President Donald Trump is pushing to establish name, image and likeness standards across college athletics and plans to sign an executive order to ensure changes are made. College sports leaders, including SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and billionaire Texas Tech booster Cody Campbell, are some of the leading voices behind NIL change, but didn’t expect the announcement this week.
Campbell has spoken at length with Trump this summer about ways to stabilize the rapidly changing landscape of college sports. Campbell told USA Today he “hadn’t heard anything” about Trump’s order, but was not caught off guard by the news.
And while the White House has halted plans for a college sports commission for now, Trump is moving forward after members of the U.S. House of Representatives introduced the SCORE Act (Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements) aiming to “protect the name, image, and likeness rights of student-athletes to promote fair compensation with respect to intercollegiate athletics, and for other purposes.”Â
The bill would superse the current patchwork of state laws that provide guidance on player compensation and create federal standards for NIL.
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said this week there’s still much to sort out concerning Trump’s plan.
“It’s not a secret, I had a chance to visit with the President, along with Pete Bevacqua, the athletics director at Notre Dame,” Sankey told ESPN Wednesday. “We met and played golf at Bedminster, and his interest is real. My takeaway: he wants to be supportive of college athletics, make sure that it’s sustainable, the Olympic program and the Olympic development.
“Work that’s done on college campuses was on his mind. The support of women’s athletics was on his mind, but having some kind of real boundaries, and we’ve been in active conversations. And I talked to members of Congress yesterday as they look at a bill in the House of Representatives, went through a subcommittee markup, this is all the gobbledygook. I think those congressional activities are still a real priority for us.”
Sankey said he didn’t have “inside reports” of what led to news of Trump’s plan for an executive order relating to NIL standards.
College football coaches and leaders have voiced strong opinions on NIL and revenue sharing regulation. South Carolina’s Shane Beamer testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade of the Committee on Energy and Commerce earlier this year while former Alabama coach Nick Saban has called for change on several occasions.
