President's Executive Order on College Athletics Starts with Eligibility and Transfers
STILLWATER – It took longer than the week that was promised after President Donald Trump hosted conference commissioners, university presidents, athletic directors, and former college coaches, even professional sports commissioners and executives for a panel discussion on the future of major college athletics. The President told the group on Friday, March 6 before they adjourned that he would issue an Executive Order designed to fix the problems with college athletics. He stated that America needs the tradition of collegiate athletics. Almost a month to the day on Friday, April 3, the President signed an Executive Order that call for changes to major college athletics.
President Trump’s Executive Order started with a limit on how long athletes can play college sports and how often they can transfer between schools.
The Order directs the NCAA to create rules that mandate college athletes can play for "no more than a five-year period" and allows them to transfer schools only once before they graduate without having to sit out a season. The Order stipulates the rule changes to go into effect Aug. 1. A school that plays an athlete who doesn't meet these new limits could risk losing its federal funding.
These no nonsense ideas and rules that would help calm the massive transferring and the over paying from a reasonable value standpoint of college athletes, particularly in the premier sports of football, men’s basketball, and in some cases, women’s basketball. President Trump cited the need to protect non revenue or Olympic sports that with the increased costs of the major sports could be minimized or even eliminated.
Many people involved in and around college athletics have supported the five-year eligibility clock with no redshirt. The transfer rule would severely curb the tampering and the offering of over valued payments to athletes derived from the unlimited movement from school to school. It would also get college athletics back to the business of helping the participants to get their education. That process is much harder to do bouncing from university to university.
Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark, who was in attendance along with the other three Power Four conference commisioners at the White House on March 6 issued a comment on the Excutive Order supporting the contents and what impact they would have. Yormark pledged to continue working with the President on permanent solutions.
Pokes Report also did a cursory inquiry with Oklahoma State University athletics. Athletics director Chad Weiberg is in Indianapolis as part of his duties on the NCAA Basketball Tournament Selection Committee. There is really no other adminitrative leader that we would value their opinion on the subject except for selected head coaches and they aren’t going to comment ahead of the athletic director.
In what I personally consider to be a major part of stemming the proliferation of unqualified and unscrupulous individuals posing and acting as agents for the college athletes, the Executive Order called for rules and policies to push out the street agents that have no business being involved in the process.
The order also states that the NCAA should update its rules to create a national registry for player agents and create policies that prevent schools from cutting scholarships or other opportunities for women's and Olympic sports in order to pay their athletes.
