Latest news with #CodyCampbell
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
White House pauses plans for President Trump's commission on college sports as Congressional leaders discuss legislation
The White House has decided to wait before making an official foray into college sports. Plans for a presidential commission on college sports co-led by former Alabama head coach Nick Saban have been paused, Yahoo Sports' Ross Dellenger reported Thursday. The move is possibly rooted in the commission's potential impact on current Senate negotiations over legislation in the same sphere. Advertisement It's unclear how long the pause will last, but it will give a group of five senators, including Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) more time to reach an agreement on legislation for a sport whose leaders have been begging for federal intervention in recent years. Cruz said earlier this month the talks were a work in progress, via The Athletic: 'That is actively moving forward,' Cruz said on May 6. 'We are negotiating. I think we are close to having a bipartisan product that can move. … I think college athletics is in crisis, and Congress has an obligation to step in and solve this problem. Planning for the commission had reached the point that President Donald Trump and Texas businessman Cody Campbell, the other potential co-leader of the commission had started to pool recommendations for membership and send out invitations to stakeholders. The commission was also paused amid private concerns from Big Ten and SEC officials over its concepts and after Saban, the man tasked to lead the group alongside Campbell, outright questioned the necessity of its existence. "I don't know a lot about the commission first of all, secondly, I'm not sure we really need a commission,' Saban said on 'The Paul Finebaum Show' on Wednesday. 'I think that a lot of people know exactly what the issues are in college football and exactly what we need to do to fix them. I think the key to the drill is getting people together so we can move it forward. I'm not opposed to players making money, I don't want anybody to think that. I just think the system — the way it's going right now it's not sustainable and probably not in the best interests of the student-athletes across the board or the game itself.' Advertisement Saban has emerged as a prominent voice in the debate over how to rework college sports after several years of structural and financial upheaval, which has seen student-athletes gain the right to receive NIL compensation, transfer at will and, if the House settlement finally goes through, get directly paid by schools. The court system, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, has taken a dim view of the NCAA's legal authority to limit its athletes' rights. Saban, who has railed against the NIL system for years, met with Trump earlier this month about the matter. Trump was later reported to be considering an executive order addressing NIL payments, though a law passed by Congress would likely be far more welcomed by the NCAA and its leaders considering the executive branch's lack of oversight over college sports.
New York Times
22-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
White House pausing plans for presidential commission on college sports: Source
By Justin Williams, Sam Khan Jr. and Chris Vannini Plans for a presidential commission exploring issues in college sports have been paused, a source familiar with the plans confirmed to The Athletic on Thursday. The commission will be paused indefinitely as members of Congress continue to pursue legislation in hopes of addressing major issues facing college sports, the source said. There is no definitive timetable for when the commission could resume, but planning and coordinating could continue in the interim. Yahoo Sports was the first to report that the commission would be paused. Advertisement Former Alabama coach Nick Saban and Texas Tech board of regents chair Cody Campbell were the expected co-chairs of the commission and met in person last week and were said to be aligned on key issues. A presidential commission would typically dig into various aspects of an issue or enterprise and deliver a report suggesting possible solutions that could involve executive and legislative action. But Saban has publicly downplayed the need for a commission in recent public statements. During a May 14 appearance on 'The Paul Finebaum Show,' Saban simultaneously downplayed the commission's necessity while advocating for solutions from a group of people. 'Well, first of all, I don't know a lot about the commission. Secondly, I'm not sure we really need a commission,' Saban said on the show. 'I think a lot of people know exactly what the issues are in college football and exactly what we need to do to fix them. I think the key to the drill is getting people together so that we can move it forward.' Saban discussed possibly constructing a group that addresses the ongoing legal, financial and competitive issues college sports have struggled to navigate in this era of name, image and likeness (NIL) compensation and the transfer portal. 'I think there are a lot of people out there that know how to fix it,' Saban said. 'I just think we have to push it forward and get everybody together, and some of it may need to be done on the federal level.' News of the possible commission broke on May 7, shortly after President Donald J. Trump spoke at Alabama's commencement and visited with Saban personally afterward. College sports leaders have been lobbying Congress for several years for a bill that would support the NCAA and conferences as they try to regain control of regulating college athletics issues, including NIL compensation, transfer portal movement and possibly obtaining an antitrust exemption. Advertisement Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has been leading a bipartisan group, including Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who is working on a bill that could provide some relief to the NCAA and conferences. In early May, Cruz expressed optimism about the possible legislation, while acknowledging the multiple steps that remain in the process. 'That is actively moving forward,' Cruz said on May 6. 'We are negotiating. I think we are close to having a bipartisan product that can move. … I think college athletics is in crisis, and Congress has an obligation to step in and solve this problem. 'That is a major priority for me and for this committee. We have been spending hundreds of hours working, trying to get bipartisan agreement.'
New York Times
13-05-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
Bret Bielema's grocery recruiting advice, plus CFB needs Dan Campbell
Until Saturday Newsletter 🏈 | This is The Athletic's college football newsletter. Sign up here to receive Until Saturday directly in your inbox. Today in college football news, if you like pop music — well heck, everybody likes pop music — you might really like the new Lights album. Having spent the first decade of my working life at Publix, the Southeastern grocery chain, I of course locked on to this as my favorite detail from Scott Dochterman's new story on dark-horse Illinois: 'On recruiting trips as an assistant at Wisconsin, Bret Bielema learned from Barry Alvarez to watch offensive linemen move while stacking groceries to see whether they could block for the Badgers.' Valid. Wise. Mandatory. Couldn't possibly agree more. Alvarez knows ball. Let's go to the tape. If I'm a recruiting staffer for a Power 4 football program, and for some reason I am sent on a grocery run with a prospective student-athlete, there are several factors to which I'm going to pay punishingly close attention. (For today, let's just put these athletes through the grocery-bagging drill. Stocking shelves is for those who have earned helmet stripes.) Thank you for listening. Go read Scott's story on Illinois. 💰 Would a billionaire booster and an eight-figure coach be the two best choices to create a fair college sports system? Skeptical! Still, there are some agreeable stances in a review of key quotes by reported presidential commission co-chairs Cody Campbell of Texas Tech and Nick Saban. 9️⃣ Everything a nine-game SEC schedule would mean, including a refresher on each team's three potential annual rivals. 📈 The newly huge FBS schedule has paved the way for FCS to soon expand to 12 regular-season games, in addition to its own even huger playoff. 🍗 Texas A&M-Texas will be on Black Friday this year, even though Thanksgiving is their far more traditional date — 70 times! They're now avoiding the NFL's chokehold on the bigger holiday. (Well, the NFL's started taking over Black Friday too, so just keep shrinking out of its way, I guess.) 🍱 'How studying sushi chefs helped Vanderbilt land a top-100 recruit.' Say no more. 🏀 'Of the thousands of college basketball players who entered the transfer portal this spring, at least 137 of them stand out because of one thing they're all lacking: remaining college eligibility.' I love it. Married to the game. Hustle don't quit. Make them say no. (There's actually way more to the story than mere stubbornness or wishful thinking.) 🥎 Diamond time: 🎭 The Real World: Chapel Hill: What's Urban Meyer been up to lately, other than wearing sunglasses on Fox's Saturday pregame show? This past weekend in Columbus, he was one of several major Buckeye-adjacent names — along with Kirk Herbstreit and current stars Caleb Downs and Jeremiath Smith — to appear at a Life Surge event, a kind of Give Us Money To Somehow Make Yourself Better At Real Estate thing that is also heavily infused with televangelist-style Christian theming and branding. At one point during the event, Meyer told a story about being asked by Ohio State's 'school attorney' to stop having Bible classes and church services in some sort of Buckeye capacity. Meyer said he responded to Ohio State's separation-of-church-and-state concerns like this: 'I said, 'Well, we're gonna do it.' … 'I'm really busy. We're doing it.' … '(Athletic director Gene Smith), we're doing this, and if not, you gotta let me go.' … So, the compromise: We had to call it 'reflection.'' Until the past couple years, I would not have guessed the hyper-competitive Meyer had ever threatened to quit the most prominent job in college football because of a dispute about a Bible study. I knew he was named after a pope, sure, and being friends with Tim Tebow surely imbues one with a buff to religiosity. But going full Bill McCartney? Surprising. Advertisement There's another surprise in Meyer's statement during the event that he prefers college football over the NFL because CFB coaches can selectively recruit pious players. Not to say someone couldn't change over time, but how would we square that claim with the non-stop chaos units that were Meyer's late-2000s Florida Gators teams? (Along with his own evocative year in Jacksonville.) Just interesting to watch. I understand being in the NFL is something almost no coach would willingly give up before (or sometimes after) retirement age. It's the peak of the profession, the highest level of competition and all that stuff. I also know life is long and has many unforeseen avenues. So if there should come a time when Dan Campbell, the 49-year-old who has recently led the Detroit Lions' two best seasons since 1991, is ever looking for work, college football would be a great place to look. There are many examples that demonstrate Campbell's erudite meatheadity is a perfect fit for CFB, and yes, the famous Biting Kneecaps speech was one of the first. The latest was Rustin Dodd's assignment to drink Campbell's daily caffeine treatment: 'Two 20-ounce Pike Place medium roast coffees with two shots of espresso in each one. The colloquial term for the drink is a 'black eye.' But I had one concern. ''Haha,' I wrote back. 'I might die.' Did the author die? Better read to find out. (No, Rustin survived, though so did one of the coffees.) This amount of caffeine of course reminded me of Larry 'nine Red Bulls in a day' Fedora, Ed '10 Monsters in a day' Orgeron and Dana 'case of Red Bull per week, every week, forever' Holgorsen, among CFB's many other energy demons. I hope Campbell succeeds in Detroit, partly because Lions fans never get to have anything nice for every long. All I'm saying: Sure would be fun if we could trade Belichick for the Texas A&M alum right now. That's a wrap. Email me at untilsaturday@ on what you want more of in the newsletter! Last week's most-clicked: It was the link to the New York Times' news story on the new pope's identity. Guessing this means some of you learned major world news from Until Saturday. In light of that, have this story on Pope Leo XIV's favorite sports teams all suddenly becoming very popular in Vegas. 📫 Love Until Saturday? Check out The Athletic's other newsletters.
Fox News
13-05-2025
- Business
- Fox News
NCAA president 'up for anything' amid rumors of Trump creating commission on college sports
NCAA President Charlie Baker said Monday he was "up for anything" when asked about reports that President Donald Trump is set to create a commission on college sports. The presidential commission would tackle issues the college sports landscape faces with former Alabama Crimson Tide football coach Nick Saban and billionaire Cody Campbell leading it, Yahoo Sports reported last week. "I think the fact that there's an interest on the executive side on this, I think it speaks to the fact that everybody is paying a lot of attention right now to what's going on in college sports," Baker said, via the Raleigh News & Observer. "There is a lot going on, that's not all bad, and I'm up for anything that helps us get somewhere." Commissioners of the top conferences in the NCAA have already asked Congress to step in to help the NCAA regulate name, image and likeness (NIL) and the transfer portal. Greg Sankey, Jim Phillips, Tony Petitti and Brett Yormark were on Capitol Hill last month. Yormark, the Big 12 commissioner, bluntly admitted to Bret Baier on "Special Report," "We need help from Congress." "From where I sit today, federal preemption, having a standardized platform that oversees and governs NIL is critically important," Yormark said. "Today, 34 states see it very differently, and it's relatively unruly." "The volume of laws that are being passed on a state level are making it really difficult for us to regulate and compete nationally," Petitti added. "Every single time someone doesn't like a ruling, or something comes from the NCAA, we end up in litigation. Those rules then get aggregated, and we're back to the start. "We're hopeful that the combination of what we've done in the settlement will give us an opportunity, with some help from Congress, to really put a system in a place that has some stability. "We've crossed the bridge of being willing to provide revenue … but we need to have some structure. We can't have a system that has complete unregulated movement." It is unclear when the commission would be finalized. The NCAA and collegiate athletes have waited for the $2.8 billion House settlement to be approved. It will allow schools to share revenue with athletes directly for the use of their NIL. Follow Fox News Digital's sports coverage on X, and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.
New York Times
13-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
If Nick Saban and Cody Campbell help control college sports' future, how might it look?
— By Chris Vannini, Sam Khan Jr. and Justin Williams Can a presidential commission do anything substantial to change college sports? The recent news that President Donald Trump may get involved in the prolonged effort to bring stability to college sports sparked plenty of debate on that question. But what could such a commission do, and what would the reported co-chairs, former Alabama coach Nick Saban and Texas Tech board chair and billionaire booster Cody Campbell, aim to accomplish? Advertisement Though we don't yet know the scope of the commission or how deep it will dive into issues like name, image and likeness compensation or the transfer portal, Saban and Campbell's past public statements provide some clues on what they might seek to address. Saban has criticized the money flowing into the NIL market from deep-pocketed donors; Campbell is one of those donors, bankrolling Texas Tech's recent success in player acquisition. Although NIL freedoms were designed to allow players to pursue marketing or endorsement deals, donors and their collectives quickly took to using them as a proxy for a pay-for-play system. 'To me, the biggest issue we have in college athletics is donor-induced name, image and likeness,' Saban said last fall at a panel in Dallas alongside NCAA president Charlie Baker. 'Instead of doing what we're doing now, we should be having revenue-sharing with the athletes so that their quality of life is better.' Revenue sharing is indeed on the way, pending approval of the House v. NCAA settlement. But Saban and Campbell have expressed a desire for national NIL rules, rather than a collection of different state laws. The NCAA has long lobbied Congress for federal NIL legislation, to no avail. A bipartisan group of senators, led by Ted Cruz (R-Texas), continues to work on the issue, but nothing appears imminent. Campbell, who has written several op-eds about college sports for The Federalist, advocated in April for an antitrust exemption that would allow a governing body to enact a single set of rules to supersede the 'patchwork of 34 different state laws' that currently exist. The House settlement, if it's approved, will establish a revenue-sharing cap of at least $20 million that schools can distribute to athletes, and the Power 4 leaders are planning to create an enforcement organization for traditional NIL, but it's not yet clear whether that will slow pay-for-play 'NIL' as we know it today. Campbell hasn't written much about the portal, and Texas Tech has been an active user in recent years. Saban, however, has criticized the transfer rules for their effect on team chemistry and graduation rates. 'I'm all for the players, and I want the players to benefit, and I think we went far too long without the players being able to benefit,' Saban said last year. 'But the system that we have right now makes it much more difficult for a coach to really create the culture on this team, because guys can leave whenever they want. So they don't have to make the same kind of commitment that we all had to make, in terms of, how did you value your college experience?' Advertisement Restricting player movement hasn't come up much in congressional hearings compared to the financial concerns, but the question of whether outgoing players should owe contract buyouts has gained steam as revenue sharing approaches. Arkansas' NIL collective is currently looking to collect a buyout from quarterback Madden Iamaleava, who signed with Arkansas in December but has since transferred to UCLA. Despite their shared backgrounds in college football, Saban and Campbell have expressed concern over the impact on Olympic and non-revenue sports as more money shifts toward football and basketball. 'Of 134 FBS schools, 90 or more could lose funding for Olympic sports, women's teams, and even football itself (not to mention the FCS and Division II),' Campbell wrote in March on The Federalist. 'Local towns could crumble. Smaller colleges would fade. College sports would shrink from a national treasure to an elite clique, and countless dreams would be crushed.' Saban cited Alabama's softball team, one of the best in the country, as a winning program that doesn't make money. 'What people don't understand about college athletics, in my opinion, it's not a business,' Saban said last September. 'It's revenue-producing. … Nobody takes a profit in college athletics. What do we do with the money? We reinvest it in the players and opportunities for non-revenue sports, so that they have an opportunity to graduate and compete.' A large part of that cost also includes growing salaries for coaches, but Saban and Campbell both seem interested in finding ways for football — and, to a lesser extent, basketball — to continue funding non-revenue college sports under a reformed system. Though Campbell called for antitrust protections, he doesn't want to give those protections solely to the Power 4 leagues, even with his ties to Texas Tech and the Big 12, and said that any solutions must be 'maximally inclusive' of the 130-plus Football Bowl Subdivision schools. Advertisement 'Give the Autonomy Four (especially the Big 10 and SEC) a free antitrust hall pass, and they'll build a super conference, a gilded monopoly that starves everyone else of the revenue needed to provide opportunity to more than 500,000 student athletes per year,' he wrote in March. Saban, meanwhile, has said in the past that he'd like power conference schools to only schedule each other. Campbell has written that the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 should be opened up to allow a broadcasting antitrust exemption for college sports as it does for pro sports, which could allow the entire FBS to pool and negotiate its broadcast rights collectively. Last week, Cruz remarked in a Senate committee hearing on streaming that the concept was something worth looking into, while also sharing concern about the NFL bumping up against protected late-season college football windows. The SBA is one of the first major hurdles faced by recent Super League proposals from private equity groups that would include all of FBS or only the Power 4. The Big Ten and SEC have shown no interest in concepts that would lessen their financial advantage, but Campbell shares similar views with those promoting the Super League ideas: An antitrust exemption would lead to more money for everyone. 'The big and storied programs will continue to retain an advantage because of their massive ticket sales, donor support, and ability to monetize licensing and merchandise,' Campbell wrote, 'but the smaller schools will at least be able to maintain solvent athletic departments and support non-revenue sports.' Campbell has also advocated for 'geographic sense' for conference alignment, expressing concern about travel time and the loss of rivalries. Finding a way to unwind conference realignment seems difficult, but it's a topic any casual fan of college sports, including members of Congress, would understand. The issue of employee or collective bargaining status for college athletes is not directly addressed in the House settlement, but it is expected to be one of the next high-profile legal battles in the industry. Advertisement Saban and Campbell have expressed desires for college athletes to remain students and for college sports to maintain some semblance of an academic model. 'Establishing this non-employee status will help to limit the cost burden of sponsoring an intercollegiate sport, and ensure that benefits like a scholarship are not taxable as income,' Campbell wrote in April. Campbell also noted the Title IX implications of this debate: '(T)he proper application of Title IX with respect to the payment of student athletes must be made clear in order to prevent another wave of disruptive litigation.' It's yet to be seen who else will be on this presidential commission, what it will focus on and whether it will actually influence anything. But its existence would put more focus on doing something. 'My only hope is that leadership can emerge and consensus can be found in Washington before it's too late,' Campbell wrote in April. 'There are solutions, and the problems can be solved in a bipartisan manner. It is only a matter of will, engagement, and attention from well-intentioned individuals who wish to perpetuate the legacy and impact of the great American institution of Intercollegiate Athletics for all of its participants — not just for a privileged few.' Saban for years has worked as a de facto voice of the sport, especially in his role at ESPN, and Campbell laid the political groundwork with his writing. The pair may soon have the ability to drive even more of the conversation for actual change. 'If we can just get it together and put it together, we'd have a great system,' Saban said. 'I think the future of college football is great. I really do. I'm not down on the game. I'm just down on the system of how we get money to players. That's got to be fixed.' (Top photo of Nick Saban and Donald Trump:)
