Trump rips NIL ‘disaster’ in Oval Office, warns it’s killing college sports
When President Donald Trump hosts an event in the Oval Office and opens things up to questions from the media, as he did on Friday while hosting members of the 1980 Miracle on Ice team, you get a lot of dumb questions.
I mean, I get that opportunities to ask the president a question are at a premium, but with Jim Craig and Mike Eruzione on hand, is that the time to ask about Venezuela?!
Anyway, at least one member of the press asked a question that made a lot of sense, and it had to do with NIL.
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That’s fitting, as back when the Miracle on Ice team played, the Olympics were strictly for amateurs, and most of the team was plucked from various collegiate rosters.
Had they played 40-plus years later, they may have been rolling in some of that NIL dough.
But, as the president noted — and Sen. Ted Cruz would agree with — the current state of NIL is simply not sustainable and could cause serious damage to college athletics, and even the Olympics.
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“I think that it’s a disaster for college sports,” President Trump said. “I think it’s a disaster for the Olympics, because, you know, we’re losing a lot of teams. The colleges are cutting a lot of their — they would call them sort of the ‘lesser’ sports, and they’re losing them like at numbers nobody can believe. They were really training grounds, beautiful training grounds, hard-working, wonderful young people. They were training grounds for the Olympics.
“And a lot of these sports that were training so well would win gold medals because of it. Those sports don’t exist because they’re putting all their money into football. And by the way, they’re putting too much money into it, into football.”
President Trump noted that the top-performing athletic programs aren’t making enough money to sustain themselves, given the rate at which they’re paying highly sought-after players.
“They’re putting all of their money in, and I know something about it,” President Trump said. “They will not be able to stop. You have a college president [saying], “I’m telling you, sir, we give a guard $7 million, we’re going to win the national championship,’ and they’ll give them seven, then they won’t win it.
“And even if they do win it, colleges cannot afford to be paying the kind of salaries that you’re hearing about.”
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