How Congress complicated its college sports fix
By Michael Jones
For a few days last week, the Senate looked ready to do something increasingly unusual in Washington: pass a major bipartisan bill.
The Protect College Sports Act had Republican and Democratic sponsors, overwhelming support from the Senate Commerce Committee and backing from some of the biggest institutions in American sports.
Its premise was straightforward. College athletics have been transformed by court rulings, a patchwork of state laws and the rise of name, image and likeness compensation, leaving schools and athletes without a uniform set of rules.
Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Maria Cantwell of Washington, the Republican chair and Democratic ranking member of the Commerce Committee, spent months trying to build one.
Then Congress happened.
By the time senators left Washington for their August recess last weekend, the bill had become entangled in concerns from Black lawmakers about athlete representation and economic power, a conservative campaign over transgender athletes, continued lobbying by colleges and athletic conferences and the basic problem of finding enough Senate floor time to resolve it all.
The legislation isn’t dead. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has committed to bringing it up when senators return in September, and Cruz said last week that it would be among the chamber’s “first orders of business.”
But its path to this point offers a useful window into why passing a major law is often so much harder than identifying a problem that Congress broadly agrees needs to be fixed.
A bipartisan bill with real momentum
Cruz and Cantwell introduced the legislation in May after months of negotiations. The bill would establish national rules governing NIL compensation, transfers, eligibility and other aspects of college athletics while providing new protections for athletes.
Those protections are substantial. The latest version includes scholarship guarantees, medical coverage for sports-related injuries and representation for current and recent former athletes on the governing boards that make college sports rules. At least one-third of the membership and voting power on those boards would have to come from current athletes or athletes who graduated within the previous decade.
The bill would also require certain institutions and athletic organizations to cover out-of-pocket costs for sports-related injuries, independent second opinions and catastrophic-injury insurance.
In June, the Commerce Committee advanced the legislation 19-9. Supporters eventually assembled a coalition that included major professional sports leagues and players associations, Olympic organizations, hundreds of colleges and universities and nearly two dozen athletic conferences.
Even two of the most powerful holdouts, the Big Ten and SEC, eventually negotiated changes with Senate staff.
That is usually what legislative momentum looks like.
Then the politics caught up
But lawmakers don’t write consequential laws in a vacuum, and the groups most enthusiastic about a bill aren’t necessarily the ones who get the last word.
The Congressional Black Caucus had warned Cruz and Cantwell for months that it believed Black athletes, coaches, agents and Historically Black Colleges and Universities were not being given enough influence over legislation that could reshape the economics of an industry their talent helped build.
Last week, as Senate leaders prepared to move the bill, the caucus formally opposed advancing it in its current form.
“The legislation before the Senate has evolved,” CBC Chair Yvette Clarke of New York said. “However, the fundamental concerns of Black collegiate athletes, coaches, agents, HBCUs, and the communities we represent have not.”
The caucus argued that the bill would give powerful athletic institutions new legal protections without sufficiently guaranteeing athletes a voice in a system that would replace today’s uncertainty.
The final legislation does include provisions aimed at some of those concerns, including athlete representation in governance and an entire title establishing grants to improve sports broadcasting and technology infrastructure at HBCUs. But the CBC’s position is that meetings and revisions aren’t enough if the final policy doesn’t adequately reflect the priorities of the people who will live under it.
“Meaningful engagement is measured by results, not meetings,” the caucus said.
At almost the same time, pressure was coming from the other direction.
Conservative lawmakers and activists raised alarms that the bill’s federal preemption language could override laws in 27 states restricting transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.
Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Jim Banks of Indiana and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama responded by filing an amendment intended to preserve those state laws explicitly.
The dispute became significant enough that the White House counsel’s office circulated a two-page legal analysis arguing the conservative interpretation was wrong.
The administration said the legislation would not preempt those laws because its eligibility provision doesn’t establish rules based on sex. Instead, it sets requirements such as being a student-athlete, meeting academic standards, not being a professional athlete, and complying with eligibility rules tied to state and federal law.
The actual text illustrates why the disagreement arose. Section 121 would prevent states from enforcing certain laws governing athlete eligibility when they conflict with the national framework, including provisions described in the bill’s eligibility section. But the legislation separately says nothing in it should override or modify Title IX.
In other words, a bill written primarily to bring order to NIL, transfers and college sports governance had suddenly become part of one of the country’s most contentious culture-war debates.
How the calendar became its own obstacle
None of this means Congress shouldn’t pass the bill. It doesn’t mean its critics are right about every provision, either.
It means legislating is rarely as simple as finding a good idea and collecting 60 votes.
Every major bill creates rules, distributes power and decides whose interests receive federal protection. That gives universities, conferences, athletes, civil-rights organizations, ideological activists and lawmakers themselves reasons to try to shape the outcome. Sometimes those pressures improve legislation. Sometimes they weaken it. Sometimes they simply make passage harder.
And all of that happens while the congressional clock keeps ticking.
By last week, the college sports bill was competing for precious floor time with government funding, Russia sanctions, cryptocurrency legislation, President Donald Trump’s nominees and Republicans’ plans for another reconciliation package.
Thune teed up an initial procedural motion to force the issue, but senators ultimately left town without taking the vote.
Now supporters have another month to work through the opposition.
“Time may have run out to protect college sports in August but there is plenty of time in September,” Cantwell said after the Senate adjourned. She said the challenges facing athletes and universities “aren’t going away” and predicted the bill would pass next month.
Cruz was similarly confident, declaring that the Senate would take up the legislation when it returns and send it to Trump.
They may be right.
But the bill senators consider in September will have arrived there after months of hearings, negotiations, amendments, lobbying, coalition-building, opposition campaigns and one missed deadline.
Some lawmakers would argue that this isn’t necessarily evidence that Congress failed to do its job. It’s what doing the job looks like.
Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.
