Why does the federal government need to "save" college sports?

In the ongoing drip, drip, drip of news regarding the efforts of President Trump specifically and/or the federal government generally to "save" college sports, there's an important question that hasn't been asked.

Why does the federal government need to do it?

College sports can fix itself. Decades of corruption in the form of blatant antitrust violations created the mess. Let the universities — which apparently are chock full of smart people — come up with a solution.

It's a fundamental aspect of free enterprise. Freedom to thrive. Freedom to fail. The free market figures it all out.

A market that is free from violations of the antitrust laws.

The universities are in competition for the services of the young men who play football. For decades, the system was rigged against them. "Sorry," the schools would say, "we can't give you anything more than tuition, fees, room, board, and snacks. NCAA rules."

The colleges got free (or at least extremely cheap) labor, for decades. In recent years, the judicial branch has systematically exposed the truth. Why should the executive and/or the legislative branch get involved?

College sports aren't "too big to fail." There's no compelling public interest in getting a broken sport to fix itself. If college football would disappear (and it won't), life would go on. (And the NFL would backfill the void with three windows of games on Saturdays.)

Major League Baseball is broken. It's been broken for decades. Small-market teams can't consistently compete. Should the federal government intervene and make it more fair?

This obsession with winning obscures the fact that it's not a crisis of financing but of vanity. Those who once ruled the sport (like Nick Saban) resent the fact that the game has changed, and that it's harder for them to dominate. That their cheese has moved. Now, instead of finding it, they want the president and/or Congress to blow up the maze.

When it comes to sports, there are plenty of issues that impact public interest. Concussions. Gambling. Accessibility of broadcasts. Restoring some sense of order to an industry currently experiencing competitive chaos is not in the public interest. It's in the interest of schools that would rather stuff their coffers with all or part of the money that is currently going to players. It's in the interest of coaches, who can go wherever they want whenever they want to pursue their own bag, to not have to deal with the constant challenge of holding their teams together.

The knee-jerk (and often misguided) reaction by many when Congress gets involved in private business is to ask, "Don't they have better things to do?"

In this case, the answer is yes. Anything they do is better than trying to give college sports a quick and easy solution that results in more for the schools and coaches, and less for the players.

Especially when an airport in a major metropolitan area currently can't function properly because it periodically loses track of, you know, the planes.

So let's focus on fixing the shit that is truly broken. And let's let college football clean up its own mess. Our elected officials in the federal government absolutely have better things to do.