Nick Saban retired from college football rather than coach through one more season of the NIL chaos.
Now he sat two seats from the President of the United States, watching Trump call Congress a bunch of lunatics to their faces.
What came out of that White House room last Friday will reshape college sports forever – if Trump's executive order survives the courts.
The Seven-Year Freshman Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About
Donald Trump opened the Saving College Sports Roundtable in the East Room on March 6 with a line nobody in the media bothered to highlight.
"We have a seven-year freshman."
Seventeen-year-old quarterbacks are signing $12 million NIL deals before they've taken a college snap.
Players are staying in college because the money beats what the NFL pays.
SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey told the room he has a basketball player in his league on his sixth campus.
This is what Democrats and activist judges created when they blew up the entire structure of college athletics with a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling in 2021 – and then watched it unravel for five years without lifting a finger.
Trump called the spending losses at successful schools "astounding."
He's right.
Texas is spending $40 million on its football roster this year alone.
Schools that can't compete are cutting sports – swimming, golf, wrestling, softball – programs that built Olympic pipelines and gave thousands of kids a college education.
Over 4,500 college football players entered the transfer portal in January alone – between a quarter and a third of all scholarship athletes chasing better money somewhere else.
What Trump Did When Congress Tried to Slow Him Down
The roundtable was supposed to build momentum for the SCORE Act – the Republican-backed bill that would give the NCAA an antitrust exemption, create national NIL standards, and keep athletes from being classified as employees.
House Speaker Mike Johnson told the room the votes are there in the House.
Ted Cruz said they need 60 Senate votes – and zero Democrats are ready to cross the aisle.
Trump heard that and called them lunatics.
"You're not going to get it through the Senate, and you're probably not going to get anything through the House because you have a bunch of lunatics," Trump said.
Then he promised a comprehensive executive order within one week – and told the room to brace for a lawsuit.
"We will get sued," Trump said. "That's the only thing I know for sure."
Urban Meyer told the room that NIL collectives are simply cheating.
"If the collective goes away, college sports gets better immediately," Meyer said.
Nick Saban put the player development problem in plain terms: kids are picking schools the way free agents pick contracts, chasing the biggest offer instead of the best program.
Trump cornered him on it at the roundtable, noting that Saban saw the NIL era coming and got out before coaching through one season of it.
Saban didn't deny it.
Democrats Blocked the Fix and Still Had the Nerve to Show Up
Here is the part the media won't tell you.
The SCORE Act was supposed to come to a House vote in December.
Democrats blocked it.
Three Republicans joined them – Byron Donalds, Scott Perry, and Chip Roy – but the bill died primarily because Democrats refused to support any conservative-led solution.
Then Democrat Rep. Lori Trahan of Massachusetts showed up at Trump's roundtable and complained that no student athletes were invited.
She also claimed the SCORE Act "hurts" women's sports.
This is the same party that blocked NIL reform for six years while activist judges shredded every standard college athletics ever had.
The people who actually run college athletics agree: the system is broken beyond repair without federal intervention.
What Trump's Executive Order Actually Means
Trump's July 2025 executive order was a test run.
https://twitter.com/johnnymaga/status/2030047913812902290?s=20
It took aim at pay-to-play arrangements but left the broader NIL market untouched and created no national standards.
What's coming this week will be more comprehensive.
Based on what came out of the roundtable, expect the order to target transfer portal limits – capping athletes to five playing years with one transfer.
Expect it to go after NIL collectives directly, the donor slush funds Meyer called cheating.
Expect it to protect women's sports and Olympic programs from getting gutted to fund football and basketball bidding wars.
The $2.8 billion House v. NCAA settlement already forces schools to pay athletes up to $20.5 million per year – a number growing four percent annually.
Schools cannot sustain that without cutting everything else.
That is the financial gun pointed at every wrestling team, every swimming program, every track and field athlete who relied on revenue sports to fund their scholarship.
Trump sees it.
Saban sees it.
Congress could have fixed this years ago and chose not to.
Now the President is going to try to fix it by executive order and let the courts sort it out.
That's not ideal.
But it's better than five more years of doing nothing while college sports collapses one women's program at a time.
_________________________________________________________________________
Sources:
- Fox News Staff, "Trump Sets Sights on NIL Regulation, SCORE Act at College Sports Roundtable, Teases Another Executive Order," Fox News, March 6, 2026.
- Nick Schultz, "President Donald Trump Announces Plans to Sign New Executive Order on College Sports," Yahoo Sports, March 6, 2026.
- "Donald Trump College Sports Roundtable Takeaways," Yahoo Sports, March 6, 2026.
- "Nick Saban Speaks During College Sports Roundtable," Tide 100.9, March 6, 2026.
- "Trump Hosts College Sports Roundtable, Promises Executive Order," LifeZette, March 7, 2026.
