The federal government is taking a new, bipartisan stab at solving what ails college sports. The Senate is putting forth the Protect College Sports Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation with a long list of what would be new and enforceable laws within college sports. The Senate effort to save college sports now drills down on many of the hot topics, including athletes and coaches changing schools.
Senate Effort to Save College Sports
The Starting Point
Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced the bill to the media on Wednesday. Much of that same media was quick to declare the legislation dead on arrival. In doing so, what does not get acknowledged is that this is likely not the final version. It needs 60 votes in the Senate to pass. In order to get to the 60 votes, there will be what is normal for Congress, and new to many in college football media, several rounds of negotiations. To reach the magic number, some elements of the bill will be altered, some will be dropped altogether, and new sections may be added. We know this because we grew up on Schoolhouse Rock.
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) started his engines by declaring the bill to be anti-athlete. It does place new restrictions on some of the financial elements tied to individual student-athletes. It gives new strength to the rules enforcement to the NCAA and the College Sports Commission (CSC), and it gives a lot of decision-making flexibility to the individual conferences.
Supplanting the House Bill
One of the things that jumps out about the new bill is that it takes no official stance on college athletes becoming employees of the schools. The House bill, the SCORE Act, which was torpedoed last week when the Congressional Black Caucus decided to boycott it, had outlawed student-athletes from obtaining employee status. The lack of a formal position would seemingly leave it up to the federal courts when a college athlete files a class action suit against all of college sports at some point down the road.
The Details
The Senate bill puts teeth into the terms of the House v. NCAA settlement from last year. It codifies the parts of the settlement that grant limited antitrust protection to the NCAA and the CSC to enforce the rules. That includes enforcing strict standards that limit third-party deals with athletes that are deemed not to be legitimate NIL structures. It is the P4 schools that voted for the legal settlement and the same conferences/schools that are refusing to sign off on the CSC’s power.
As soon as the ink was dry on the settlement and a $21.3 million revenue-sharing cap was instituted, schools started violating the new standards by redirecting corporate sponsor cash for their rosters and disguising it as NIL money, which does not count against the cap. This bill empowers the CSC to do the job it was given in the settlement: stop improper use of NIL.
The Cantwell-Cruz bill provides a mechanism for the conferences and the schools to revisit and raise the revenue-sharing cap.
Player and Coach Movement
The new bill, if passed, would also limit the transfer abilities of student athletes. It would go back to the system of getting one “free” transfer to another school. Any transfer after that would force the athlete to sit out a year. While that may be popular with fans of consistent rosters, it might have a hard time passing the legal muster when all of the other students on campus can transfer at will. The athletes are permitted an exemption for another “free” transfer if their coach leaves or if the school drops their sport.
Within the eligibility structure, it also creates a five-year eligibility rule. Each student athlete would have eligibility to play/redshirt for a grand total of five years.
The bill also puts limits on when coaches can and cannot move to other jobs. It states that coaches cannot move to another job while their season is still active.
The TV Revenue and Who Is In
The PCSA also addresses the TV contracts, the largest source of revenue for the conferences. The bill does not mandate, but allows for the conferences to bundle their TV rights into one. That would be different than the current situation, where every conference is on its own with the networks, causing dramatic rises in the costs of those rights. Those increases are what are paying for schools to move from one conference to another.
The SEC has indicated in the past that it is not inclined to bundle its media rights with other conferences. The Big 10 is likely to lean against it as well. But the G6 conferences, the ACC, and the Big 12 could do it, and it would be the 75% needed to legitimize the process under the bill. At that point, the conferences that do not do it would not be granted the antitrust exemption protections from the legislation.
The Cantwell-Cruz bill would create a national standard for Name, Image, and Likeness and the compensation that goes with it (as monitored by the CSC and the NCAA), thus overriding individual state laws on the subject in an effort to curtail the current spending race. That is also considered an attempt to force schools to allocate more money for the Olympic sports.
Next Step
From here, the wrangling starts behind closed doors to secure the 60 votes. There is no vote scheduled yet on the bill, and that would certainly wait until Cantwell and Cruz are confident they have the 60 votes. The status of the four Senate members who are part of the Congressional Black Caucus, which killed the SCORE Act in the House in protest, remains unclear.
Main Image: NCAA
