Maybe it’s because March Madness is upon us, but in recent days our leaders in Washington, D.C., have taken a surprising amount of time from more pressing concerns—Iran war, anyone?—to kvetch about the state of college sports. To put it bluntly, they’re not very happy about it.
At a big meeting at the White House on March 6, which included athletic directors, conference commissioners, and several famous ex-football coaches (Nick Saban and Urban Meyer among them), President Donald Trump decried the fact that a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling in 2021 made it possible, for the first time ever, for college athletes to be paid for their “name, image, and likeness.” Some star athletes, like Texas Tech’s new quarterback Brendan Sorsby, are now getting millions of dollars. (Sorsby has a $5 million deal.) “A lot of really bad things are happening,” Trump said, claiming that rising athletic costs were going to put some schools into bankruptcy if something wasn’t done. “Everybody was happy” with the old system, he added, “and now you’ve got yourself a mess.”
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A few days later, at a Senate roundtable to discuss the same issue, Tommy Tuberville, the former head football coach at Auburn University—and now an Alabama senator—described the current state of affairs as a “disaster”: “Are we gonna be an educational institution or are we gonna be pro sports?”
