{"id":21060,"date":"2026-04-08T02:21:06","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T02:21:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/overshadowing-the-final-four-was-trumps-threat-to-hamstring-college-athletes\/"},"modified":"2026-04-08T02:21:06","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T02:21:06","slug":"overshadowing-the-final-four-was-trumps-threat-to-hamstring-college-athletes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/overshadowing-the-final-four-was-trumps-threat-to-hamstring-college-athletes\/","title":{"rendered":"Overshadowing the Final Four was Trump\u2019s threat to hamstring college athletes"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

\n

Because he’s apparently not fully occupied with the war he started that’s shaken up the world, President Donald Trump signed an executive order concerning college sports Friday that reveals yet another megalomaniacal fantasy. Just as the Final Four, the culmination of college basketball’s billion-dollar tournament, was about to tip off, Trump demanded a return to yesteryear: When players didn’t get paid. When, unlike every other college student, they couldn’t move from one school to another without penalty. When disproportionately Black basketball and football teams had to do whatever the white men ruling the roost decreed.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Trump signed an executive order concerning college sports Friday that reveals yet another megalomaniacal fantasy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

The president’s executive order says it’s intended “to bolster the effectiveness of key college-sports rules on transferring, eligibility, and pay-for-play by evaluating whether violations of such rules render a university unfit for Federal grants and contracts … establishing clear, consistent, and fair eligibility limits, including a five-year participation window … banning improper financial arrangements including pay-for-play …”<\/p>\n

But it’s more properly seen as an attempt to put Black athletes in their place.<\/p>\n

The University of Michigan Wolverines, who won the national college basketball championship Monday night, and the University of Connecticut Huskies they defeated will, for the first time ever<\/a>share in the millions of dollars they reaped for the NCAA’s Final Four. But if Trump’s retrograde executive order were the rule, they couldn’t.<\/p>\n

The Wolverines would have just gotten a commemorative ring, a grab bag, a ball cap, a T-shirt and an “attaboy” pat on the back. That’s what the winners of the tournament got for decades.<\/p>\n

Ten of the 16 players on Michigan’s championship-winning squad, including four of the five starters, are Black. The Huskies team they defeated is predominantly Black too. The demographics of basketball and football, college athletics’ only profitable sports, have for decades colored the country’s perception of what those athletes deserve and how they should be treated.<\/p>\n

As Christian Collins, a Center for Law and Social Policy analyst in Washington, wrote three years ago about the racial economics of college sports<\/a>: “From 2005 to 2019, Black college athletes across men’s and women’s basketball and men’s football in the largest five athletic conferences are projected to have lost between $17 [billion] and $21 billion in compensatory theft, or roughly $250,000 per athlete per year, if revenue sharing in collegiate athletics modeled that of professional sports leagues. College athletic programs are often complicit in the economic exploitation of underrepresented student populations.”<\/p>\n

\n