College sports are a mess.
The House v. NCAA settlement cleared the way for college athletes to be paid for their labor, name, image and likeness. That was long overdue. However, the unintended consequences created a landscape of unlimited transfers, pay-for-play, unenforceable rules and a toothless NCAA.
We are rapidly headed toward the untenable paradigm of mega conferences, have-and-have-not colleges, professional college players who are unrecognizable as student athletes and, in some instances, a deemphasis of women’s and Olympic sports.
However, there just might be a way to return sanity to college sports while still protecting athletes’ rights to be paid for their work. It is in the form of the Protect College Sports Act that was just introduced in the U.S. Senate.
The bill, co-sponsored by Texas Republican Ted Cruz and Washington Democrat Maria Cantwell, addresses the most pressing issues in college sports and provides reasonable and enforceable solutions. Here are a few of the highlights:
–It limits athletes to one transfer without losing eligibility. Players will have to sit out a season if they transfer multiple times.
–The bill establishes a five-year eligibility window, while prohibiting athletes who have already played professionally from participating.
–It creates enforceable compensation caps and preempts the hodgepodge of state laws. The aim is to make it more difficult for schools to create workarounds of revenue-sharing limits or to offer bogus NIL deals.
–Coaches would be prohibited from leaving one job for another during the season.
–Under the legislation, conferences could pool media rights. The thought here is that if conferences band together, they could increase revenue while discouraging conference realignment poaching.
–Perhaps most importantly, the bill gives a limited antitrust exemption to the NCAA. Much of the instability in college sports has come from court decisions limiting or negating the NCAA’s ability to enforce rules. This bill says that if the NCAA is enforcing rules established by the law, it cannot be attacked as an illegal restraint of trade.
The Senate Commerce Committee, chaired by Cruz and ranking member Cantwell (and also attended by Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia), held a hearing Wednesday on the bill.
Former WVU President Gordon Gee and former Alabama Coach and West Virginia native Nick Saban were among those testifying in support of the legislation. Gee, who has been pushing for Congress to act, said the bill will “bring fairness and stability to college sports” while giving schools billions more in revenue through pooled media rights.
Saban said, “Right now in college sports we have no rules. The NCAA cannot enforce their own rules. Every time they try to enforce the rules, they are subject to a lawsuit. It’s a race to the bottom.”
The bill faces obstacles, starting with the fact that Congress cannot seem to agree on much of anything. In addition, the two biggest conferences—the Big 10 and the SEC—have already come out against the legislation.
They released a statement opposing the bill, saying it leaves “critical issues unresolved.” What they did not say is that they are the alpha dogs more concerned with protecting their own dominance at the cost of the rest of the college and university sports landscape.
There is no going back to the way college sports used to be, and that’s appropriate. For too long, schools took advantage of the cheap labor of athletes while raking in billions of dollars. However, the current system is fundamentally flawed in ways that are turning college sports into something unrecognizable, damaging women’s and Olympic sports, and leaving too many young athletes with a temporarily flush bank account but no education to rely on when the money runs out.
This legislation may not be perfect, but it is a significant improvement over the current broken system. It creates a fair, enforceable, and predictable infrastructure for college athletics going forward.
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