President Donald Trump said Friday that questions about the war in Iran were “easy” compared to efforts to better regulate college sports and rein in high salaries for football players — an extraordinary suggestion that even he himself seemed to think better of a short time later.
Trump convened a roundtable of experts that included former Alabama football coach Nick Saban, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and Pete Bevacqua, Notre Dame’s athletic director. He and others then spent over an hour arguing that big paydays for star athletes — as well as other relatively recent changes to NCAA sports like the transfer portal — have wrecked college athletics.
Presidents are routinely called upon to tackle multiple issues at once, many of them extraordinarily complex. But the timing of this lengthy discussion was especially striking, given that the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran a week ago. At the end of the event, a reporter started to ask about Iran and the president interrupted, “That’s an easy problem compared to what we’re doing here.”
When a second question came about Trump’s Thursday decision to fire Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the president groused, “Ugh,” before adding, “Is it possible to stay on this subject, just for once?”
Later, the president appeared to get a bit more reflective when asked why he was focused on this topic with so much else going on in the world.
“I saw what was happening with college sports. And it doesn’t sound very important compared to what’s happening in Iran and other places,” he said. “But it is very important to me. And if I can get it done, I’ll get it done.”
Trump also eventually commented briefly on Iran, saying that on a scale of 1 to 10, he’d rank U.S. military actions “a 12 to 15.”
College sports — particularly football — is wildly popular and its governance is without question a huge and continually thorny issue. Trump has also for months complained that athletes securing higher and higher salaries as part of the NCAA’s name, image and likeness era has changed things for the worse.
He maintains that big-revenue sports like football are squeezing out smaller sports and women’s athletics, and even says that some universities have begun paying athletes so much that it is driving the institutions toward insolvency.
The roundtable came after Trump spent hours with top officials behind closed doors, likely discussing Iran and other major issues. The president announced that he’d met with defense contractors who had agreed to increase weapons production.
Still, it was surprising that Trump — flanked by his Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles — found so much time to devote to the issue of college sports.
The president listened as Saban joked, “I’m just a football coach.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and others took turns expressing their love for college football and their fears for its future. Ex-Ohio State coach Urban Meyer offered his thoughts, as did Randy Levine, president of Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees. No current college athletes participated.
“I’m here as long as you need me,” Trump assured those assembled, who included former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who once served on the College Football Playoff Selection Committee.
The event boiled down to Trump imploring members of Congress to pass the SCORE Act, or legislation based on it. The bill is designed to impose new rules on college sports, but has been criticized by opponents as a giveaway to the NCAA and its most powerful schools.
Told that the measure almost certainly wouldn’t pass Congress, Trump said he’d draft an executive order himself on college sports.
“If this doesn’t work, colleges are going to be destroyed,” he said.
It wasn’t clear how that would differ from one Trump signed in July mandating that federal authorities clarify whether college athletes can be considered employees of the schools. Instead, Trump spent more time pining for the days before name, image and likeness.
“Is there any way we could go back to the old system, which I thought was fantastic?” Trump asked at one point, advocating for returning to a simple scholarships model for college athletes while also suggesting that they could be paid “some compensation, more minimal, but a lot.”
