If President Trump needs more evidence that the business of college sports needs to get reformed as soon as possible, he can point to recent hijinks in California federal court.
This is where, sources close to Team Trump contend, a California magistrate judge might be given final say over the insane money grab that has upended collegiate sports. It also could make the White House’s efforts to restore sanity even more arduous, The Post has learned.
As reported, Trump has appointed the Saving College Sports Roundtable — a blue-ribbon commission led by New York Yankees president Randy Levine and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — to reform college sports’ “Name, Image and Likeness” (NIL) system.
The committee’s goal: To recommend new legislation to Congress that will end some of the nasty, often unintended side effects they believe NIL has unleashed on college sports.
A key concern is that colleges are competing for top athletes by diverting donor money from academic pursuits through so-called booster clubs, school-affiliated organizations that are allowed to raise money from these same sources as part of the athlete wooing process.
The system, as broken as it is, does have one safeguard. Under the terms of a class action that helped create the current NIL structure (aka “The House Settlement”), something called the College Sports Commission puts a $20.5 million yearly cap on money distributed to student athletes from booster organizations.
But now critics allege that plaintiffs’ lawyers have filed a motion in US District Court in Northern California seeking to craft what they say is a loophole in the rules that allows so-called “third-party NIL deals” to surpass the cap.
Those third-party deals are with sports marketing companies like PlayFly and Learfield, outfits that facilitate media-rights deals with athletes. The commission believes such groups should fall under the cap because they work with the schools (as opposed to a private company working directly with athletes).
I spoke to Levine about the matter; he tells me the roundtable is making progress, and there is also bipartisan support for legislation that reforms NIL. But he says the filing is scary since a magistrate judge might have the final say over how the business of college sports operates.
‘Further chaos’
“The latest attempt to circumvent NIL enforcement if successful will throw college sports into further chaos and accelerate colleges’ financial decline,” he told The Post. “It shows more than ever that the president and Congress’s leadership is needed now to save college sports. We cannot have magistrate judges running college sports.”
Reps for Learfield and PlayFly had no comment.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers claim that such NIL deals “are not subject to review by the College Sports Commission” because they are legitimate third parties not directly connected with the schools.
“The House settlement agreement is a negotiated deal among the NCAA, the conferences and class of athletes and approved by the court . . . [and] provides two types of payments — one that involves a cap and others from third parties,” said Jeffrey Kessler, co-executive chairman of Winston & Strawn and co-lead counsel on the House settlement case.
“If those payments come from an affiliated entity then it is subject to review but if the payment doesn’t come from a booster then it is just free-market payment and that is the deal,” Kessler added. “The College Sports Commission would like to regulate this more, but that is not the deal.”
Again, who could be against student athletes sharing in the wealth they’re creating? But here’s the downside: If a new type of school-sponsored third-party deal becomes the norm, the deals luring athletes to jump from school to school will reach stratospheric levels, magnifying the problem the roundtable was created to fix.
For context, the money from NIL deals exploded after the landmark 2021 antitrust case known as House v. NCAA, which allows student athletes to rake in huge amounts of money through sponsorships and the like that are sponsored by the schools themselves or the affiliated boosters.
Sounds good until you start peeling back the layers of insanity that have infected the system ever since.
What NIL has evolved into is something closer to a big-bucks free-for-all, with top athletes jumping from school to school in search of bigger endorsement deals.
Some college athletes — particularly in popular sports like football and basketball — have remained amateur athletes well after they were supposed to graduate so they can cash in on multimillion-dollar endorsements.
While football and basketball college stars can earn millions of dollars in endorsements, other college sports suffer, including those that support Olympic athletes.
Smaller schools are at a huge disadvantage in financing sports because they need to spend huge amounts of money they don’t really have to compete for athletic talent.
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