A 22-year-old wide receiver at a mid-major school in the Sun Belt signed an NIL deal last fall worth $40,000. He is the first person in his family to attend college. His mother works 2 jobs in Baton Rouge. That $40,000 paid for his younger sister's first semester at community college. On April 3, 2026, the President of the United States signed an executive order designed, in part, to make sure deals like that one stop happening. I think that order is wrong, I think it will fail in court, and I think the people cheering for it have forgotten what the old system actually looked like for the people inside it.
The language from the White House ceremony on April 21 was revealing. Trump talked about "150 years of rulings" and a "great system with the scholarship system." Great for whom? For the kid at Alabama generating $500,000 in jersey sales while eating at the campus dining hall on a meal plan? For the women's basketball player whose likeness sold video games she never saw a dime from? The scholarship model was a gentleman's agreement between institutions, and the gentlemen were never the athletes. Courts didn't destroy that system out of spite. They destroyed it because it couldn't survive contact with basic labor law.
You Can't Unring This Bell
The $2.8 billion House v. NCAA settlement happened because the old model was legally indefensible. Now the executive order asks the NCAA to write rules that attorney Mit Winter says would "likely violate existing federal court orders." Think about that for a second. The White House is directing a private organization to adopt policies that federal judges have already said it cannot adopt. The litigation will be immediate and brutal.
I'll grant this much: the concern about non-revenue sports is real. When 90 to 95% of revenue-share money flows to football and men's basketball, swimmers and fencers and track athletes feel the squeeze. That pipeline to the Olympics matters. But the solution to an unfair distribution of new money is not to eliminate the new money. It is to distribute it better. Punishing athletes for finally getting compensated because athletic directors can't manage a budget is like blaming the new employee for the company's bad accounting.
The Ghost of Walter Byers
Walter Byers ran the NCAA for 36 years. Built the whole machine. And in retirement, he wrote a book calling the system he created "a nationwide money-laundering scheme." His words. The man who invented the term "student-athlete" specifically to avoid workers' compensation claims later admitted the phrase was a legal fiction designed to keep athletes from being treated as employees. That is the tradition Trump's order is trying to preserve.
NCAA President Charlie Baker welcomed the executive order, which tells you everything about who benefits. Baker runs an organization that lost control of its own membership, got hammered in court, and now wants federal muscle to restore authority it couldn't maintain on its own. The 5-year eligibility cap and 1-transfer limit sound reasonable in a press conference. On the ground, they mean a kid who transfers because his coach got fired or his program got cut has to sit out and lose a year of his life. The old NCAA loved rules like that. Rules that sounded principled and landed hardest on the people with the least power.
The executive order is a forcing function aimed at the SCORE Act, and maybe Congress does need to create a national framework. Fine. But that framework should codify athlete rights, not strip them. It should address Title IX compliance in a revenue-sharing world, establish minimum standards for NIL transparency, and protect the scholarship pool for non-revenue sports through dedicated funding mechanisms rather than by capping what football players can earn.
I have watched college sports for a long time. I watched kids blow out their knees generating billions for institutions that owed them nothing beyond tuition. The genie is out of the bottle because the bottle was a cage. Trying to stuff athletes back inside it with an executive order that won't survive its first court date is not reform. It is nostalgia with a signing ceremony.
