Editorial: Congress should pass the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act

“The reason Congress needs to act,” Sen. Ted Cruz told us Monday, “is that Congress screwed this up in the first place.”

The chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation was talking about college sports. More specifically, he was railing against the infusion of massive amounts of money into one sector of what used to be an American tradition of collegiate athletics coupled with young people actually getting an education.

“We used to have a system that worked,” Cruz told us. “What we now have is utter chaos. We have student athletes transferring three, four, five times. We have players playing six, seven years. Athletes playing until they are 27, 28 years old. We have former professionals going back to play college sports. That has created a spending spiral that has bankrupted almost every college program. Many programs are losing tens of millions of dollars, and as a result we see almost every week a different program being canceled. We see women’s sports being canceled.”

Cruz is basically arguing that this cash race is not only precipitating the end of nonrevenue sports programs but reducing the nation’s hundreds of football programs to 30 or 40 viable ones, almost all in either the Southeastern Conference or the Big Ten. “It will essentially be a mini NFL” is how Cruz puts it. He’s speaking the truth.

How did it happen? The courts played a role after lawsuits argued the old system violated antitrust laws and unfairly prohibited players who were making their universities millions of dollars from fairly profiting from the commercial use of their “name, image and likeness,” or NIL.

That’s an ironic acronym if ever there was one. NIL can mean in excess of $5 million to the very elite players.

In 2021, the Supreme Court ruled against the NCAA’s limits on “education-related benefits.” Several years later, the House v. NCAA antitrust settlement opened the floodgates, making direct payments to athletes possible, and the cash started to flow.

We have had some conversations over beers with so-called “boosters” at big football schools. They’ve told us they happily spend to secure their school the best football players money can buy and beat out competing offers. Many of these boosters are very rich alumni who think nothing of dropping several million dollars.

On the one hand, these gestures reasonably can be viewed as altruistic. All the boosters get, after all, is a very good football team for their school, and even that’s assuming the costly players gel, of which there is no guarantee. You could argue that is their business. On the other hand, there is no question that the number of competitive college football teams has indeed dwindled, being as the top high school recruits, many of whom come from working-class families, find themselves sucked into this money pit.

These days, the story of snoozing in your high school bed, dreaming of one day playing for your favorite school, is a thing of the past. In most cases, elite players are being coaxed by agents to go for the highest offer, not the most inspiring campus. And if you miss out after high school, or want more later, you can try the so-called transfer portal. Ka-ching.

So what’s the solution? In the chairman’s mind it is the Protect College Sports Act, bipartisan legislation that would, in essence, be the federal government restoring an antitrust exemption for the NCAA, which could (and presumably would) then impose salary caps. Cruz notes that the pro leagues have those caps, as does global soccer. They are the only way to create fair competition. And if steely professional outfits have figured that out, colleges surely should be able to do the same. They’re colleges, after all, not pro teams.

Cruz has a long list of leagues and professional players who support the bill, which he is hoping will be presented next month to the Senate, where Cruz says he thinks it would pass with support from both sides of the aisle, and then be “enthusiastically signed” by President Donald Trump. Clearly, time is short for the bill to pass before the summer recess and the congressional elections in November.

The Big Ten and Southeastern Conference are the holdouts. They call some of the provisions “unfairly targeting” their schools. They certainly have the most to lose.

They and some of the schools are the chief beneficiaries of the current free-for-all, and their big cash advantage would be dissipated by this proposed legislation, no question about that. The leagues also don’t like the provision in the bill that would allow schools to sell their media rights as one entity rather than on a conference-by-conference basis.

The bill also stops the two mega-leagues from adding any more members, although we will have to see if that provision, like the whole bill, makes it through the Senate. That could be a negotiating chip with the Big Ten and the SEC.

Still, everyone involved here should act like they are educators — and coaches — first and should acknowledge that their responsibility is to a fuller universe of college athletes, some of whom are U.S. Olympians who do not get millions of dollars as they train in less popular sports. Yes, Ohio State and the University of Michigan have an advantage with the status quo, but that does not mean it is good for all their student-athletes.

We have sympathy with students getting reasonably compensated for their NIL and we know that the sepia-toned days of amateurism are gone. Perhaps they always were something of an illusion. But the current situation is simply awful.

A reasonable person should not want schools to be encouraged to function like mere businesses just to win a ball game. They are schools — many of them owe their real estate to the Morrill Land-Grant Acts — and if they can’t behave like educational stewards, they should be incentivized by Congress to do so. The SEC and the Big Ten simply are not the same as the NFL. Nor should they ever be.

Cruz told us that the NFL supports this legislation, as do many Democrats. We’ve written many times that we wanted to see more bipartisan legislation in Congress and kudos to the chairman not only for a sensible bill but for ensuring such support.

Time is short. But Congress absolutely should not fumble the chance to get this bill passed before the August recess.

And, one more time, the SEC, the Big Ten and the elite football schools should start thinking about a lot more than their fiscal self-interests.

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