3 / Front Office Sports estimates

Data as of Apr 15, 2026CSV

The distribution is starkly unequal. At Ohio State, revenue-sharing payments go to athletes in football, men's basketball, women's basketball, and women's volleyball — and nobody else [9]. At UNC, administrators said "the majority of those funds will be paid to student-athletes in our revenue-generating sports, football and men's basketball" [9]. The Intercollegiate Tennis Association reported that as of mid-2025, it had "not heard of any D-I programs planning to offer revenue-sharing dollars to tennis players" [9].

For athletes outside the major revenue sports, the compensation comes instead in additional scholarships. Ohio State added 91 total scholarships; UNC increased from 338 to 532 across all sports [9]. Whether that constitutes adequate compensation for athletes whose labor generates billions is one of the core disputes.

What Congress Is Being Asked to Do

The leading legislative vehicle has been the SCORE Act (Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements Act), introduced by Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) with bipartisan co-sponsors including Reps. Cuellar, Suozzi, and Vicente Gonzalez [10]. The bill would establish a federal preemption of the current patchwork of 50 state NIL laws, provide the NCAA with limited antitrust protection, prohibit athletes from being classified as employees, and create a federal NIL database [11].

The SCORE Act was pulled from a scheduled House vote on December 3, 2025, after criticism that it favored the NCAA and power conferences over athletes [10]. As The American Prospect reported, the bill "failed because enough members of Congress understood that the NCAA's 'educational mission' has always been a cover story" [5].

The bill differs from the House v. NCAA settlement framework in important ways. The settlement is a court-supervised agreement that permits but does not require revenue sharing, with an independent College Sports Commission providing oversight [7]. The SCORE Act, by contrast, would delegate regulatory authority to private entities — the NCAA and the College Sports Commission — without any federal agency oversight, raising what legal scholars call the "private nondelegation" problem [12].

Trump's executive order adds a third track: it "strongly encourages" Congress to pass legislation while directing federal agencies to use funding leverage to enforce compliance with NCAA rules on transfers, eligibility, and NIL [4]. The White House committee's draft proposals go further, suggesting coaches' salary caps and a separate playoff structure for non-Power Four schools [2].

The Constitutional Problem

Legal scholars have raised serious objections to the SCORE Act's structure. A Cardozo Law Review analysis concluded the bill "cannot withstand constitutional scrutiny" because it delegates policymaking authority to private, self-interested entities without public oversight — a violation of the private nondelegation doctrine [12]. The analysis draws parallels to litigation over the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act, where courts found similar delegation structures problematic [12].

Beyond the nondelegation issue, the bill's antitrust exemption would shield not just the NCAA but "anyone else claiming 'compliance' with its provisions," a breadth that critics say would undermine the very athlete protections the legislation claims to provide [12].

The employee-status question poses an even more fundamental challenge. The SCORE Act explicitly declares that college athletes cannot be regarded as employees. But the NLRB has moved in the opposite direction, and multiple legal analyses have found that athletes who generate billions in revenue, train 40+ hours per week, and are subject to institutional control meet established tests for employee status under both federal and state labor law [13]. Any federal law declaring otherwise would face equal protection challenges, as athletes could argue the statute arbitrarily strips them of rights available to other workers [13].

Cornell Law School researchers have noted that "proclamation that college athletes cannot be employees would face a host of legal challenges" because public university employment has traditionally been an area reserved to the states [14].

Who Gains From Federal Preemption?

A federal NIL law that overrides state statutes would primarily benefit the NCAA and power conferences, which have sought a uniform framework they can control [11]. Under the current patchwork, states like Texas, Florida, and California have enacted permissive NIL laws that give athletes broad rights to monetize their names and likenesses. Federal preemption could replace those protections with more restrictive standards.

The NCAA and its member conferences have spent heavily to achieve this outcome. OpenSecrets data shows that colleges and universities competing in major athletics spent $15.5 million on federal lobbying in 2023 alone [15]. The House v. NCAA settlement itself contains a lobbying provision requiring plaintiff lawyers to use "reasonable efforts" to support antitrust protections and the preemption of state laws — effectively conscripting the athletes' own legal team into the NCAA's lobbying campaign [16].

Notably, the settlement also requires those same lawyers to "take no position" on whether athletes should be considered employees or whether collective bargaining should be permitted — neutralizing potential opposition from the very advocates who won the $2.8 billion case [16].

The 92% Problem: Athletic Department Deficits

Roughly 92% of NCAA Division I athletics programs operate at a deficit, relying on institutional subsidies and student fees [17]. Iowa State University projects athletics budget shortfalls totaling nearly $150 million over the coming years [18]. Ohio State won the College Football Playoff while losing money. Penn State faces growing debt [19].

These numbers are real. But the analysis of what causes them is contested.

A detailed examination by Sports Illustrated's Ben Fischer argues the supposed crisis is "not structural" but "how the schools have actively chosen to operate" [19]. Ohio State employs 16 business office staffers. Coaching salaries continue to escalate without competitive market pressure driving them — schools pay buyouts on fired coaches and then hire replacements at even higher salaries [19]. Revenue-sharing payments of $20.5 million per school are treated as an additional cost rather than prompting corresponding cuts elsewhere.

Fischer's analysis points to the enormous community economic impact athletics generate — $1.28 billion for Louisville, by one estimate — arguing that operating deficits function as strategic marketing investments in university brand affection, not symptoms of impending collapse [19].

Conference commissioners, meanwhile, have largely aligned with the crisis framing. ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips thanked Trump for his intervention, saying "there continues to be significant momentum to preserve the athletic and academic opportunities for the next generation of student-athletes" [3]. But the commissioners have financial incentives to support legislation that would cap athlete compensation and restore institutional control over the market.

Who Gets Hurt: Walk-Ons, Women, and the Group of Six

If Congress passes a federal framework that caps revenue sharing at the House settlement level, several groups face outsized disadvantage.

Walk-on athletes face an existential threat. New sport-by-sport roster caps under the settlement mean tighter budgets and fewer open spots. Track and field programs could shrink from 120 athletes to 45; baseball rosters from 40 to 32 [20]. Schools can offer unlimited scholarships, but the total number of athletes cannot exceed the roster cap — squeezing out walk-ons, preferred walk-ons, and anyone outside the starting rotation [20].

Women's sports participants receive a fraction of revenue-sharing dollars. Many major programs plan to distribute less than 5% of revenue-sharing payments to women's sports [9]. Title IX requires equitable treatment, but the Department of Education revoked guidance on how Title IX applies to athlete pay in 2025, creating legal ambiguity that schools are exploiting [21].

Athletes at non-Power Four schools face the widest gap. While Power Four schools can approach the $20.5 million cap, mid-major and Group of Six programs lack the media rights revenue to compete. The White House committee has discussed creating a separate playoff structure for these schools [2] — a proposal that critics see as formalizing a two-tier system rather than expanding opportunity.

Black male athletes face a particularly targeted impact. The reconciliation bill (H.R. 1) eliminates Pell Grant eligibility starting fall 2026 for athletes receiving full scholarships [22]. Nearly 69% of Black male scholarship athletes qualified for Pell Grants, compared to 36% of all college athletes [22]. CLASP, a policy advocacy organization, described the provision as "almost surgically targeted" at Black men in revenue-generating sports, forcing them to choose between a full scholarship and need-based aid for living expenses like transportation, child care, and classroom supplies [22].

International Comparisons: What Other Models Show

The United States is an extreme outlier in treating university athletics as a commercial enterprise. Canada's U Sports (formerly CIS) has 56 member institutions with roughly 12,000 student-athletes, but athletic scholarships max out at around $5,000 per year and there is no equivalent of the NIL market [23]. British Universities and Colleges Sport (BUCS) represents 170 institutions and over 100,000 athletes across 54 sports, with minimal athletic scholarships and a focus on making sport accessible rather than commercially viable [24].

In most other countries, elite athlete development runs through professional clubs or government-funded programs rather than universities [23]. The comparison is instructive: these systems maintain competitive university athletics without the financial arms race, labor disputes, or existential crisis rhetoric that characterize the American model. The tradeoff is that they generate far less revenue and cultural prominence — but they also avoid the structural contradictions that arise from treating athletes as amateur students while operating a multibillion-dollar entertainment industry.

The Timeline: What Happens Next

The August 1, 2026 deadline in Trump's executive order creates immediate pressure. The NCAA must establish new transfer restrictions, eligibility caps, and NIL guardrails by that date or risk federal funding consequences for noncompliant schools [4]. The next recruiting cycle will force schools to make commitments — with or without federal legislation.

Congress has introduced at least eight NIL reform bills since 2021, and none have passed [13]. The SCORE Act's failure in December 2025 suggests the political will for a comprehensive federal framework remains elusive, despite $15 million in NCAA lobbying and White House backing [5][11].

The courts, meanwhile, continue to move. The House settlement's 10-year framework is in effect. NLRB proceedings on athlete employment status are ongoing. State legislatures continue to pass and amend their own NIL laws [11].

Trump's warning that college sports could be "lost forever" without congressional action serves a specific political function: it frames the debate as rescue rather than regulation, crisis rather than transition. Whether one accepts that framing depends largely on whether one believes the current disruption threatens the existence of college athletics — or merely threatens the ability of institutions to control how much of the money they generate actually reaches the athletes who generate it.

The evidence suggests the latter. College football media rights deals continue to grow. The College Football Playoff is expanding. Attendance and viewership remain robust. What is changing is the distribution of revenue — and for the institutions and conferences that have long kept the majority of it, that change feels existential even if the enterprise itself is not at risk.

The question before Congress is not whether to save college sports. It is whether to save the current power structure within college sports — and at whose expense.