Charles Gasparino: College sports are spiraling into chaos and courts are making it worse

If President Trump needs more evidence that the business of college sports needs to get reformed as soon as possible, he can point to recent hijinks in California federal court.This is where, sources close to Team Trump contend, a California magistrate judge might be given final say over the insane money grab that has upended collegiate sports.It also could make the White House’s efforts to restore sanity even more arduous, The Post has learned.As reported, Trump has appointed the Saving College Sports Roundtable — a blue-ribbon commission led by New York Yankees president Randy Levine and Florida Gov.

Ron DeSantis — to reform college sports’ “Name, Image and Likeness” (NIL)  system.The committee’s goal: To recommend new legislation to Congress that will end some of the nasty, often unintended side effects they believe NIL has ­unleashed on college sports.A key concern is that colleges are competing for top athletes by diverting donor money from academic pursuits through so-called booster clubs, school-affiliated organizations that are allowed to raise money from these same sources as part of the athlete wooing process.The system, as broken as it is, does have one safeguard.Under the terms of a class action that helped create the current NIL structure  (aka “The House Settlement”), something called the College Sports Commission puts a $20.5 million yearly cap on money distributed to student athletes from booster organizations.But now critics allege that plaintiffs’ lawyers have filed a motion in US District Court in Northern California seeking to craft what they say is a loophole in the rules that allows so-called “third-party NIL deals” to surpass the cap.Those third-party deals are with sports marketing companies like PlayFly and Learfield, outfits that facilitate media-rights deals with athletes.

The commission believes such groups should fall under the cap because they work with the schools (as opposed to a private company working di...