Welcome to Sports at Large. I’m Milton Kent.
One of former President Ronald Reagan’s favorite asides was that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are I’m from the government and I’m here to help.
As the academic year comes to an end, we may have a new disturbing phrase, shorter, but no less scary: Donald Trump wants to save college sports.
Unless you’ve been under a rock, you know that intercollegiate athletics in their current day form more closely approximates the cantina bar scene from Star Wars than what we’re used to.
Anything goes in college sports nowadays. Soon, every college athlete will be eligible to be compensated for their labor. A California-based federal judge is waiting to approve the details of a lawsuit, but when that’s done, it’s a brave new world.
But for all that novelty, there are things that have not changed: namely the desire of those who run intercollegiate athletics to wring every dollar possible from the process.
For example, NCAA President Charlie Baker mused last week that it’s a good time to expand the Division I basketball tournament field from 68 teams to 72 or 76.
To be clear, it’s not as if that there are four to eight deserving teams that aren’t getting into the tournament each year. It’s just that more schools means more money.
And in football, there’s talk of taking the newly minted 12-team playoff to 16 teams, again, not out of need for more opportunities for deserving teams, but for the cash.
To make all this happen, to get all that lucre for themselves and to keep it away from the people who make it possible, namely the athletes, the NCAA and the big conferences have been lobbying Congress for antitrust legislation.
Those laws would permit the NCAA and the colleges to bypass state statutes regarding matters like compensation of athletes, while keeping said athletes as amateurs, rather than employees, so the athletes wouldn’t qualify for benefits.
With that antitrust protection, the NCAA wouldn’t have to collectively bargain with the athletes and could make its own rules of governance, absent federal intrusion.
Such legislation would face tough sledding in the narrowly divided House and almost certainly wouldn’t survive a filibuster in the Senate.
And that leads us to the Oval Office, where some are calling for Trump to issue one of his now famous sweeping executive orders to take the colleges off the hook. The problem is that such an order would almost certainly be challenged in court, and probably successfully.
The answer, then, might be an order that creates a commission that would make recommendations to Trump and to Congress.
That actually might not be such a bad idea, provided the panel isn’t overloaded with college presidents, athletic directors and coaches, the very people who caused this mess.
Oh, and speaking of words to avoid in this process, here are six more, Quote We’re putting Elon Musk in charge unquote. Now, that’s a joke that isn’t funny.
And that’s how I see it for this week. You can reach us via email with your questions and comments at Sports at Large at gmail.com. And follow me on BlueSky, Threads and X at Sports at Large.
Until next week, for all of us here and for producer Lisa Morgan, I’m Milton Kent. Thanks for listening and enjoy the games.