Can Trump Put NIL Back in the Tube? His New College Sports Plan Explained

Full credit to Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports for the original reporting and framing here. His article on President Trump’s White House college sports roundtable did a great job capturing both the surreal tone of the event and the deeper policy tension underneath it.

If you needed one moment to capture just how disconnected some of the people in power still are from the reality of modern college athletics, it might be this one: the President of the United States looking around a room full of commissioners, athletic directors, billionaires, and media executives and saying, essentially, why can’t we just go back to the old system?

That was the headline takeaway from Ross Dellenger’s reporting on the White House roundtable, where President Trump reportedly said, “I’d like to go exactly back to what we had and ram it through a court.” That is a remarkable sentence, both because of what it reveals and because of what it ignores.

The toothpaste analogy Dellenger used is the right one. Yes, maybe you can physically jam the toothpaste back into the tube if you cut the bottom open, force it in, and staple it shut. But by the time you’ve done that, the tube is mangled and the thing no longer really works. That is exactly where college sports is right now. The old system is gone. Not “under pressure.” Not “slipping away.” Gone. And yet, here we are, still hearing powerful people talk like the real issue is not that the old model was legally broken, morally strained, and economically inconsistent, but that courts had the audacity to notice.

This is not a serious path forward

The most striking part of Dellenger’s piece was not just that Trump wants to return to a pre-NIL world. It was that he seems to want to do so by sheer force of will, through another executive order, with the express hope that the next legal challenge lands in front of more favorable judges.

That is not a policy framework. That is not reform. That is a wish to reverse time and then bully the legal system into agreeing with it.

The problem with that approach is simple: the old system didn’t collapse because people got soft. It collapsed because it kept losing in court. Again and again. The NCAA kept trying to argue that it could limit athlete earning power while everyone else in the system got rich, and judges kept rejecting that logic. Not just one judge, not just one court, but a long chain of legal decisions, culminating most notably in the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in NCAA v. Alston. You do not stumble into a 9-0 loss by accident. You get there because the underlying logic of your system is rotten. So when leaders talk about “going back,” what they are really saying is that they want to revive a model that was built on suppressing athlete compensation while everyone else cashed in. That may be nostalgic for some people, but it is not legally durable and it is certainly not equitable.

The room told its own story

Another thing Dellenger’s reporting highlighted, and this matters, is who was in the room and who was not. There were commissioners. Athletic directors. Politicians. Business leaders. Boosters. Former coaches. There were people talking about saving college sports. There were people lamenting lawsuits and budget deficits and resource strain. There were people warning that football is swallowing the ecosystem whole.

What there were not, notably, were current athletes.

That absence matters because every conversation about “saving” college sports that excludes the people actually playing the games is eventually going to run into the same wall. College sports is not unstable because athletes suddenly became too powerful. It is unstable because the people in charge spent years pretending athletes did not need a meaningful seat at the table. Rep. Lori Trahan apparently raised concerns about exactly that, according to Dellenger’s reporting, and good for her. Because you cannot keep building governance structures around athletes while excluding athletes from the foundational conversation. That is how college sports got here in the first place.

The real irony is that actual compromise may be happening elsewhere

What makes this whole White House spectacle even more striking is that, while the room was busy fantasizing about undoing the modern era, actual compromise was reportedly happening a mile away on Capitol Hill. Dellenger notes that Senators Maria Cantwell and Eric Schmitt had reached a bipartisan agreement on legislation to amend the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which would allow college conferences to potentially consolidate and sell media rights together. That is not a small thing. That is one of the most significant and potentially transformative ideas in the college sports business right now. Whether you love that concept or hate it, it is at least rooted in the reality of today’s marketplace. It accepts that the economic system has changed and tries to address it with new tools. That is a fundamentally different mindset than saying, essentially, “Let’s just pretend 2018 never happened.” This contrast is important. One conversation is grounded in the world as it is. The other is grounded in a fantasy of the world as some people wish it still were.

Everyone wants order, but not everyone wants honesty

To be fair, some of the people in that White House room are not wrong about the current instability. Pete Bevacqua’s warning that football is becoming a “runaway financial train” gobbling up resources is not absurd. Jim Phillips saying that lawsuits are killing the industry reflects a very real level of frustration. Brett Yormark urging urgency makes sense. But the question is not whether the current system is strained. It obviously is. The question is whether the people trying to “fix” it are willing to admit why it broke.

And too often, the answer seems to be no.

College sports did not become unstable because athletes gained too much freedom too quickly. It became unstable because the previous model relied on denying economic reality for far too long. Once that denial started to crack, all the unresolved contradictions came flooding out at once. Now everyone is looking for structure. Everyone is looking for guardrails. Everyone is looking for legal protection. But some still want those things without fully accepting that athletes are economic participants in the system, not just students who happen to wear uniforms on Saturdays. That is the part they still seem unwilling to say plainly.

There is no going back, only choosing what comes next

The big takeaway from Dellenger’s article, at least for me, is that college sports remains stuck between two instincts. One instinct is to deal honestly with the world as it exists now, even if that means collective bargaining, athlete representation, revenue restructuring, and uncomfortable changes to how power is distributed. The other instinct is to keep looking over the shoulder at a version of college sports that no longer exists and trying to recreate it through executive orders, courtroom luck, and nostalgia.

Only one of those instincts has a chance to work.

The toothpaste is out. Everyone knows it. Everyone in that room knew it, too, whether they wanted to admit it or not. The only real question now is whether the people with power are willing to build something new, or whether they are going to keep cutting open the tube and pretending that counts as repair. Because at some point, the effort to go backward becomes more destructive than the mess you were trying to clean up in the first place.