The people cheering loudest for Trump’s April 3rd executive order on college sports are the exact same people who spent fifty years making sure college athletes couldn’t get paid, couldn’t transfer freely, and couldn’t organize. The NCAA and its president Charlie Baker lined up behind it — Baker called it “a significant step forward.” The White House press release practically wrote itself. None of the people who drafted the order thought to consult an actual athlete.
That tells you everything.
The EO — formally titled “Urgent National Action to Save College Sports” — urges the NCAA to cap eligibility at a five-year window, limit athletes to one transfer with immediate eligibility during that window, and restrict NIL payments to market value. It threatens schools with suspended federal funding if they don’t comply. Sounds decisive. The problem, as Burr & Forman attorney William Lawrence pointed out, is that the thing is “primarily symbolic rather than consequential.” The operative language throughout is “should,” not “shall.” There are no penalties attached to NCAA non-compliance. The enforcement threat runs to schools — not to the governing body that actually sets the rules.
So the NCAA gets a political ally in the White House, a document it can wave at Congress to push the SCORE Act, and zero actual legal obligation to do anything. Baker was careful to frame it this way: the EO is “leverage for Congressional legislation,” not a direct mandate. He knows exactly what he has.
What he has is a wish list dressed as governance.
The transfer piece is where this gets genuinely ugly. Athletes only just won meaningful transfer freedom — won it through litigation, through the House v. NCAA settlement that delivered $2.8 billion in damages and $20.5 million per school per year in direct revenue-sharing. Courts struck down the old transfer and eligibility restrictions on antitrust grounds. Now the EO is asking the NCAA to reinstate rules that federal judges already ruled illegal. As ESPN’s reporting on the executive order notes, legal experts predict athletes will challenge the EO — because some plaintiffs have already successfully challenged the very restrictions the order wants restored. The president cannot unilaterally rewrite the Sherman Act. The executive branch doesn’t work that way.
There’s also the matter of who this order actually covers. The EO applies to approximately 68 institutions with $20 million or more in athletics revenue — Power Four programs. AAC schools, the programs your average aacfever.com reader actually follows, fall below that threshold. The revenue-sharing requirements in the order don’t reach your programs. The transfer restrictions, once codified by a compliant NCAA, absolutely will. AAC athletes get the labor suppression without the compensation floor. That’s the deal. The Power Four built the rules, kept the money, and sent the restraints downstream.
Athletes.org, one of the few organizations that actually represents college athletes rather than their employers, responded with anger — athlete advocates argued the order rolls back hard-won rights and treats athletes as the problem when the system is. Athletes aren’t the problem, they argued. The system is. And the only solution that’s ever actually worked — collective bargaining, a structure athletes have a hand in shaping — is precisely what this order exists to prevent. The SCORE Act that Baker wants Congress to pass — positioned for a House floor vote as of 2025, though its current status is unconfirmed — would bar athlete employment entirely and hand the NCAA an antitrust exemption it has lobbied for through six years of failed congressional attempts.
Six years of lobbying Congress didn’t work. So they got the executive branch to do it instead — this is already Trump’s second college sports EO, following the July 24, 2025 order, and the pattern is clear.
The right way to think about this isn’t as a political story — it’s a labor story. Management had a bad decade in court. Workers won transfers, won revenue-sharing, won the right to get paid for their name and likeness. So management found a new forum, one without antitrust scrutiny, without collective bargaining rights, without any of the legal architecture workers normally use to fight back. They found the White House.
Worth sitting with: what does it mean that the federal government intervened in a labor dispute — and chose the side with the money, the lawyers, the lobbyists, and the fifty-year track record of telling athletes to shut up and be grateful?
