Trump targets NIL pay in college sports as athletes cash in: Telander

How NIL and the transfer portal are changing college sports | ChicagoLIVE

Charlie Minn shares the impact of name, image and likeness deals and the transfer portal on college athletics as the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament approaches.

CHICAGO - Do you like money?

If you say no, great; I hope your monastery feeds you well and your sack shirt holds up.

But if you find money to be, well, valuable, then you should understand what’s going on in elite college sport these days. Simply: Young men who are athletically gifted want to be paid for their performances in front of huge university crowds.

And after a hundred or so years of doing it for free, they are getting paid.

What those athletes do on the field or court might look like fun. But it’s work they are doing. And in the U.S., we get paid for work. It’s called capitalism. It’s our economic system, and it’s fed by market forces. Free college classes and rooming and books are nice when given to you. But all can be bought with money.

So when Michigan quarterback Bryce Underwood made about $3 million last year for leading the Wolverines on the field — whether he learned anything in the Ann Arbor classrooms or not — he was paid for his gridiron services, and he has the capital to purchase an education any time he wants, for the rest of his life.

Underwood mostly struggled in 2025, but such is the money bargain. It seemed a fair deal in our capitalistic system. In fact, Michigan stole Underwood from his LSU commitment. How? With money.

For decades, colleges held onto the mantra that athletes ages 18-to-23 were too young to be given cash money. Dear God, think what the child might do with it! Never mind that 18-year-old’s can vote and go to war; 21-year-olds can drink, gamble, purchase handguns, and Justin Bieber started making millions at 14.

U.S. President Donald Trump holds up a football presented to him during a presentation ceremony for the Commander-in-Chief Trophy to the Navy Midshipmen football team in the East Room of the White House April 15, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Win McNamee/Getty Images / Getty Images)

Coaches have always been able to make a fortune. Why? Because they’re adults. And the market and laws say they can. Hee-ya.

But now, old-school old boys and Congress are enraged by the money-driven chaos in college sport. They are upset about athletes becoming employees of their schools, their name, image and likeness (NIL) revenue skyrocketing, and male college football and basketball players jumping from school to school like hopped-up prairie dogs. (Yes, other sports and female athletes are in on this, too. But men’s football and basketball players are the tip of the spear.)

It’s so bad, that President Donald Trump says that he alone must "fix" the "mess" that is college sports with an immediate executive order. Otherwise, "college sports will be destroyed. Women’s sports will be destroyed." Of course, this is not so.

It’s just White House hyperbole. With professionalism at full tilt last year, college football was more popular than ever. Yes, rules are needed. But reasonable, non-governmental oversight with contracts, IRS support, a possible players’ union, collective bargaining, salary caps and the like, can do the trick.

Don’t forget, if there is chaos now, it’s temporary and 100 percent the NCAA’s doing.

The NCAA is comprised of all its member schools—over 1,000, counting big and little ones-- and for years, forever, actually, all those big and little college presidents, conference commissioners, athletic directors, boosters, and NCAA brass have liked it the way it was. That is: We get paid; those silly little athletes don’t.

They still want it that way. As does Trump. At his convocation of old coaches and gray-haired sycophants on Friday, he lamented, "Is there any way we could go back to the old system, which I thought was fantastic?"

(L-R) Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks as New York Yankees President Randy Levine, U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) and U.S. President Donald Trump look on during a roundtable discussion on college sports in the East Room of the White Ho (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images / Getty Images)

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Of course he did. He’s a watcher, a benefiter, not an athlete. Not a worker. You want an extreme comparison? Mississippi cotton barons really loved their old slavery system, too.

Naturally, there were no athletes at Trump’s high-priest roundtable. But NCAA president Charlie Baker was there, as were old Alabama coach Nick Saban and old Ohio State coach Urban Meyer, New York Yankees president Randy Levine (what?) and old pals Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and House Speaker Mike Johnson. D-1 running backs? Safeties? Point guards? Nope.

Remember this too: The college sports money cavalcade was legislated into being by law. Trump seemed baffled to find this out. The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in 2021 that enforcing "amateurism" in elite sport was illegal. Nine to nothing. From a court that agrees on almost nothing. Summed up, conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, "Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair market rate."

Trump and pals want to extremely limit what players can get paid.

Saban and Meyer want it that way because that’s how it was when they were kings, winning titles, using clout to get their star players. Morality wasn’t a factor. Meyer had over 30 players arrested while he was building a national champion at the University of Florida from 2005-2010. That included All-American tight end Aaron Hernandez, who would go on to be convicted of first-degree murder.

In a nutshell: the courts will once again make mincemeat of these rulers’ unfair dreams. Just watch.

"It’s crazy," said Trump. "Young people are being signed, 17-year-old quarterbacks for $12 million, $13 million, $14 million." Is that crazier than a president making hundreds of millions of dollars—billions, in fact-- off crypto, licensing, real estate, while in office? What’s good for the goose should be fine for the gander.

Yes, it’s true, the old college sports system was great. So orderly and easy for the viewer. It was just unfair, oppressive, manipulative, and morally bankrupt.

Sorry about that, old-timers.

Dig deeper:

Want more? Read some of Rick Telander’s recent columns for Fox 32:

• Bulls' latest rebuild echoes the Jordan-Krause dynasty: Telander
• The NFL Combine begins with Bears' to-do list and shopping list set | Telander
• Vonn crashes out, Malinin stumbles as Olympic dreams unravel in Milan | Telander
• Super Bowl LX reminds us football's biggest game is bigger than the game itself | Telander
• The ‘train wreck’ of college sports is actually a cash machine: Telander