The co-chair of President Donald Trump’s incoming college sports commission apparently isn’t certain it’s necessary.
Last week, reports surfaced suggesting that President Trump had agreed to create the body, co-chaired by former Alabama coach Nick Saban.
But the details of the commission are murky, even to Saban—who doesn’t appear to be sold on the idea himself. “I don’t know a lot about the commission, first of all,” he said Wednesday on The Paul Finebaum Show. “Secondly, I’m not sure we really need a commission.”
Saban isn’t alone. Federal lawmakers were unaware of the news of the commission before it was reported in the media, sources in and around Capitol Hill told Front Office Sports last week. There was no formal announcement to lawmakers about it. That isn’t necessarily rare for the Trump Administration, a lobbyist said, but it is notable given multiple federal lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have been working on legislation for college sports issues for several years.
It’s unclear which issues the commission would address, or who would be on it besides Saban and Texas Tech board of regents chairman Cody Campbell, who is also on the board of the school’s NIL (name, image, and likeness) collective, The Matador Club.
Saban did, however, elaborate on some of the reforms he hopes to see in the sport—most of which are in line with the NCAA’s wish list for federal intervention. Saban said there should be one uniform federal law to govern NIL, rather than all the current disparate state laws. He said players shouldn’t be employees. He said he supports NIL in general and players getting paid, but he said, “I don’t think pay-for-play is necessarily what we want,” gesturing at NIL collectives using deals as recruiting inducements.
“I think a lot of people know exactly what the issues are in college football and exactly what we need to do to fix ’em,” he said. The issue: getting the requisite parties together to actually get something done—which he says could require Congress.
