WASHINGTON — Two key senators involved in a long-simmering debate over fixing college sports have introduced a bipartisan bill designed to break a congressional logjam that would regulate payments to student-athletes, limit them to one “free” transfer over their careers and create a “Lane Kiffin Rule” to restrict coach movement during the season.
Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Maria Cantwell, D-Washington, the chair and ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee that oversees college sports, briefed The Associated Press on details of the bill they crafted in hopes it can get the 60 votes needed to clear the Senate.
“This is a stability bill, not just an NIL bill,” Cruz said, referencing the name, image and likeness payments that have led to college football rosters with $30 million payrolls and reshaped that sport while also affecting others.
Cantwell said she and Cruz teamed on the legislation “because he and I really do believe the college sports system is in a bit of chaos.”
The bill looks very much like a “best of” pair of legislative proposals — one called SCORE, another called SAFE — that have gone nowhere over the past several months. It contains two elements the NCAA has supported: a limited antitrust exemption and a clause that would preempt much of the patchwork of state laws currently regulating NIL payments.
Meredith Page, the chair of the NCAA Division I Student Athlete Advocacy Committee and a former volleyball player at Radford University in Virginia, called the bill “a phenomenal step,” especially after the latest setback for the SCORE Act, which the committee she leads also supported.
“I think this has lots of great protections,” Page said, “and gives the ability for us to stabilize the field that is so, so unstable right now.”
College sports leaders have been looking to the federal government for help as they grapples with the rising costs of paying players and a transfer-heavy climate, which have combined to threaten some sports, many involving women, that often generate little or no revenue but make up the backbone of the pipeline for U.S. Olympic teams.
This bill, called the Protect College Sports Act, would offer what Cruz and Cantwell said was targeted antitrust protection for the likes of the NCAA and the College Sports Commission, which was part of the largely Republican-backed SCORE Act that many Democrats opposed. That would be in exchange for what Cruz said would be “public-facing protections” for athletes in 10 areas, including guarantees for health insurance and scholarships, as well as more stringent regulations for both NIL deals from third parties and agents who broker their deals.
“I think it’s better predictability,” Cantwell said. “Why did we do it? Because when you’ve got thousands of athletes being cut, hundreds of programs being cut, the risk to the whole infrastructure was too high to not try to get better predictability.”
The bill would limit players to one unrestricted transfer over the course of their college careers — a widely supported idea across the country — and would adopt something close to the five-year eligibility period the NCAA appears ready to enact next month.
The bill also tries to regulate coaching movement. Kiffin’s sudden move to LSU from Southeastern Conference border rival Ole Miss while the Rebels were preparing for the College Football Playoff last season put a fine point on an issue that has only gotten worse in an era when teams spend millions to fill out rapidly shifting football rosters: Schools have less patience (and more money) to devote to hiring coaches for a quick fix.
Under terms of the bill, midseason coaching changes would be prohibited.
“It’s not fair or right to poach a coach in the middle of the season while the team is still competing,” Cruz said before making a comparison to traditional professional sports. “There’s a reason the NFL has a rule that you can’t do that. Obviously, NFL teams hire coaches away from each other, but they don’t do so in the middle of the season.”
The bill would also rework the Sports Broadcasting Act to allow conferences to pool their TV rights — a move proponents have said could add billions of dollars to the ecosystem in a conclusion the SEC and Big Ten believe is inaccurate.
The senators said conferences wouldn’t be required to join the media pooling, but those that do would have to use a percentage of any increase from that to support women’s sports and Olympic sports (those outside of football and men’s basketball). That alone could be a dealbreaker for the SEC.
The commissioners of the Atlantic Coast Conference, Big 12 and SEC said they were looking forward to reviewing the details, with the ACC’s Jim Phillips saying he hoped the bill afforded his league a chance to “build upon today’s positive momentum” and the SEC’s Greg Sankey saying “bipartisan engagement in Washington on these issues is critical.”
Other proposed legislation has faced multiple challenges, with some of those expected and others newer.
The SCORE Act, which garnered little support from Democrats, was on the House schedule last week but was abruptly pulled off when the Congressional Black Caucus and NAACP came out against it. Even if it had squeaked by in the razor-tight House, it had virtually no chance of passing as written in the Senate, where it would need 60 votes to break a possible filibuster.
“The Congressional Black Caucus and I have the same objective: stop the ‘SEC SCORE Act,'” said Cantwell, referencing the SEC as one of dozens of conferences that have supported that bill.
Some Democrats were reluctant to support a bill, like SCORE, that prohibited college athletes from being classified as employees of their schools. PCSA, the new bill, takes what Cantwell said was a neutral stance on the issue of employment.
“Sen. Cruz and I have been very concerned about producing a bill that’s not just about the 1% of athletes who go on and have a professional career,” she said. “We took care of the entire ecosystem and have opportunities for athletes to continue to have that collegiate experience.”
Mit Winter, a Missouri attorney who specializes in sports law, said the proposal was so sprawling he was skeptical it will pass as is.
“When you start getting into the stuff about giving the CSC and NCAA antitrust exemptions and liability protection from enforcing rules on athlete denial of compensation, I think that’s where things get a little more dicey,” he said.
“There almost wouldn’t be any reason from the school side or NCAA side to collectively bargain if this entire bill is enacted into law because it provides everything they would want on their side from collective bargaining: limit on transfers, has the eligibility rules and it caps compensation for the athletes.”