On Friday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order attempting to “fix” the ever-changing landscape college athletics. More specifically, it attempts to rein-in the current name, image, and likeness (NIL) landscape through changes to eligibility and transfer rules. This is, depending on who you ask, either long overdue compensation for athletes, or the complete unraveling of amateur sports.
The order tries to do a few things at once: limit athlete compensation to what it calls “fair market value,” crack down on booster-backed NIL collectives, and threatens to pull federal funding from schools that don’t follow these new guidelines, despite the guidelines being at odds with some applicable law.
As written, the order appears to be a step in the right direction to standardize college athletics across the country. In reality, it raises a much more immediate question: can a president actually do this?
Short answer: kind of? But also, not really in the way this order seems to suggest. To start, executive orders don’t create new law. They tell federal agencies how to enforce existing law. That’s an important distinction here, because nothing in this order magically rewrites antitrust law or overrides existing court decisions, such as the one that did away with restrictions on athletes entering the transfer portal. As you can imagine, that’s where things start to get shaky.
Anyone who’s taken Sports Law 1 can tell you about NCAA v. Alston. In that case, the Supreme Court held that certain NCAA limits on athlete compensation violated federal antitrust law. Despite the decision being rather narrow, it opened the door to the sort of NIL payments we’re seeing now.
So, when this executive order started talking about limits on compensation again, many eyebrows rose. At a certain point, this “guidance” looks more like trying to reimpose the same restrictions the Court already rejected, just through a different mechanism. Courts tend to not be fans of that.
There’s also a pretty straightforward separation of powers issue here. Congress is usually in change of making laws, courts interpret them, and all the president really does is enforce them. An executive order that effectively established a nationwide compensation framework, without any involvement from Congress, is going to invite challenges.
The administration’s workaround seems to be leveraging, to nobody’s surprise, federal funding. The idea is that if schools want federal money, they need to play the President’s game. However, it’s not so simple. The Supreme Court has made it clear that conditions on federal funding can’t be overly coercive or totally unrelated to the purpose of the funding itself. So, if this turns into “follow these NIL rules or lose funding,” that’s probably not going to hold up.
The order also takes aim at something that’s been driving coaches insane for the last few years: the transfer portal. It directs the NCAA to reinstate a one‑time transfer rule, and suggests a more rigid eligibility structure, including a five-year window to compete. That might sound reasonable at first glance—after all, college athletes have traditionally had five years to play four seasons—but the current landscape is way more complicated. Between redshirts, COVID eligibility extensions, and recent legal challenges to transfer restrictions, athletes have more flexibility than ever. Trying to pull that back, especially through top-down federal pressure, runs into many of the same antitrust problems as compensation limits. Restricting athlete movement starts to look a lot like restricting labor mobility, something of which courts are already skeptical. Trump is seemingly aware of this, as he acknowledged he’ll probably get sued at a roundtable discussion on this topic in March.
We can’t forget about the state law issue here, either. Right now, NIL is governed by a bunch of different state laws, many of which explicitly allow athletes to be paid. This creates inconsistencies in many areas, including athletic conferences with schools across states. Because of that, it is no surprise to see leaders from the SEC, Big 10, Big 12, and ACC sharing their support for the order online. This order is basically trying to create a national standard without Congress doing so, which is… ambitious. It also raises real federalism questions regarding whether the executive branch can sidestep states like that.
All of this is to say: the order isn’t necessarily illegal per se. Presidents have broad authority to direct agencies and set enforcement priorities. However, parts of this feel like they’re pushing right up against the edge of that authority… And maybe a little past it.
Sources:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/04/03/trump-college-sports-order
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7169907/2026/04/03/trump-executive-order-college-sports-rules/
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5530608/2024/05/30/ncaa-transfer-rules-banned-permanently/
Mary Starr is a 3L at the University at Buffalo School of Law with a concentration is sports law. Hockey is her favorite sport, and she's especially interested in writing about player safety and labor issues. In law school, Mary is involved with the Buffalo Sports and Entertainment Law Society, Phi Alpha Delta, OutLaw, the Jewish Law Students Association, Buffalo Human Rights Law Review, the Peer-to-Peer Mentorship Program, and she is a student ambassador. Outside of school, Mary can be found playing hockey, rock climbing, or expressing her undying love for the Boston Bruins.
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