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The last time major legislation regulating college athletics was scheduled for a vote in Congress, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) lit into the proposal, highlighting many of the problems with modern college athletics that the bill failed to address.
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“If we’re going to take a big federal step because a federal court intervened and we’re going to intervene, well then maybe we should fully intervene,” Roy said during a hearing a week before the bill was pulled from the House floor. “Maybe we should fix the damn mess so that we don’t have 16 teams in the SEC and 17 teams in the ACC and 19 teams in the Big 10 and fricking Stanford and Berkeley on the West Coast in the Atlantic Coast Conference all because of money.”
SKIP THE WELLNESS MAXING AND HAVE SOME WINE
Roy’s criticisms of the SCORE Act were well-founded and helped inspire new bipartisan legislation in the Senate. The Protect College Sports Act, written by Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), and co-sponsored by Sens. Chris Coons (D-DE) and Eric Schmitt (R-MO), addresses almost all of Roy’s concerns, and more.
The legislation is not perfect. Like any compromise, nobody is completely happy with the final product. But it is a good-faith effort to address what almost everyone agrees is a chaotic and unsustainable status quo. Some stakeholders would come out as clear winners should the legislation become law, while others would be clear losers.
Winners
Students
College sports has entered a new era in which athletes can be paid in two major ways: through outside name, image, and likeness deals, and, under the House v. NCAA settlement, directly by their schools through revenue sharing. Beginning in 2025, schools can share roughly $20.5 million per year with athletes, a massive new expense for athletic departments already paying for larger staffs, facilities, and travel. Many schools are already ignoring that limit.
Schools are already passing those costs on to students. Clemson approved a new $150-per-semester athletics fee expected to raise $8 million. Minnesota added a $200 athletics fee to help offset its revenue-sharing shortfall. South Carolina created a new $150-per-term athletics auxiliary fee. Florida opened the door for universities to use auxiliary revenue from campus services such as housing, parking, bookstores, and food service to pay athletes. Professionalized college sports are not funded solely by television networks — students are being asked to underwrite the arms race.
The Protect College Sports Act would relieve these pressures by creating and enforcing player compensation caps and transfer eligibility rules.
99% of college athletes
Roughly 99% of college athletes either receive no NIL money at all or far less than six figures. The Protect College Sports Act does not take anything away from this 99%. It does not take away scholarships or ban NIL. For the vast majority of students, the bill preserves NIL rights while making the system more stable.
In fact, the bill gives college athletes new protections they do not have today. It establishes health, wellness, and safety standards so schools cannot treat players as disposable assets. It strengthens academic and scholarship protections so athletes are not punished for pursuing an education or left vulnerable if their athletic role changes. It also requires schools to provide full out-of-pocket medical coverage for athletic injuries during participation and for five years after eligibility ends. For the 99%, the Protect College Sports Act is a win-win.
College football fans
College football rivalries are the lifeblood of the sport, embodying generations of passion, regional pride, historic traditions, and community bonds that transform ordinary Saturdays into cultural events. The conference expansion era has killed many rivalries, including the Apple Cup (Washington vs. Washington State), Bedlam (Oklahoma vs. Oklahoma State), the Border War (Kansas vs. Missouri), and the Backyard Brawl (Pitt vs. West Virginia).
The Protect College Sports Act protects these rivalries through its media rights provisions in Title II, which grant conferences an antitrust exemption for pooling and jointly selling broadcasting rights only if they enforce scheduling mandates under traditional rivalry preservation rules.
Non-power conference schools
The Protect College Sports Act would also help even the playing field for non-power conference schools by allowing conferences to pool their broadcasting rights instead of forcing every league to negotiate alone against the SEC and Big Ten. Today, the richest conferences use massive TV contracts to separate themselves financially, while smaller conferences are left with less media revenue, weaker bargaining power, and more pressure to raise fees, cut sports, or chase unstable realignment deals. By permitting collective media-rights arrangements, the bill would let more schools share in the value of college football as a national product, strengthen regional leagues, protect Olympic and women’s sports, and reduce the incentive for schools to abandon traditional rivals just to survive financially.
Losers
Top 1% of college athletes
There is no getting around the fact that some people are made worse off by the Protect College Sports Act, and the richest, most talented athletes are at the top of that list. Under the hard caps of the bill, Arch Manning (son of NFL legend Peyton Manning) would not be making over $6 million a year playing for Texas, and Shedeur Sanders (son of NFL legend Deion Sanders) would not have made $4 million playing for Colorado. NFL quarterbacks Riley Leonard and Will Howard, of the Indianapolis Colts and Pittsburgh Steelers, respectively, said they took pay cuts moving from Notre Dame and Ohio State to the pro game. The Protect College Sports Act would bring those richest-of-the-rich payouts back down to earth.
Big Ten/SEC duopoly
The Big Ten and SEC are big losers under the Protect College Sports Act because the bill threatens the advantages that let them dominate college sports. By allowing broader pooling of college football media rights, it would weaken the two conferences’ ability to hoard television value for themselves and give other leagues a better claim on national broadcast revenue.
The bill also aims to prevent college football from becoming a two-conference super league. By restoring national rules and reducing the incentives for endless realignment, it would make it harder for the SEC and Big Ten to keep raiding other conferences, consolidate power, and force everyone else to compete on their terms.
Greedy coaches
Defenders of the current college chaos love to point to the freedom of greedy college coaches to jump ship midseason for bigger paychecks to justify similar anarchy in player compensation. Enter the Protect College Sports Act, which includes the so-called “Lane Kiffin Rule,” stopping coaches from abandoning their teams before the season is over.
The bill also cracks down on recruiting tampering, making it harder for coaches and boosters to lure athletes from other programs before they have properly entered the transfer portal. Together, these rules send a simple message: Coaches should not be able to chase bigger paychecks, raid other rosters, or destabilize college sports while asking their own athletes to stay loyal and finish the season.
HOW THE SUPREME COURT BROKE COLLEGE FOOTBALL
Greedy lawyers
The Protect College Sports Act is bad for greedy lawyers because it would end the litigation chaos that has turned college sports into a legal free-for-all. Today, every unclear NIL rule, transfer dispute, eligibility fight, and state-law conflict creates another opportunity for lawsuits, settlements, and legal fees. The bill replaces that chaos with one national framework for NIL, revenue sharing, transfers, tampering, and enforcement. It also caps athlete-agent fees at 5%, ensuring more money goes to college athletes rather than lawyers and agents trying to profit from them.
College sports do not need more chaos wrapped in free-market rhetoric. It needs rules that protect students, preserve rivalries, reward ordinary athletes, and stop the richest programs, coaches, agents, and lawyers from rigging the system for themselves. The Protect College Sports Act is not perfect, but it is a necessary reset.
