Protect College Sports Act clears Senate hurdle on NIL, eligibility

The Senate took a major first step to advancing standardized, federal guardrails on college sports as name, image and likeness (NIL) has transformed the landscape of collegiate athletics.

Lawmakers moved the Protect College Sports Act, led by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., onto the next phase, opening up the opportunity for the Senate to advance the bipartisan bill later in the week.

“I think most people acknowledge that the current landscape of college sports is a mess,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said ahead of the vote. “It needs to be addressed.”

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At its core, Cruz pitched the legislation as a means to corral the chaos that has unfolded in college athletics since the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) made its landmark decision in 2021 to allow student-athletes to benefit financially while playing collegiate football, basketball and many others.

“Some have asked why should Congress get in the middle of this? The answer is simple: because Congress screwed it up in the first place,” Cruz said during a press conference on Monday.

“It has been the federal antitrust laws applied in litigation after litigation after litigation that have had the effect of tearing down essentially all the rules,” he continued. “So right now it is the Wild West.”

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The Protect College Sports Act would broadly add restrictions to the transfer portal for student-athletes, create a uniform eligibility framework of five years, recruiting and tampering guardrails that establish when schools or agents can contact or recruit a student-athlete, a federal standard for NIL rules, and a revenue-sharing cap.

Opponents of the bill, including Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., contended that the Protect College Sports Act would take away bargaining power from student-athletes and create exemptions from antitrust laws for colleges.

“The ‘chaos’ is that (mostly black) athletes now have bargaining power and white coaches and sports industry execs hate it,” Murphy said on X.

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And the Congressional Black Caucus, led by Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., announced that it would not support the bill, charging in a statement that it would not support the legislation while “Black political representation is under attack across the country,” following the Supreme Court’s decision on the Voting Rights Act earlier this year.

“Several months ago, before the Senate ever reached this moment, the Congressional Black Caucus made clear that Congress should not rush to provide sweeping new federal protections and legal certainty to powerful athletic institutions while those same institutions remained largely silent as Black voting rights and Black political representation came under unprecedented attack,” the group said.

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Cantwell acknowledged the pushback, noting that “several are friends and allies.”

“Let me be clear, voting rights are sacred, and I will stand in that fight with anyone,” she said on the Senate floor. “But I cannot agree that the way to wage it is to hold thousands of student-athletes’ scholarships, health protections and future hostages to a Supreme Court decision they did not make.”