Two U.S. senators have struck a deal in landmark bipartisan legislation to regulate college athletics.
Next comes a months-long process of gaining enough support for passage in a divided U.S. Congress at a divisive time in America.
Sens. Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, and Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, reached an agreement on Wednesday after more than two months of intense negotiations, adopting a comprehensive bill that would grant the NCAA its long-sought antitrust exemption related to athlete transfers, eligibility and the compensation cap.
The bill — named the Protect College Sports Act — precludes the creation of a so-called “super league”; creates an agent registry limiting fees to 5%; permits the pooling of media rights; and bars coaches from leaving their team before the season ends.
“This bipartisan bill is designed to save the part of college sports that fans actually care about,” Cruz said in an interview with Yahoo Sports announcing the legislation.
Cantwell described the bill as delivering historic protections for athletes in creating a national standard for name, image and likeness compensation (NIL) by preempting state law. The bill is intended to curtail the industry’s spending arms race to protect the future of Olympic and women’s sports and also provides athletes with guaranteed medical care and scholarships.
“Congress is hungry for any bipartisan legislation. I know America is for sure,” Cantwell said on the bill’s chances of passage in the U.S. Senate, where 60 votes are necessary for the adoption of legislation.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the bill is the narrow legal protection granted to college sports’ governing body intended to slow player movement, standardize eligibility and control the third-party NIL spending on athletes.
The bill…
– enables administrators to enforce policies related to movement by permitting only one transfer before a player must miss a season of eligibility. A second or more transfers are permitted under certain conditions, such as a head coach leaving or the elimination of an athlete’s sport.
– establishes a five-year eligibility length for college athletes and prohibits professional athletes — even those having competed internationally — from participating in college sports if they earned compensation in their pro careers beyond prize money.
– codifies portions of the NCAA’s House settlement by granting legal protection to the NCAA and College Sports Commission to enforce strict standards in prohibiting third-party NIL deals.
– remains mostly neutral on athlete employment, leaving open as a possibility for athletes to eventually be deemed employees or/and collectively bargain.
The cap
The policing of the cap is perhaps one of the more notable additions to the legislation.
The NCAA’s settlement of three antitrust cases (commonly referred to as House) ushered in athlete compensation directly from schools to athletes but within a capped system similar to the NFL’s salary cap. Next year, each school has $21.3 million to spend on all of their athletes, but many programs, in order to achieve an advantage in a competitive recruiting environment, have redirected corporate sponsor cash to their rosters disguised as third-party NIL — compensation that doesn’t count against the cap.
Given the above-the-cap spending, football rosters have ballooned to more than $30 million and men’s basketball to more than $15 million, especially within the richest leagues: the Big Ten and SEC.
This piece of legislation stands to grant the College Sports Commission, the new enforcement entity created by the power leagues to prevent phony third-party payments, a path to enforce the cap policies without the threat of legal challenges — a significant move and one that could, if the cap isn’t increased, result in a decrease in player compensation rates.
However, in the interview with Yahoo Sports, Cantwell said language in the bill allows the conferences to increase the cap, which she described as a “key thing.”
“The cap can float,” she said. “In case the parties go back to the table (to raise the cap) — there’s dialogue about this — we want athletes to know that there is a mechanism of getting a higher percentage of the revenue share.”
A higher cap, she believes, will prevent any decrease in athlete compensation.
“I am ensuring athlete rights with a private right of action for NIL compensation and revenue sharing. That doesn’t exist right now,” she said. “And do I think this discussion about collective bargaining is over? No.”
The bill’s announcement comes at a divisive time as the four power conferences hotly debate how to address athlete compensation issues while also growing more apart financially.
In fact, the bill’s introduction arrives in the midst of the SEC’s annual spring meetings near Destin, Florida, where university presidents, athletic directors and football and basketball coaches gather to discuss a breakaway model to self-govern as well as a concept around collective bargaining and changes to the College Sports Commission itself, where more than $100 million of NIL compensation goes unapproved — much of it from the SEC and Big Ten.
How the Senate bill impacts those ongoing conversations is unclear.
While the bill does not disturb the House settlement in any way, it sets “clear rules” and “puts teeth in place to enforce those rules,” Cruz said. That includes keeping intact the College Sports Commission’s athlete arbitration path that gives players the ability to arbitrate over rejected NIL deals.
But the senators are clear on this concept: Third-party NIL compensation that the CSC deems as phony (not meeting a “valid business purpose”) can be rejected from the system.
“The approach of this bill is to give highly targeted legal protections to the enforcement of the rules that are specified in the federal statute,” Cruz said. “So, if it’s fake NIL, if it is a booster just handing an athlete a bag of cash under the table, that is breaking the rules.”
Added Cantwell: “You cannot lure or induce athletes to an institution unless you have a valid business purpose.”
Super League and pooling rights
While most Division I conferences pledged their support for the Senate legislation last week — even before the bill was released — SEC and Big Ten officials withheld their position on the matter.
Those within the league expressed caution about the language specifically addressing the pooling of media rights and other concepts.
For instance, the act prevents any league earning more than $1 billion in revenue on its 2025 tax returns from merging or consolidating with another conference.
There are only two leagues that earn such revenue: the Big Ten and SEC, college sports’ behemoths who many believe are destined to eventually break away to create their own “super league.”
There is another concept targeting those two conferences: The bill offers leagues the ability — it’s an option only — to pool their media rights contracts in an effort to generate more revenue at a financially stressed time. The pooling of rights — a divisive topic among SEC and Big Ten leaders who are against the proposal — is only “voluntary,” the two senators reaffirmed to Yahoo Sports.
However, as the two biggest revenue generators, the SEC and Big Ten would need to participate in the pooling of rights for projected media values to “work,” Cruz acknowledges. The other conferences must “negotiate” with the two conferences in striking “an agreement that would be attractive to them” to garner their inclusion.
“Obviously we’re trying to make sure that that nobody runs away with the eyeballs or a certain amount of revenue and hijacks the rest of the system, leaving it short changed,” Cantwell said.
A minimum threshold of 75% of the 138 FBS schools must be reached to collectively pool rights, which would come through replicating the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which provides professional leagues the right to evade antitrust law and collectively pool rights.
Cantwell is encouraging the conferences to return to more regional competition, even believing that the leagues should reverse their conference makeups that created mega-leagues that span coast to coast and cost schools an additional $3 million annually in travel expenses, she said.
“You’ll see from the [Sports Broadcasting Act] section that we try to promote regional eyeballs. I’m hoping the schools go back to regionalism,” she said. “Regionalism feeds a lot of sports viewership.”
The bill does not address or prohibit conference expansion in a limited manner, Cantwell said.
An unlikely compromise
Though only the first step in a labyrinth approval process within Congress’ bureaucratic system, the Senate agreement is a historic moment in college leaders’ seven-year lobbying effort on Capitol Hill to bring stability to a landscape that grew unregulated through their slow resistance to change. Court rulings cratered the NCAA’s archaic amateurism framework, with many of its rules — created and upheld by the schools themselves — having been found to violate antitrust law.
The multi-million dollar lobbying from college executives has culminated in legislation from two most unlikely partners: a gregarious conservative Texan and a career politician from Washington state — neither of whose views necessarily align.
Cruz and Cantwell — the chair and ranking member of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee — began in earnest their discussions in March, meeting weekly in person, either the two lawmakers or their staff. Conversations accelerated with daily meetings on May 13.
The gatherings went beyond the Capitol. They jointly met in Phoenix in late April with members of the presidential committee on college sports, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Yankees president Randy Levine, Texas billionaire Cody Campbell and business titan Gerry Cardinale. A working dinner on May 20 turned into more hours-long, in-person negotiations, as well as conversations with college stakeholders, player activists and White House personnel to shape legislation.
Each lawmaker compromised on an assortment of issues. Cruz backed off on a rigid anti-employment concept and Cantwell acquiesced on the one-time transfer policy — both significant compromises necessary to reach agreement.
“Today is a time of deep partisan division, and yet sports are one of the very few things in life that brings us together, that bring communities together, where people of different parties, of different races, of different religions, side by side, embrace and cheer on their teams, and there’s a powerful unifying force to sports,” Cruz said.
“How did Senator Cruz and I come together?” Cantwell asks rhetorically. “I mean, this isn’t exactly R and D politics here. This is the politics of athletes and traditional opportunities for Americans to participate in sports, and we can see it being eaten away, and so I think there’s a lot of people who say let’s not let that happen.”
In the end, they landed on a bill just days after a separate piece of legislation, the Republican-authored SCORE Act, flopped in the House of Representatives.
What’s next?
While the Senate bill’s fate remains unclear, any legislation with Republican and Democrat co-authors holds a more realistic chance of advancing than recent one-sided bills — none of them having reached a floor vote in either chamber.
But now comes the hard part.
While featuring many pro-athlete concepts, the Senate act includes player movement limitations and potential compensation restrictions that may draw scrutiny during a lengthy amendment and hearing process. In fact, hearings are expected to begin as soon as next week, though one has not been formally scheduled.
What awaits the bill are committee fights, floor arguments and external pressures, both from entities who want to see it thrive and fail. For instance, members of the Congressional Black Caucus suggested that they will push back against any bill supported by the SEC unless their university leaders speak out against the attack on the Voting Rights Act.
The act also:
– makes it illegal for coaches to leave their teams before the season concludes and schools cannot hire coaches before a season concludes — something those on Capitol Hill refer to the “Lane Kiffin Rule,”
– introduces a medical trust for lower-resource athletic departments,
– creates a commission to study the pooling of rights and long-term governance of college sports,
– preserves access to local communities by requiring that broadcasts of local teams are not behind a paywall and requires schools maintain scholarship/roster levels for Olympic sports based on a three-year period of funding. Each of those concepts is only triggered if rights are pooled,
– features a “private right of action” for athletes to file a legal claim if they do not believe the law is being adhered to,
– re-establishes regional rivalries by requiring some schools to restart rivalry games if they compete in a conference without three or more of their top 10 most played opponents. This concept is only triggered if rights are pooled.