The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly
The crisis in college sports is having a ripple effect, causing colleges to eliminate programs, which then decreases their enrollment as fewer students have a reason to go there. As enrollment declines, colleges go out of business, and at least a quarter of colleges teeter on bankruptcy even during good times.
In April, President Trump issued an executive order explaining that “financial perils” caused by the crisis in college sports “could impact [colleges’] capabilities and responsibilities as Federal contractors and grantees,” and also that the “health of the university system is integral to the Federal Government’s basic functioning.”
A federal court in California caused this crisis by allowing a class action on behalf of college athletes seeking compensation, and then approving a $2.8 billion payout to college athletes dating back to 2016. Known as the “House settlement,” this includes a whopping $750 million payout to attorneys which neither colleges nor the NCAA can afford.
With the exception of men’s basketball and football, college sports programs are money-losers that serve the purpose of attracting enrollment in the college. The judicial activism from a federal court against college sports is bringing down entire colleges in the collapse.
This class action lawsuit is on appeal to the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. Seven different groups of athletes are appealing, including women who receive almost none of the back pay, men in underappreciated sports like wrestling, and walk-on athletes who made their college team as many aspire to do.
College enrollment depends on the opportunity for all students to try to make the team in their favorite sports, without having been recruited in high school. The movie Rudy featured a walk-on who tried out and made the Notre Dame football team, and is considered one of the greatest sports movies ever made.
For more than a century, college sports worked well by keeping professionals out, and students played for the love of the game, not money. “I’d like to go exactly back to what we had and ram it through a court,” Trump said in March, and his instincts are right.
He could do that by intervening in the “House” litigation. Trump’s Solicitor General who represents the U.S. in the Supreme Court, John Sauer, was himself a “walk-on” college wrestler who became the team captain at Duke, and he could argue for a return to allowing colleges to keep compensation out of their sports.
The Senate Commerce Committee is holding a hearing on Wednesday for the misnamed Protect College Sports Act, which would mandate as federal law the opposite of what has long worked. This new federal law would force colleges to allow compensation for players by allowing them to take money for their name, image, or likeness (NIL), to the detriment of team spirit.
The Protect College Sports Act would micromanage college sports in additional ways, such as adopting team roster size limits, which makes it harder for a student to become a walk-on. This bill would place wage controls on the compensation of agents who will negotiate lucrative contracts for a few students, when there should not be any agents or compensation at all in college sports that thrived with amateur athletes.
This federal bill would prohibit the two most successful conferences, the Southeastern Conference (SEC) and the Big Ten, from expanding or merging. Never before has a federal law interfered with private associations like this.
A generation ago, college was part of the American Dream. College sports attracted students and donations by alumni, and millions of students obtained a good education and a solid foundation for the rest of their lives by attending college to play sports.
The federal lawsuit encourages NCAA Division I colleges to pay their players $20 million annually, but for most schools the money simply isn’t there. Most sports do not have a sizable television audience and will be eliminated, to save money to pay a handful of top basketball and football players who have little interest in academics.
Even before this court-ordered $2.8 billion burden on colleges, many were already going out of business. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia predicted in 2024 that as many as 80 colleges might close in the next five years.
Last year 28 colleges went out of business, and during the past eight years more than 100 colleges have closed. The Huron Consulting Group found that roughly 25% of the private, nonprofit universities and colleges could close or merge in the next ten years.
Congress could help college sports by allowing a return to the amateur model, thereby ending what Trump has described as an “out-of-control financial arms race.” The Trump Administration could also stop granting visas to foreign athletes to play on college teams, which worsens this “arms race.”
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.
These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.
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