NCAA chief reacts to Trump's college sports commission

NCAA chief Charlie Baker says he is open to the idea of President Donald Trump creating a national college sports commission.

“I think the fact that there’s an interest on the executive side on this, I think it speaks to the fact that everybody is paying a lot of attention right now to what’s going on in college sports,” Baker said at the ACC spring meetings, according to ESPN.

He added: “I’m up for anything that can help us get somewhere.”

Last week, it was reported that President Trump was considering the creation of a federal commission to look into the state of college sports, and that former Alabama head coach Nick Saban was being floated as a potential co-chair of the body.

The group is projected to include collegiate sports “stakeholders”, businessmen with “deep” connections to college football, and “perhaps, even a former coach and administrator,” per the report.

If it goes ahead, the commission would investigate the general college sports landscape, including transfer portal usage, booster payments to players, athletes’ employment status, and even the composition of conferences and their media contracts.

Commissioners from the various conferences in the NCAA have already appealed to the U.S. Congress to intervene and help the NCAA regulate its volatile name, image, and likeness rules and the transfer portal system.

“We need help from Congress,” Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark bluntly told Fox News.

“From where I sit today, federal preemption, having a standardized platform that oversees and governs NIL is critically important. Today, 34 states see it very differently, and it’s relatively unruly.”

News of President Trump’s idea to create the commission comes as the NCAA awaits the final settlement in the historic House vs. NCAA case that will allow schools to directly share revenue with student-athletes for the first time in history.

And it follows a report that President Trump asked aides to draft language on a prospective executive order looking into NIL payments for players after a meeting with Saban.

President Trump’s apparent intervention has not been met with complete praise, however.

The plan was met with anger from Steve Berman, one of the attorneys involved in the pending House vs. NCAA case.

“Coach Saban and Trump’s eleventh-hour talks of executive orders and other meddling are just more unneeded self-involvement,” Berman said in a statement.

He added: “College athletes are spearheading historic changes and benefiting massively from NIL deals. They don’t need this unmerited interference from a coach only seeking to protect the system that made him tens of millions.”

(ESPN)

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