Salary Caps. A New Playoff.
An Antitrust Shield.
The White House Wants to Remake College Sports.
A White House committee convened by President Donald Trump is circulating a draft framework for the most sweeping federal intervention into college athletics in American history. The document, obtained by CBS Sports, proposes capping coaches' salaries, creating a separate playoff bracket for non-Power-4 schools, and insulating the NCAA from antitrust lawsuits long enough to implement a new governance structure — all backed by the threat of federal funding consequences for noncompliant institutions.
The committee is chaired by Trump himself and co-led by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) and New York Yankees President Randy Levine — two figures with no prior formal role in college athletics governance. Their mandate: untangle a system that has been reshaped by the House v. NCAA settlement (a court-approved $2.8 billion agreement allowing schools to share up to $20.5 million annually with athletes), the NIL era, and a broken transfer portal — all without the congressional legislation that has failed to pass for five years.
The draft is preliminary — an internal discussion document, not a final executive order — but it lays out the most concrete federal reform plan yet: three phases, a new task force, pooled media rights, a revamped playoff structure, and a hard deadline of August 1, 2026 for NCAA compliance with transfer and eligibility rules already issued under an April 3 executive order.
- April 3, 2026 — Executive order signed — "Urgent National Action to Save College Sports". whitehouse.gov
- $20.5M — Per-school annual revenue-share cap under House v. NCAA settlement — the floor the White House is building on. ESPN / House v. NCAA
- 5 committees — Formed by Trump in March 2026 to address eligibility, NIL, governance, media rights, and antitrust. CBS Sports
- Aug. 1, 2026 — NCAA compliance deadline for transfer limits, eligibility caps, and NIL guardrails. White House EO, April 3
- ≥13 coaches — Major football head coaches already earning $10M+ next season — a figure the salary-cap proposal targets. CBS Sports / Sportico
- SCORE Act — Congressional antitrust-shield bill — pulled from House floor in Dec. 2025; still short Senate votes. Congress.gov / The American Prospect
On February 27, 2026, Trump announced a Saving College Sports Roundtable and tasked two vice chairs with day-to-day leadership: Ron DeSantis, the Republican Governor of Florida, and Randy Levine, President of the New York Yankees and a veteran sports executive who helped negotiate the 2002 MLB labor deal. Neither has previously held a formal role in NCAA governance.
Their advisory circle is deep. The broader commission includes Nick Saban, the retired Alabama head coach and the most decorated figure in college football history; Adam Silver, NBA Commissioner; Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State and former Stanford University provost; Lou Lamoriello, longtime NHL executive; and sports consultant Marc Ganis. Texas Tech regent and billionaire Cody Campbell is also helping shape policy.
Chair: President Donald J. Trump
Vice Chair: Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL)
Vice Chair: Randy Levine, President, New York Yankees
Advisory: Nick Saban (retired Alabama head coach) — 6 national championships
Advisory: Adam Silver, Commissioner, NBA
Advisory: Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of State; former Stanford provost
Advisory: Lou Lamoriello, longtime NHL executive
Advisory: Marc Ganis, sports consultant
Advisory: Cody Campbell, Texas Tech regent and billionaire
Source: Sportico, Bloomberg, CBS Sports — Feb.–Mar. 2026
Trump formed five separate sub-committees in March 2026, each focused on one domain: eligibility rules, NIL and compensation, governance structure, media rights, and antitrust policy. The CBS Sports draft is believed to be the preliminary output of the governance and antitrust sub-committees.
The circulating draft is organized into three phases — a structure that acknowledges the committee cannot deliver everything by executive order alone and that congressional action on antitrust protection is ultimately necessary for the plan to hold.
Phase 1 — Stabilization. A new College Sports Reform Task Force is established within the existing NCAA structure, armed with limited antitrust exemptions and the authority to override state NIL laws. The task force operates for two years. Any rules it sets during that window carry permanent antitrust protection — they remain in effect after the task force dissolves, unless a future body or Congress changes them.
Phase 2 — Media Rights. The committee proposes pooling models for media rights, including an opt-in structure where 75 or more schools combining rights at contract expiration would receive antitrust protection. The goal is to prevent Power-4 conferences from individually monopolizing broadcast value at the expense of smaller programs.
Phase 3 — Permanent Governance. A 15-member board takes over as the permanent governing body, born out of the task force. This body replaces the ad-hoc committee and carries the authority to set compensation, transfer, and playoff rules on an ongoing basis.
“The committee calls for a new entity to oversee a plan it believes should be implemented in three phases — stabilization, media rights, and permanent governance.”
CBS Sports · internal White House committee draft document · May 2026
The draft's most controversial proposal is a federal salary cap on coaches and athletic administrators — the first such intervention ever proposed at the federal level. The target is plain: at least 13 major college football head coaches are set to earn $10 million or more next season. Head coaching salaries at Power-4 programs have more than doubled in the past decade, driving some schools to eliminate non-revenue Olympic sports and shrink athletic department staff to cover the payroll.
The draft does not specify a precise dollar figure for the cap. A separate congressional bill, the COACH Act introduced by Rep. Michael Baumgartner (R-WA), proposed tying the cap to a multiple of undergraduate tuition — limiting compensation to no more than ten times the school's tuition for first-time undergraduates. The White House draft is expected to eventually adopt a similar formula or a fixed ceiling, but has not yet done so.
The proposal also explicitly prohibits NIL-based salary-cap circumvention. This is a growing concern: booster collectives and athletic departments have begun redirecting multimedia rights deals and apparel revenues to supplement the $20.5 million that schools are permitted to share with athletes under the House v. NCAA settlement — in effect, using NIL infrastructure to run a backdoor payroll that bypasses the cap. The draft would close that channel.
The current 12-team College Football Playoff structure — which began in the 2024-25 season and stays at 12 teams for 2026 after Big Ten/SEC expansion talks stalled — gives the highest- ranked Group of Six team one automatic bid to the field regardless of whether it is a conference champion. That's a marginal concession. The White House draft proposes something more significant: a separate Group of Six playoff bracket, running parallel to the Power-4 structure.
The “Group of Six” refers to the six FBS conferences outside the Power 4 (SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, ACC): the American Athletic Conference, the Conference USA, the MAC, the Mountain West, the Sun Belt, and Conference USA. These 65-plus schools have historically been squeezed out of playoff revenue and bracket representation, despite producing competitive programs and large fan bases.
Revenue split.The draft also proposes modifying the CFP's revenue distribution formula — currently heavily weighted toward Power-4 conferences — to provide a more meaningful share to Group of Six programs.
Structural separation. Rather than competing for one guaranteed spot in a 12-team Power-4-dominated bracket, Group of Six champions would crown their own national champion through their own bracket — a model borrowed from FCS football, which has run a 24-team playoff independent of FBS for decades.
The CFP expansion backdrop.The Big Ten is pushing for a 24-team expanded CFP; the SEC prefers a 16-team “5+11” format. Neither proposal includes meaningful structural concessions to Group of Six programs. The White House draft is an explicit counter to both.
The structural hinge the entire plan turns on is antitrust protection. The NCAA has been the losing defendant in a string of antitrust cases — most recently Alston v. NCAA (2021, Supreme Court, unanimous) and the House v. NCAA settlement ($2.8 billion, approved June 6, 2025) — that have systematically dismantled its authority to restrict athlete compensation. Without an antitrust shield, any new rules the task force sets on salary caps, transfer limits, or NIL deals are immediately vulnerable to the same type of litigation that forced the settlement in the first place.
The draft proposes a two-track solution. The first track is executive: the White House task force would operate under a limited, time-bound antitrust exemption granted by the administration, giving it two years of rule-setting authority without litigation exposure. Rules set during those two years carry permanent antitrust protection going forward. The second track is congressional: the draft acknowledges that durable antitrust protection requires Congress, and explicitly references the SCORE Act (H.R.4312, 119th Congress) as the legislative vehicle.
The SCORE Act — the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements Act — grants the NCAA and athletic conferences a limited exemption from antitrust suits. It also overrides the patchwork of state NIL laws and bars college athletes from being classified as employees, cutting off collective bargaining rights. The bill passed House committee markup in July 2025 but was pulled from the House floor calendar in December 2025 after some Republican members signaled they would not vote for it in its current form. Sens. Chris Murphy (D-CT), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Cory Booker (D-NJ)have called the antitrust exemption a “giveaway to the NCAA.” The bill is at least a half-dozen Senate votes short of passage.
“Federal action is essential to protect the future of college athletics. The bipartisan SCORE Act offers a comprehensive framework for many of the issues facing our industry.”
Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark · statement on Trump's April 3 executive order
One of the draft's less-publicized but operationally significant proposals borrows a concept from the NBA's labor agreement: a college version of the “Bird Rule” — named after Larry Bird, whose 1983 contract dispute led to a provision allowing teams to exceed the salary cap to re-sign their own players.
In the college context, the draft would allow schools to provide financial incentives to players who remain at the same institution for consecutive seasons — a retention bonus structure. The transfer portal has created a marketplace logic where the financially optimal move for any athlete is to transfer annually to the highest bidder. The Bird Rule adaptation attempts to counterbalance that by making loyalty financially competitive. Schools could offer a retention premium above the base revenue-share cap specifically for returning players — without that premium counting against the NIL salary-cap ceiling.
The CBS Sports draft document sits on top of an executive order Trump already signed. On April 3, 2026, Trump signed “Urgent National Action to Save College Sports” — his most comprehensive executive action on college athletics, and the second such order after a July 2025 executive order focused on transfers and eligibility.
Eligibility: The NCAA must create rules limiting college athletes to no more than a five-year period of competition, closing the extended eligibility loophole opened by COVID-19 waivers.
Transfers: Athletes may transfer once before graduation without sitting out a season. Multiple transfers require a sit-out year.
Professionals: No athletes may return from professional leagues.
NIL agents:The NCAA must create a national registry for player agents and establish policies that prevent schools from cutting scholarships or reducing opportunities for women's and Olympic sports to fund athlete pay.
Scope: Applies only to schools with over $20 million in athletics revenue — roughly the Power-4 universe.
Deadline: Sections 3-6 take effect August 1, 2026. Schools that fail to comply risk federal funding consequences.
Source: White House Presidential Actions; ESPN; McGuireWoods
Power-4 conference commissioners have been publicly supportive of the executive order, if cautiously so. Their responses read less like endorsement and more like strategic positioning ahead of the antitrust-shield negotiation they all know is coming.
NCAA President Charlie Bakercalled the April 3 order “a significant step forward” and said the administration's interest “reinforces many of our mandatory protections.” ACC Commissioner Jim Phillipswrote that there was “significant momentum to preserve the athletic and academic opportunities for the next generation of student-athletes.” Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormarkcalled federal action “essential” and pointed to the SCORE Act as the legislative vehicle.
None of the commissioners publicly addressed the salary-cap or Group of Six playoff proposals in the CBS Sports draft. Those specific proposals, if implemented, would directly reduce Power-4 coach payrolls and distribute CFP revenue toward programs in smaller conferences — both of which are financially contrary to the Power-4 conferences' interests.
“We deeply thank President Trump and his administration's ongoing commitment to protecting college athletics. There continues to be significant momentum to preserve the athletic and academic opportunities for the next generation of student-athletes.”
ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips · statement on the April 3, 2026 executive order
The combination of proposals — if enacted with congressional backing — would represent the most significant restructuring of American college athletics since the NCAA's founding in 1906. Consider what each piece touches:
- Salary caps on coaches would compress the arms race that has pushed Power-4 football coaching salaries above the pay of most American governors and university presidents. At least one congressional bill (the COACH Act) already proposes tying the cap to a tuition multiple.
- A Group of Six playoff would redirect television revenue and national-title prestige toward 65-plus schools currently locked out of the playoff ecosystem, reversing a decade of consolidation toward the SEC and Big Ten.
- An antitrust shield would give the NCAA rule-making authority it has lacked since Alston — but the same shield that protects compensation caps also protects the NCAA from athlete-union organizing, Title IX equity claims, and any future litigation challenging the new structure.
- The Bird Rule adaptation attempts to slow the transfer carousel without a blanket transfer ban — using financial incentives rather than eligibility penalties as the brake.
The White House has put a specific, three-phase blueprint on the table: cap coaches' salaries, build a separate bracket for schools the Power-4 have squeezed out, and give the NCAA two years of antitrust breathing room to implement it — with a 15-member permanent board waiting on the other side. The April 3 executive order is already in effect. The NFL-style Bird Rule loyalty bonus is already drafted. The SCORE Act is the key that unlocks the permanent version — and it doesn't have the Senate votes yet. The question now is whether Congress can do what it has failed to do for five years, or whether the White House will try to build a durable reform on executive-order foundations alone. Federal funding leverage is the only enforcement mechanism available without the antitrust shield. The Power-4 conferences know it. The committee knows it. August 1 is the first real test.