WASHINGTON D.C. — An attempt to establish federal, national standards on big time college sports–addressing NIL, annual player transfers and even coaches departing mid-season to take a bigger, better deal at a larger school–has passed the U.S. Senate, 77-22, with bi-partisan support. If the bill passes, it would be the first time Congress has directly regulated NCAA and college sports.
U.S. Senator, Maria Cantwell (D-WA), co-sponsored the Protect College Sports Act with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). The bill now goes to the U.S. House where it faces a post-election, lame duck session and must be passed before the current Congressional session expires in January when re-elected and newly elected lawmakers are sworn into office in 2027. If the House doesn’t vote on the PCSA, it will die and would have to be re-started in the next Congressional session. Pres. Donald Trump has indicated his support of the PCSA.
The bill codifies NIL, name, image, and likeness rights, protects student-athletes from predatory agents, establishes revenue sharing from media rights deals between larger and smaller schools, and safeguards scholarship, healthcare, and women’s and Olympic sports, according to Cantwell, who said in a Senate floor speech urging its passage, “Compensation on revenue sharing is probably the most important thing we could possibly do to enshrine in federal law today. This is saying, for the first time, that an athlete gets a percentage of the media rights, the ticket sales and the sponsorship. That’s not been said before in a court case decision. It was agreed to in a settlement agreement…called Grant House versus the NCAA. Now that settlement agreement has had its ups and downs, and I hope it prevails.”
The House Vs. NCAA anti-trust case was decided in a federal district court settlement that paid student-athletes $2.8 billion from a pay-out pool for lost NIL opportunities retroactive to 2016 and created revenue sharing among the Divison I schools who were permitted to allocated $20.5 million annually per school to its student-athletes in an attempt to retain players rather than players transferring to other schools in pursuit of larger NIL deals.
The PCSA establishes a federally protected right for college and university athletes to profit from their NIL. Schools could also share up to $48 million a year in revenue directly with players — more than double the current cap — with an extra $5 million reserved for women’s and Olympic sport athletes. Agents, meanwhile, could not take more than 5% of any NIL deal.
Adam Breneman, CBS Sports College Football analyst, reports that PCSA will guarantee student-athletes one free transfer within a 5-year eligibility window. Any player desiring to transfer again would be required to sit out one year and be ineligible for play during that year. Other facets Breneman reported include:
- The NCAA gets limited antitrust protection to enforce rules around eligibility, transfers and compensation (so the NCAA doesn’t get taken to court every day).
- Coaches would be restricted from leaving for another FBS job in the middle of the season.
- Schools could have access to as much as $27.5M in additional retention spending on top of the House settlement revenue-sharing structure.
- NIL stays, but there would be one national framework with tighter rules around booster/associated-entity payments.
- Players get federal protections for scholarships, healthcare and NIL rights.
Other key provisions of the bill include:
- Guaranteeing scholarships for ten years after eligibility, so athletes can complete their degrees, and ensuring student athletes cannot lose their scholarship because of injury or a bad game.
- Requiring Division I schools to cover out-of-pocket medical costs for athletic injuries or illness for current student athletes and extending that health care coverage for five years post-eligibility.
- Preventing women’s and Olympic sports from being cut by requiring schools to maintain a minimum number of sports.
- Giving athletes a private right of action to enforce provisions of the bill, including their NIL rights, agent protections, health and safety standards, scholarship protections, and medical coverage requirements.
Kitchy Cook, a former Congressional aide for sports policy with the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee now the Director of Government Affairs for Smash Sports said of the bill, “There is nothing limiting athletes earning potential from actual NIL deals. The PCSA has increased the cap limit that schools can share with athletes, but that does not include true NIL agreements. (A player) can still do a $1 million deal with Gatorade which does not affect the cap.”
Cook went on to add, “The Senate needed to provide an adversary for the athletes to negotiate against, which is why they allow them to unify the sale of their media rights which cannot happen until 2035 and coincides with the expiration of the House settlement. The issue is not athletes making money or coaches making money. It is the business competition between schools and conferences that is driving costs to rise at an exponential rate. That cannot be fixed until all schools in the division are economically aligned. In that scenario, coaching salaries and athlete pay would rise at a stable rate with increases in revenue.”
Cantwell advocated in her Senate floor speech for the PCSA, “There are no sound rules that prohibit an arms raise from taking place in people who are billionaires and millionaires (school boosters), putting any amount of money into their school program and our bill fixes that and creates rules across the board for everyone to follow so that we don’t have this exorbitant arms race. Now, I’ll be the first to admit, there’s more to do on stadiums. There’s more to do on other aspects of spending (in) college for sports, but we need to pass a bill tonight because we need to stop stealing money out of college, University institutions for education, for tuition, for professors and putting it into an arms race on sports. It’s time to make sports about playing sports again and not about the money.”
Opponents of the PCSA have included Democratic Congressional members who say the bill takes away the rights of the student-athletes to collectively bargain and form player unions. The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) condemned the Senate’s passage of the bill saying it fails to grant athletes employment rights and limits their private legal options via antitrust exemptions.
The 22 senators who voted against the bill were lead by Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who called the system exploitative, stating the bill protects the billions made by coaches and executives while suppressing bargaining power for a workforce that is predominantly Black. Murphy introduced failed amendments to cap coaches’ salaries and allow athlete unionization.
Florida Senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott voted against the legislation because of a provision capping conference membership at 20 schools and penalizing schools that transfer conferences. This restriction directly threatens the realignment options of major state programs like Florida State University and the University of Miami.