Dealing with the Iran war is

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Friday that questions about the war in Iran were “easy” compared to efforts to better regulate college sports and rein in high salaries for football players, an extraordinary suggestion that even he himself appeared to take better notice of soon afterward.

Trump convened a roundtable of experts that included former Alabama football coach Nick Saban, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey and Pete Bevacqua, Notre Dame’s athletic director. He and others then spent more than an hour arguing that big payouts for star athletes, as well as other relatively recent changes in NCAA sports, such as the transfer portal, have ruined college athletics.

Presidents are routinely asked to address multiple issues at once, many of them extraordinarily complex. But the timing of this lengthy discussion was especially surprising, given that the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran a week ago. At the end of the event, a reporter started asking about Iran and the president interrupted: “That’s an easy problem compared to what we’re doing here.”

When a second question arose about Trump’s decision Thursday to fire Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the president grumbled, “Ugh,” before adding, “Is it even possible to pursue this issue, just once?”

The president later seemed to become a little more reflective when asked why he was focusing on this issue when there were so many other things going on in the world.

“I saw what was happening with college sports. And it doesn’t seem very important compared to what’s happening in Iran and other places,” he said. “But it’s very important to me. And if I can do it, I will.”

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Trump also finally made brief comments about Iran, saying that on a scale of 1 to 10, he would rate U.S. military actions as “a 12 to 15.”

College sports – particularly football – are tremendously popular and their governance is, without a doubt, a huge and continually thorny issue. Trump has also complained for months that athletes earning increasingly higher salaries as part of the NCAA’s name, image and likeness era have changed things for the worse.

He argues that big-money sports like football are crowding out smaller sports and women’s athletics, and he even says some colleges have started paying athletes so much that it’s driving institutions into insolvency.

The roundtable came after Trump spent hours with senior officials behind closed doors, likely discussing Iran and other important issues. The president announced that he had met with defense contractors who had agreed to increase weapons production.

Still, it was surprising that Trump, flanked by his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, found so much time to devote to the topic of college sports.

The president listened as Saban joked: “I’m just a football coach.”

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House Speaker Mike Johnson, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and others took turns expressing their love for college football and their fears for its future. Former Ohio State coach Urban Meyer expressed his opinion, as did Randy Levine, president of Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees. No current college athletes participated.

“I’ll be here as long as you need me,” Trump assured those gathered, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who once served on the College Football Playoff Selection Committee.

The event boiled down to Trump imploring members of Congress to pass the SCORE Act, or legislation based on it. The bill is designed to impose new rules on college sports, but has been criticized by opponents as a gift to the NCAA and its most powerful schools.

Told that the measure almost certainly would not pass Congress, Trump said he would draft an executive order on college sports himself.

“If this doesn’t work, the universities are going to be destroyed,” he said.

It was unclear how it would differ from one Trump signed in July ordering federal authorities to clarify whether college athletes can be considered employees of schools. Instead, Trump spent more time pining over the name, image and likeness of the previous days.

“Is there any way we can go back to the old system, which I thought was fantastic?” Trump asked at one point, advocating a return to a simple scholarship model for college athletes while also suggesting they could be paid “some compensation, more minimal, but a lot.”