The Protect College Sports Act Is Moving Forward. Are We Fixing College Sports or Rebuilding the Old NCAA?

For the first time in a while, major federal college sports legislation looks like it has some legitimate momentum.

The Protect College Sports Act cleared a significant Senate hurdle this week, with senators voting 74-24 to invoke cloture and move the legislation toward a final vote. That is a pretty substantial bipartisan margin in today’s Washington, especially on an issue as complicated as college sports. It follows a 19-9 vote in the Senate Commerce Committee earlier this summer. The bill has also accumulated support from hundreds of colleges, conferences, professional sports organizations, and some of the biggest names in college athletics.

Full credit to reporting from the Associated Press, Sportico, and The Athletic for providing much of the background and analysis informing this discussion. The Senate Commerce Committee’s materials and the official Senate vote record are also useful primary sources for understanding exactly where the legislation stands. (⁠Senate Commerce Committee)

The supporters are certainly recognizable.

Former Alabama coach Nick Saban has publicly advocated for the bill. Colorado coach Deion Sanders has joined him. Arkansas basketball coach John Calipari, Gonzaga’s Mark Few, and Houston’s Kelvin Sampson have supported it. Billionaire Texas Tech booster Cody Campbell has also become one of its most prominent advocates. The Big Ten and SEC, which initially had concerns about the legislation, eventually supported a revised version. (⁠AP News)

There is a reason this coalition exists. College sports need some structure.

The transfer environment has become incredibly difficult to manage. Eligibility rules are seemingly challenged in court every few months. NIL rules have changed repeatedly. Revenue sharing is now part of the system. Schools are spending enormous amounts of money trying to remain competitive, and administrators have legitimate concerns about what all of this means for women’s sports and Olympic programs.

The Protect College Sports Act attempts to address many of those problems. Among other provisions, the legislation would create national standards around NIL, eligibility and transfers, provide scholarship and health care protections, regulate agents, establish limits around athlete compensation, and give college sports organizations greater legal protection to enforce certain rules. The revised bill also attempts to close loopholes around associated entities and the revenue-sharing cap. (⁠Senate Commerce Committee)

Some of those ideas address very real frustrations.

I don’t think unlimited movement is necessarily healthy for college athletics. I don’t think having basic eligibility rules endlessly challenged in different jurisdictions creates a particularly sustainable national sports system. I certainly think athletes deserve clear health care, scholarship, NIL, and contractual protections. But there is a much bigger question underneath all of this.

What exactly are we trying to preserve?

A 2020s Economy With a Much Older Organizational Structure

College athletics has spent the last several years changing virtually everything about how its biggest sports operate.

Schools can directly compensate athletes. Athletes can earn NIL money. Football coaches make eight figures. Conferences sign media contracts worth billions. Private capital is circling the industry. Athletic departments are building increasingly sophisticated commercial operations. Football programs are hiring general managers and front offices.

The economic engine has changed dramatically.

The organizational structure governing that engine still traces much of its philosophy to a completely different era.

That is where the Protect College Sports Act raises an important structural debate. The bill would give the NCAA, conferences, and other governing entities additional legal protection to enforce rules that have repeatedly been vulnerable to antitrust challenges. Supporters describe those protections as necessary to establish enforceable national standards. Critics, including Sen. Chris Murphy and the Congressional Black Caucus, argue that the legislation gives too much authority back to institutions while restricting athletes’ economic rights. (⁠AP News)

There are legitimate arguments on both sides of that debate. National college sports probably cannot function particularly well when every rule can immediately become litigation in a different federal courthouse. At the same time, granting additional authority to the existing governance structure raises another question: should stability mean reinforcing that structure, or should this moment be used to design something substantially different?

College Football Is Not College Athletics

There are more than 500,000 NCAA athletes.

The overwhelming majority do not play Power Four football or DI men’s basketball.

They swim. They wrestle. They play softball. They run track. They play volleyball, soccer, lacrosse, tennis, golf, field hockey, baseball, gymnastics, and dozens of other sports. Their athletic departments operate under wildly different financial circumstances, and their sports have completely different economic models.

Yet so much of the current conversation about “fixing college sports” is driven by problems created primarily by the commercial explosion of major college football and men’s basketball.

That should at least make us ask whether one overarching regulatory model is the best answer.

Perhaps Power Four football needs different rules. Maybe major college basketball does too. Perhaps sports generating hundreds of millions of dollars through television, ticketing, sponsorships, licensing, and postseason competition require a governance structure that looks different from the one governing women’s rowing or Division III soccer.

That would not necessarily diminish the value of college athletics as an educational institution. A redesigned system could explicitly protect the broader athletic ecosystem while acknowledging that the economic realities of individual sports are no longer remotely comparable.

The current bill does contain protections aimed at women’s and Olympic sports, and supporters have repeatedly emphasized those provisions. The Senate Commerce Committee says the legislation would restrict major colleges from eliminating those programs and establish additional protections around scholarships and athlete benefits. Critics argue that the bill is still written to provide the least amount of guaranteed support to these groups, and that the money allegedly grown from pooled media rights does not have enough of an obligation to provide quality support to non-revenue sport programs.

Protecting programs and designing the right governance model are separate questions.

Maybe This Is the Moment to Build Something New

The debate surrounding the Protect College Sports Act is often framed as a choice between chaos and regulation, but there may be another question worth considering.

If Congress is willing to spend this much political energy rebuilding the rules of college athletics, should policymakers, schools, athletes, conferences, Olympic organizations, and other stakeholders also consider whether the underlying governance structure itself needs modernization?

There are useful ideas in the current legislation. National standards will provide clarity. Scholarship protections matter. Health care protections matter. Agent regulation will help athletes. Reasonable transfer and eligibility rules should make roster management more predictable and encourage students to earn degrees rather than sign 1-year deals for short-term economic gains. Media-rights pooling could create additional revenue opportunities for sports beyond the top two.

But those ideas do not necessarily require that every part of college athletics operate under the same economic assumptions.

College football has become an enormous entertainment business attached to universities. Olympic sports in college remain one of America’s most important decentralized athlete-development systems. Division II and Division III athletics serve their own unique institutional missions. Women’s sports are growing commercially at different rates and in different ways. Smaller Division I programs live in a financial universe that barely resembles the SEC or Big Ten.

Trying to govern all of those realities with one economic philosophy is an extraordinarily difficult assignment.

The Protect College Sports Act may ultimately become an important piece of whatever comes next. Its supporters believe stronger national rules can stabilize a system that has spent years bouncing between lawsuits, NCAA rule changes, state legislation, settlements, and emergency fixes. Its opponents worry that the legislation would cement too much institutional power without sufficiently restructuring the relationship between athletes and the organizations governing them. (⁠AP News)

Both arguments point toward the same underlying reality - college sports have changed.

The question now is whether federal legislation should primarily stabilize the structure we already have, or whether this period of disruption provides an opportunity to reconsider what the structure should look like in the first place.

Whatever Congress ultimately decides, the answer has to account for much more than the football programs we watch on Saturday afternoons.

There are hundreds of thousands of athletes whose sports, scholarships, educational opportunities, and competitive futures are connected to whatever system comes next. In my opinion, any long-term solution has to be built with that entire ecosystem in mind.