The Protect College Sports Act Isn’t Enough
A much-hyped piece of legislation is more bark than bite.
Within the past 20 years, college athletes have carved out more privileges, not by negotiating with their coaches or the schools for which they play, but by taking advantage of the legal system. In the courtroom, players have won the right to earn money off their image; obtained freedom of movement, allowing them to transfer between programs without penalty; and seen the creation of a revenue-sharing system allowing them to be paid directly by schools. As the legal defeats have piled up, the NCAA has spent millions lobbying Congress to try to claw back some authority. Now the organization’s efforts may have finally paid off: In late September, the Senate passed the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA), a bipartisan bill that its supporters hope will bring some needed stability to college sports. Now, the bill moves to the House of Representatives, which will reconvene after the midterm elections.
Since 2020, more than 40 bills aimed at establishing consistent national guidelines for college-sports programs have been introduced to Congress. But the PCSA is the one that’s advanced the furthest. As one might expect for a meaty piece of legislation, the bill addresses some issues and leaves others untouched. Despite its ambition, though, the PCSA isn’t significant enough to fix the problems within college sports; instead, its main outcome would be tipping the balance of power back in the NCAA’s favor.
College sports are more popular, and generate more revenue, than ever before. But the lack of unvarying guidelines about how the product should be constructed has created disarray regarding a number of subjects. One of many examples: In June, the NCAA passed new eligibility rules allowing athletes to play five seasons over five years. (Under the previous rules, athletes could compete for four seasons over the span of five years and were allowed a redshirt season for injuries or other atypical circumstances.) But the new rules are already being challenged in a class-action lawsuit brought by Division I players who played during the 2022–23 season and graduated this year. The players, some of whom already have begun to play professionally, claim they are owed a retroactive fifth season of eligibility, because the recent rule changes caused them to miss out on name, image, and likeness (NIL) opportunities, the recently adopted policy that allows players to monetize themselves.
This sort of legal confusion explains a common complaint about the college-sports system: that it has now overcorrected. In contrast to the recent past, when colleges never paid players other than covering tuition, a competition to lure sought-after athletes has now ignited across programs; starting quarterbacks in the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference might easily draw up to $3 million each in NIL deals. The push to build championship rosters has universities trying to outdo one another; some upper-echelon college-football programs are spending anywhere from $40 million to $55 million to field an elite squad. Ohio State, which is expected to challenge for a national championship this season, reportedly has the most expensive team in college football at about $50 million.
To some, this is just capitalism at work. College athletes generate billions in revenue for the NCAA; why shouldn’t they reap the rewards from their labor? Spending money to maintain a top program is no different from what happens across professional sports, where some athletes may earn hundreds of millions of dollars. However, decision makers believe that the gaps of inequity between schools are only widening, leaving many programs unable to keep up financially with the new landscape. Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington, a Democrat who co-authored the PCSA alongside Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, released a report noting the explosive rise in college-sports spending. According to cited data, 94 percent of all Division I programs spend more money than they earn. From 2005 to 2023, recruiting costs went up by 322 percent; over the same time period, coaching salaries spiked 370 percent.
But the only spending addressed in the PCSA deals with how much athletes are paid. Although the legislation would more than double the amount of revenue that schools can currently share with the players, the NCAA and Congress will decide player value by introducing hard restrictions on compensation. In theory, this might prevent a never-ending competition to secure a player’s services, but limits have failed before at stopping money from finding its way to athletes. A side effect might be the exacerbation of an underground economy where players are paid under the table by well-connected boosters—the same economy that the legalization of player pay was meant to disrupt. In light of reports that the College Football Playoff may expand its annual playoff field to 24 teams, it seems as if the college power brokers want it both ways—to be able to freely capitalize on their sport’s market value while limiting the rights of the players to do the same.
The PCSA would also give the NCAA a limited antitrust exemption, which would allow the organization to adopt business practices that normally would be viewed as illegal and anti-competitive. Major League Baseball has an antitrust exemption, but it also has a collective-bargaining agreement in place with the players, which sets agreed-upon rules about compensation, player conduct, and much more. Because the NCAA doesn’t have that, the organization would effectively stem the litigation that has allowed the players to develop their leverage. “First and foremost, one of our largest concerns is that you’re giving a serial antitrust violator an antitrust exemption,” Brandon Copeland, the executive director and a co-founder of Athletes.org, an advocacy organization that represents more than 5,000 college players, told me. “They have done nothing to prove they deserve that authority over people again.”
If schools are in such financial peril, what they’re willing to pay for the top coaches tells a different story. In most states, a college coach is the highest-paid public employee in the state. The 15 highest-paid coaches in college football each make more than $10 million a year. Nobody forced the University of Southern California to give its current head coach, Lincoln Riley, a $70 million buyout, should he be fired before his contract lapses. Colleges are hot to spend on facilities too: Nobody forced the University of Illinois to spend $20.9 million on the biggest jumbotron in college-football history, and costs weren’t an issue for Northwestern, which just opened a stadium that cost more than $800 million.
So despite what the overwhelming Senate victory might suggest, the proposed legislation has plenty of detractors. The NAACP, Congressional Black Caucus, the AFL-CIO, and Athletes.org are among the organizations that have strongly voiced their opposition. The NAACP has gone a step further and accused lawmakers of using this legislation to institute a modern-day version of “sharecropping.” Because Black athletes make up over a third of college basketball and football players, the organization sees the hard cap on player earnings as a civil-rights issue.
“The crisis is pretty simple,” Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told me. “Athletes have started to get rights. They have power, and coaches and athletic directors and the sports-industry CEOs do not like that, because now they have pressure to share the $14 billion in revenue that the college-sports industry makes with the most valuable participants in the college-sports industry: the players.” Murphy and fellow Democratic Senator Cory Booker filed an amendment to the PCSA that would have capped coaches’ salaries at $5 million a year. The amendment failed 47–52, but that so many supported Booker and Murphy’s efforts showed that some lawmakers at least recognize the hypocrisy of limiting athletes while leaving coaches alone.
Some elements of the bill do address the current issues. For example, under this legislation, an athlete could transfer once without losing eligibility; after that, they would have to sit out for a season when they transferred, with a few exceptions for extraordinary circumstances. This system will prevent players from hopping around from program to program in search of the best deal—a fair shake, because part of the appeal of college sports is watching players develop in the same place over time. At the same time, coaches can still come and go as they please; the only thing the bill addresses, in that regard, is that it prevents football coaches from leaving for another job during the season. Boiled down, the players would lose their ability to maximize their value in a competitive marketplace, while the adults would keep theirs.
One of the bill’s most prominent supporters is Nick Saban, who won seven national championships before retiring as head coach of the University of Alabama in 2024. Saban, now an ESPN college-football analyst, was a key figure in lobbying President Trump and Congress to intervene. “I think a lot of the issues that we have right now could be resolved in this bill, if people would get on board with it,” Saban said before this college-football season began. “This bill is not perfect, but it’s better than everything else, and it’s certainly 100 times better than what we have now, and it probably solves 80 percent of the problems.”
Does it? While no piece of legislation can ever be perfect, a bill that mainly codifies the NCAA’s authority—while undercutting the players who have built the sport into a multibillion-dollar powerhouse—lends some credence to the NAACP’s analogy. After slavery, sharecropping was supposed to provide Black Americans a pathway to financial freedom. Instead, it became an oppressive system where the landowners controlled the resources and Black farmers had no means to protect themselves. Yes, it’s an extreme example, but the truth is that the PCSA doesn’t fundamentally change anything—it keeps the system as the power brokers want it to be.
