Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

In his first weeks in office, Donald Trump pitched himself as the preeminent advocate for women’s sports. Well, kind of: In front of risers full of little girls, he signed an executive order that threatened to withhold federal funding for institutions that allowed trans women or girls to play on female teams. The NCAA aligned its policy with Trump’s executive order within days, and Trump took a victory lap. “I am proud to be the President to SAVE Women’s Sports,” he wrote.

Trump’s dedication to the cause did not last long. In the time since signing the anti-trans order, the president has ensured that hundreds of millions of dollars that might have gone to female athletes will go to men instead.

On July 1, college sports will shift to a new economic model. This is an attempt to correct for a few years of a messy system. Since 2021, players have been allowed to earn money from third parties in marketing and endorsement deals. In practice, though, the system has meant that donor “collectives” just pool money to pay athletes to play for their favorite teams, under the thin guise that the deals are somehow for appearances or endorsements. The mix of player payments and liberalized transfer rules has resulted in more or less every college athlete being a free agent each year, exhausting coaches and administrators. Hence the whole industry’s desire for a new system.

Advertisement

It comes in the form of a legal settlement in House v. NCAA, which a federal judge signed off on this month. One piece of the settlement involves the distribution of $2.8 billion in back damages to athletes who never got to earn “name, image, and likeness” money during their time in college. The other piece is forward-looking: Schools have agreed to pay up to $20.5 million this year (often mostly in cash, with some in new scholarship funding) directly to their athletes, something they have never done before. The hope is that this will make contracts more enforceable, remove intermediaries, and even result in more money flowing to athletes.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

It was possible, as it was coming together, that the House settlement would become an unprecedented windfall for women’s athletics. More than 200,000 women compete in NCAA-sanctioned sports each year, and a centralized payment structure could have resulted in their earning a much bigger piece of the pie than they had the past few years. But the Trump administration foreclosed that possibility over the winter, and now we are beginning to see what women will get instead: scraps.

Advertisement

The vast majority of the money in college sports comes from one in particular, football. Next comes men’s basketball, then usually women’s basketball, then everything else, though some schools might have a volleyball or softball or baseball or hockey team that makes a lot of money. The back damages in the House settlement reflect this reality, with about 90 percent of the $2.8 billion flowing to former football and men’s basketball players at power-conference universities. A group of female athletes who object to the settlement have already filed suit, alleging that this payment structure violates Title IX, the federal law that requires equitable treatment between men’s and women’s teams.

More pressing for more athletes, however, is how schools will distribute their settlement dollars going forward. This decision was largely up to the schools themselves, but one of the final acts of the Biden administration, in late January, was to tell schools that they should allocate it roughly evenly between male and female athletes. Biden’s Education Department issued guidance that this new money should be paid out under the rules of Title IX. The guidance was not law, but if the federal government had stuck to it, it might have been significant anyway. College administrators have spent years begging the feds for any sort of national uniformity for player compensation rules. At the least, it would be risky to full-on ignore the opinion of the federal government, as many schools rely on significant federal funding. (It’s this very lever that Trump has used in his effort to compel the exclusion of trans women from women’s sports.)

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

If administrators had followed the Biden administration’s interpretation of Title IX, the result would have been the greatest cash influx in the history of women’s sports. Most universities won’t spend $20.5 million this year, but the majority of the 67 power-conference schools and Notre Dame will. Some napkin math: Those schools will spend $1.4 billion on players this year, of which $700 million would go to female athletes. There were 23,400 female athletes at power-conference schools in 2024, according to the NCAA’s demographic database. They would be in line for an average of $30,000 if their schools spent half of their House money on women. (I emphasize, again: It’s rough math, and not all House money is cash. Still, that’s a lot of cheddar.)

Instead, thanks in part to Trump, many women playing college sports will likely get nothing at all, and women’s teams’ share of the settlement will be in the neighborhood of 10 percent, not half. In February, Trump’s Education Department rescinded the Biden team’s guidance, calling it an “11th-hour” overreach and giving athletic programs the green light not to worry about women’s sports as they prepared their House budgets.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Related From Slate The Biggest Misconception About the Trans Athletes Debate Read More

As the new season nears, we have started to get specifics on how institutions, now unencumbered by the idea of any executive branch opposition, will spend these dollars. The college sports industry expectation has long been that about 75 percent would go to football. That is now happening. A representative illustration comes from the University of Texas, which will spend 75 percent on football players, 15 percent on men’s basketball players, 5 percent on women’s basketball players, and 5 percent on athletes on four other teams out of Texas’ 21 varsity sports. The University of Alabama will do roughly the same, though it hasn’t announced exact numbers. Many schools will use the settlement’s back-pay formula, which prioritizes football and men’s hoops, as a starting point.

Advertisement

It is possible to hold two thoughts in our heads at one time. First, sending the vast majority of the money to football players is reasonable. These are the athletes who have fueled college sports’ engine for more than a century. No matter how popular other college sports get, they will never, ever bring in as much as football. The House settlement will reflect economic reality after decades of football and basketball (two of the only plurality Black sports, by the way) subsidizing everybody else. Second, the settlement represented an opportunity for college sports programs to make a major investment in women’s sports, one that would be justified on both moral and financial grounds given how the NCAA has actively inhibited those sports’ growth over its history. Trump made sure that opportunity would go unfulfilled. That doesn’t sound like the behavior of, in his words, “the President to SAVE Women’s Sports.”

Advertisement

That’s because Trump’s interest in women’s sports is not actually in investment in the athletes who participate. Instead, it is in leveraging the issue as one of the ways to continue to politicize and push his agenda on trans issues. Another case in point: Despite the deluge of headlines about women’s sports and fairness, you were probably unaware of the regulatory machinations behind the House settlement. There’s a good reason for that.

The entire episode is indicative of how conservative politicians and activists have treated women’s sports for years. Some anti-trans activists were female athletes themselves. (Take Riley Gaines, who leveraged a tie for fifth place at an NCAA swim meet into an advocacy career.) But the bulk of lawmakers and media commentators who have focused on a supposedly existential threat to women’s sports posed by trans athletes have not spent much time talking about any other women’s sports issues at all. Some have actively bashed women’s sports in one breath while muttering about the need to save them in another. The politicians pushing anti-trans legislation didn’t hold hearings at any point during the decades the NCAA was systematically underfunding the women’s basketball tournament.

These people are loud about women’s sports when they represent an arena from which to exclude trans women. They are quiet about the Trump administration rolling back what had been the only federal effort to steer money to thousands of women playing sports. A trans volleyball player at San José State is cause for a Title IX investigation, but the diversion of millions of dollars of payments away from women in college sports is not. Why would it be, when women’s sports are already saved?