Trump Brings College Sports Power Brokers to the Same Table With Fox, ESPN Executives in the Room

President Donald Trump is scheduled to host a “College Sports Roundtable” at the White House on March 6, 2026, a meeting that pulls together a rare mix of conference leadership, network executives, university officials, and high profile former coaches and athletes.

The guest list is built around the people who control the sport’s biggest levers: media rights, conference policy, playoff access, and the expanding rulebook around athlete compensation.  It includes Fox Sports president Eric Shanks alongside ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro. That pairing is the headline on its own: the two major broadcast lanes for college football are expected to be in the same room while the sport tries to figure out what comes next.

Who Is Expected to Be There
The planned meeting includes commissioners from the four power conferences:

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Greg Sankey (SEC)
Tony Petitti (Big Ten)
Brett Yormark (Big 12)
Jim Phillips (ACC)
The broader invitation list also includes commissioners from the American Athletic Conference and the Mountain West, and NCAA president Charlie Baker.

Two vice chairs were listed for the session: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and New York Yankees president Randy Levine.

The sports side of the room features some major name recognition: Tiger Woods, Bryson DeChambeau, and NBA commissioner Adam Silver are among those included on the invite list, along with New England Patriots president Jonathan Kraft.

The football contingent includes former head coaches Nick Saban, Urban Meyer, and Mack Brown, plus former college stars including Heisman winners Tim Tebow and Charlie Ward.

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On the campus leadership side, the list includes university leaders such as Tennessee chancellor Donde Plowman, Kansas chancellor Doug Girod, Nebraska chancellor Jeff Gold, and former Clemson president Jim Clements, with Texas Tech board chair Cody Campbell included as well.

What The Meeting Is About
The roundtable is framed as an early stage discussion about “the future of college sports,” with an emphasis on how the sport is structured and how it is paid for. One person familiar with the planning described the agenda as still preliminary and said there had not been anything provided “in writing” with specific solutions yet.

The issues are the ones that keep showing up every week regardless of what sport is in season: NIL policy, roster management and transfer movement, enforcement and tampering disputes, and how the sport’s economics are divided between schools, athletes, conferences, and media partners.

The format itself is notable. The invite list, as circulated, includes no active college head coaches, which suggests the meeting is designed around governance and business structures more than day to day coaching concerns.

Why Fox’s Presence Matters
With Shanks expected to attend alongside Pitaro, the meeting places the conference side and the network side in the same room at the same time. In a world where TV windows, inventory, and rights value dictate everything from kickoff times to playoff formats, having both broadcast lanes represented turns the roundtable into something closer to a college sports summit than a normal policy meeting.

It’s also a reminder of where college athletics is right now: the rulebook is still catching up to the money, and the money is still sprinting ahead.

For now, the concrete facts are simple:  March 6, the White House, a 35 plus person invite list, power conference commissioners, major media executives, and a lineup of recognizable sports names. What comes out of the meeting is the part everyone will be watching.

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