Alabama athletics director Greg Byrne praised an executive order from President Donald Trump on Thursday.

“The University of Alabama applauds this executive order from President Trump to help ensure a long-term, sustainable model of intercollegiate athletics,” Byrne said in a statement he posted to social media Thursday evening. “We are proud of our broad-based athletics programs and strongly support future regulatory and congressional action that will preserve these opportunities for student-athletes.”

Thursday’s executive order mandates that federal authorities clarify whether athletes can be considered employees of their schools. The NCAA and its schools have long argued that athletes should not be employees.

The refusal of schools and the NCAA to evolve eventually led to several crushing court defeats in recent years, which led in part to the rise of NIL payments for players, which, when coupled with free transfer, led to a chaotic moment in college sports.

The order prohibits “third-party pay-for-play” payments to players. However, it does not stop NIL agreements adhering to “legitimate, fair-market-value compensation.”

The immediate impact of the order on college sports, if any, is unclear.

Byrne and Alabama have opposed an employment model. In 2024, he said before a congressional panel that such a development could cause UA to cut sports.

“It’s the Olympic sports that would be in jeopardy,” Byrne said. “That’s men and women. If you look at the numbers for us at the University of Alabama, with our 19 sports outside of football and men’s basketball, we lost collectively almost $40 million. We funded that through our revenue from a football and men’s basketball standpoint.

“So potentially, which one specifically, if I’m just saying this in general: if I’m a swimming student-athlete. If I’m a tennis, I’m a track, any of those sports — those are really important to our universities — we want to compete in them. I can’t stress that enough. But there also will have to be decisions made because there’s not an unlimited supply of money like some believe.”