He beat the NCAA on transfers. Now he's warning Trump executive order won't survive

• President Trump's executive order aims to limit college athletes to one transfer, a rule recently overturned in court.
• The Republican attorney general who sued to allow unlimited transfers believes the president's order will likely not survive a legal challenge.
• The conflict creates uncertainty for colleges, which are caught between a court-approved settlement allowing unlimited transfers and the president's directive.

A Republican state attorney general who sued the NCAA and won unlimited annual transfers for college athletes said President Donald Trump’s latest executive order for college sports “probably will not survive litigation” in its attempt to force changes, including a call to limit the number of times players can transfer to new schools.

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, a Republican like Trump, effectively created this new system of unlimited annual player transfers, along with a bipartisan group of attorneys general from several other states. They sued the NCAA to remove transfer restrictions in December 2023 and won a settlement that allowed unlimited annual transfers in 2024.

Now Trump wants to go back to the old system that existed before that, limiting college athletes to one transfer every five years without penalty, plus once more if they graduate.

Trump’s “executive order is a well-intentioned effort to fix the problem, and I especially appreciate any proposed changes to bring sanity to the eligibility and transfer landscape,” Skrmetti said in a statement to USA TODAY Sports. “The constitutional limits on the President’s power mean this will probably not survive litigation, but maybe it will send a meaningful signal to Congress.”

Congressional legislation to regulate college sports has been stalled amid partisan disagreements. In the absence of legislation, Trump issued an executive order April 3 that calls on the NCAA to make changes by Aug. 1, including rules to limit transfers.

The big question is what comes next

An executive order like this without the backing of a law passed by Congress generally isn’t considered enforceable. But Trump also has issued this one under the threat of federal funding cuts for those who don’t comply with his wishes.

This creates uncertainty even if it doesn’t affect college basketball players who are entering the transfer portal from April 7 through April 21. College football’s next transfer portal might not open again until next January.

“I don’t think the uncertainty affects future transfers… yet,” sports attorney Darren Heitner told USA TODAY Sports. “But athletes considering entering the transfer portal in the future face uncertainty about whether the rules will shift.”

And they might, depending on the outcome of pending legislation or another round of judicial scrutiny.

Why is this so hard to figure out?

It’s because of conflict between NCAA rules, federal law, a president’s wishes and the “chaos” that resulted from removing player transfer restrictions in 2024.

Skrmetti stood by the reason he and other states sued the NCAA to eliminate transfer restrictions in 2023 — because he said it was illegal to restrain players from transferring to schools where they could make more money.

They got what they wanted in court, approved by a federal judge. But this created a world in which players are transferring to new schools every year in search of more playing time or money for the names, images and likenesses (NIL). Team rosters are now turned over every year, alienating some fans and testing the notion education is still part of the equation.

Skrmetti even previously told USA TODAY Sports this system for unlimited transfers was a “train wreck” that is “sucking the life out of college sports.”

“The President’s executive order reflects what Tennesseans have understood for a long time: The current system governing college sports is broken,” Skrmetti said.

But now Trump’s executive order seeks to overturn when Skrmetti and others helped create.

Can Trump do that?

The NCAA and its member universities might be tempted to ignore this executive order in respect to transfer restrictions because it’s already been settled in court with a consent decree approved by order of a federal judge. But there’s a reason they can’t.

That’s because the Trump Administration previously has used the threat of federal funding cuts to get universities to do what he wants. He’s raising that threat with this executive order as well.

“The Director of the Office of Management and Budget, in consultation with the Administrator of General Services, shall issue guidance to contracting and grantmaking agencies to ensure compliance with this order,” the order states.

This puts NCAA schools in awkward position

So what do you do if you’re a university that wants to recruit a player who’s transferred more than once already?

“No university president or provost wants to be the test case for whether the administration will actually pull funding over an athletics compliance dispute,” Heitner told USA TODAY Sports. “That said, conditioning federal grants on compliance with an executive order is a strategy this administration has deployed before and one that courts have been willing to reject. The threat is real in the sense that institutions will take it seriously. Whether it survives judicial scrutiny is a different question.”

Federal legislation “could be a path to stability,” Skrmetti said. But conflict remains in the way of that too, between those who want to go back to the old restrictions and those that note college coaches haven’t been similarly restricted from changing teams for more money, so why should players?

“The NCAA seems incentivized to use the executive order as political cover to reimpose restrictions it has wanted to reimpose but could not justify on its own,” Heitner said. “The problem is that most meaningful rule changes the order contemplates has already been struck down or enjoined by a federal court.”

Follow reporter Brent Schrotenboer @Schrotenboer. Email: [email protected]