Dealing with Iran war is ‘easy,’ Trump says. College athlete pay? Not so much

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 seemed to think better of a short time later.

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 over an hour arguing that big paydays for star athletes — as well as other relatively recent changes to NCAA sports like the transfer portal — have wrecked college athletics.

Presidents are routinely called upon to tackle multiple issues at once, many of them extraordinarily complex. But the timing of this lengthy discussion was especially striking, given that the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran a week ago. At the end of the event, a reporter started to ask about Iran and the president interrupted, “That’s an easy problem...