A Senate bill that would regulate college sports and provide antitrust protections to the NCAA and major conferences advanced out of a key committee Thursday by a bipartisan 19-9 vote.
The Protect College Sports Act was introduced last month by Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas-R) and Sen. Maria Cantwell (Wash.-D), and a revised version was presented to the Senate Commerce Committee at a hearing on Capitol Hill that lasted about an hour. Six Democrats voted for the bill, and two Republicans voted against it.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (S.D.-R) can now bring the bill to the floor for a vote. Changes can still be made before it gets there — if it gets there. A House bill called the SCORE Act advanced through committee last year but never got to the floor for a vote, running into various hurdles.
Among other things, the Protect College Sports Act would allow the NCAA to limit transfers and eligibility, enforce a spending cap, give conferences the option to pool their television rights and prevent coaches from leaving their teams before the end of the season. It also forces schools to commit to preserve their women’s and Olympic sports programs.
College sports leaders have been lobbying Congress for a federal law for years, spending millions of dollars along the way. They have asked for help to create national standards for the new ways college athletes can be compensated and for antitrust protections to ward off constant legal challenges. A flood of lawsuits have made it nearly impossible for the NCAA and conferences to enforce rules regarding everything from eligibility to transfers to compensation.
The most recent example came last week when a judge in Lubbock, Texas, essentially overruled the NCAA’s permanent ban on Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby, who admitted to thousands of NCAA gambling rules violations — including betting on his own team.
After legal maneuvering by the Big 12, Sorsby decided this week to leave Texas Tech and enter the NFL supplemental draft. Still, the case highlighted the NCAA’s vulnerability and the current challenges of governing college sports.
The Protect College Sports Act has drawn the support of the White House and from a wide range of parties across college sports, including NCAA president Charlie Baker.
The SEC and Big Ten, the wealthiest college conferences, have withheld their endorsements, concerned the legislation would unfairly limit their potential growth and ability to fully control their media rights. Even with the revisions, the SEC and Big Ten remain holdouts.
“We believe revisions are needed to secure our support for the bill,” the conferences said in a joint statement released during the hearing.
“What we did today is say we’re not going to let the most powerful and richest conferences dictate to the rest of America what’s going to happen to 500,000 athletes,” Cantwell said after the vote.
The bill preempts state laws dealing with name, image and likeness compensation for athletes and ensures those rights nationally. It would bolster rules related to a $2.8 billion antitrust lawsuit settlement put in place over the last year, and it includes some long-term healthcare guarantees for athletes and protections against improper agent activity.
It also included language to prevent a possible breakaway “super league” by the Big Ten and SEC and creates a path for all 130-plus schools that play NCAA Division I football to pool their future media rights.
While some, including billionaire businessman and Texas Tech booster Cody Campbell, have claimed that the pooling of media rights would unlock billions in additional revenue for all schools, the SEC and Big Ten have pushed back against the idea and said the conferences are better off on their own.
After revisions to the bill, the ACC and Big 12 were also included in the sections prohibiting mergers and acquisitions by the richest conferences.
“The new version (of the bill) includes a broader approach to the super league issue,” Cruz said during his opening statement.
Cantwell said that “we made big concessions to the Big Ten.”
Notably, the two Republicans who voted no were Roger Wicker from Mississippi and Todd Young from Indiana. Mississippi has two schools in the SEC (Ole Miss and Mississippi State) and Indiana two in the Big Ten (Indiana and Purdue).
The SEC and Big Ten have been accused of plotting to break away from the rest of the NCAA and form a so-called super league. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey took issue with that recently and publicly called out the private equity firms — Smash Sports, in particular — that have ramped up their own lobbying efforts in the past year to influence the legislation. Sankey said it’s private equity that is a threat to form a super league that would cut out all but the biggest brands and wealthiest schools from competing at the highest level of college football.
An amendment to the Protect College Sports Act proposed by Sen. Tammy Baldwin (Wisc.-D) that would have prohibited schools and conferences from working with private equity was voted down by the committee Thursday.
In the days leading up to the hearing, the NFL and NBA and their players’ associations voiced support for the bill, a positive sign for the Protect College Sports Act’s supporters because those professional sports unions had never gotten behind the SCORE Act.
Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO Sports Council, a coalition of leaders in pro sports leagues, came out against the bill on Thursday. The players’ associations for the WNBA and NWSLPA are also against the bill.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (Ala.-R), the former college football coach, earlier in the week said he does not yet support the bill and believes it unnecessarily overregulates college sports.
Cantwell called the legislation “landmark.”
Thursday’s vote was a significant step, but there is still a long way to go to get the bill to President Donald Trump’s desk.
The bill would need 60 votes to pass the Senate and is no guarantee to get through the House, where the SCORE Act failed for lack of support from both sides of the aisle.
Lawmakers are also working on a tight timeline, with summer recess looming in early August and midterm elections in the fall that will make it difficult to get any legislation passed.
But the biggest obstacle seems to be not making headway on Capitol Hill but getting college sports’ two most powerful conferences on board.
