President Trump on Friday will unveil a new commission to reform the business of college sports — including the controversial “name, image and likeness” framework for student athletes — and will be tapping one of New York’s smartest and toughest executives for the task, On The Money has learned.
New York Yankees president Randy Levine will serve as vice chair of Trump’s new Saving College Sports Roundtable, a group of some two dozen executives and athletes from the college and professional levels, to fix the financial side of college sports, including the insane money grab known by its acronym, NIL, people close to the matter say.
A longtime college sports fan, Trump sees what has happened to a system where athletes used to spend four years playing for one school, receiving an athletic scholarship for free tuition. The big change occurred in 2021, when the ruling body of college sports, the NCAA, allowed athletes to cash in on their “name, image and likeness” through advertising and various endorsements.
At the time, it seemed like the right thing to do. College sports, particularly football and basketball at big schools, are multibillion-dollar industries. Why shouldn’t student athletes make a few bucks doing a few advertisements, maybe appearing on local TV promoting a car dealership or a small business?
Of course, it hasn’t worked out that way. All hell has broken loose as colleges use NIL to lure the best players. College athletes are being courted with multimillion-dollar deals. Arch Manning, the highly touted QB from the University of Texas and heir to the Manning football dynasty, has inked an NIL deal worth nearly $7 million.
Now, colleges are facing financial consequences. Schools can’t pay the athletes directly. Instead they must turn to NIL collectives, so-called booster organizations that rely on the same donor base funding other needs such as labs and new dorms. Colleges also are wooing premier athletes to jump ship midway through their playing days by dangling big-buck NIL endorsements.
To fix the mess, Trump is tapping Levine as well as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who will serve as the other vice chair. He’s also naming a host of other top sports executives, including the savvy media banker Gerry Cardinale of RedBird Capital, fresh off his big victory helping Paramount Skydance snare Warner Bros. Discovery. Cardinale is one of the top Wall Street executives who has been helping college sports traverse the potential NIL pratfalls.
Federal legislation is probably needed to create a uniform standard for NIL; college athletes are regarded as amateurs as opposed to professionals, but that might have to change. Different types of employment laws may apply, and whenever there’s money and competition for business, antitrust might also soon apply to college sports. Inaction over all of the above annoyed Trump, who was keeping tabs on the entire mess and knew he needed to kickstart change.
And shouldn’t college, even for athletes, include education as a priority? Many athletes barely understand finance, even as they’ve become multimillionaires overnight.
Given the above, it’s easy to understand why Levine was selected to help sort all this out, and it goes beyond running the business side of the Bronx Bombers, the most valuable baseball enterprise, worth around $8.2 billion and bringing in revenue of $728 million yearly.
Levine is good at putting fans in the seats, but he knows athletic sports contracts better than just about anyone (he was the former chief labor negotiator for MLB) and how to joust with some the best agents in the business; he also understands sports media rights and the endorsement racket (he runs the YES Network, the regional sports network that airs Yankee games), and he understands politics (Levine is a longtime friend of Trump and served as deputy mayor during the Giuliani administration).
In other words, my money is on Randy Levine figuring out the NIL conundrum.
