President Joe Biden and other White House officials met with multiple former college football players on Wednesday to discuss the working rights of college athletes, an unprecedented show of support for players in the battle over the status of so-called “student-athletes,” one of the longest running and most contentious debates in American sports.
According to an administration official, the roundtable discussion was convened because “college football players—and all student-athletes—deserve consistent safety standards, to have a voice, and to benefit from the revenue they produce[.]”
In attendance were Rod Gilmore, Desmond Howard and Ryan Clark, all now commentators at ESPN, as well as broadcaster Kevin Neghandi from the network. Gilmore was a two-sport athlete at Stanford, Clark played safety at LSU, and Howard played receiver at Michigan. Former Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck was also on hand, as was Jordan Meachum, a representative from the College Football Players Association and former running back at Sacred Heart and South Dakota State, and former Georgia running back Keith Marshall, co-founder of NIL media platform The Players’ Lounge.
