The United States Senate passed legislation late Monday night that could reshape college athletics, sending the Protect College Sports Act to the House of Representatives.
The bipartisan bill, introduced by Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA), passed 77-22. The bill would establish a uniform, national standard for regulating spending in college sports, and would supersede fragmented state laws while creating new eligibility rules, transfer limits, sustainable revenue sharing, practical tampering rules and reasonable enforcement.
Student athletes would be subject to new name, image or likeness (NIL) requirements. The NCAA would also receive a limited antitrust exemption for schools, which the NCAA and its conferences can enforce their eligibility rules and transfer protocols with.
Health protections would also be put in place for athletes who suffered sports-related injuries or illnesses for five years post-eligibility and would require schools to maintain a minimum number of women’s and Olympic sports.
Despite overwhelming support in the Senate, the bill’s future is uncertain as it heads to the House, which is currently in an extended recess ahead of the November midterm elections.
The Big Ten Conference, which includes USC and other universities like Northwestern University and the University of Washington, issued a statement regarding the act passing the Senate.
“We are pleased the Protect College Sports Act has passed the Senate and are appreciative of the substantial work that has gone into the effort from the act’s authors, sponsors and supporters. We look forward to the next steps to passage as we continue to support the act as drafted.”
USC Annenberg Professor Jeff Fellenzer said some of the legislation’s most immediate effects for college athletes would revolve around transfer and eligibility rules.
“I think of primary interest would be the transfer portal rules,” Fellenzer said. “If they’re put in place, [they would] limit the number of transfer options to one free transfer.”
Fellenzer said the legislation addresses several areas of college athletics, but that a larger issue remains: athletes can’t collectively bargain over rules that directly affect them.
“They don’t really have a seat at the table,” Fellenzer said. “All these rules are made independent of player input, and that doesn’t seem right.”
For athletes at USC and across the country, Fellenzer said those decisions can have consequences that last beyond their college career.
“When you’re talking about the sweeping bills that significantly affect a person’s future at a critical time. If they’re aspiring to be professional athletes in development, you have no say,” Fellenzer said.
Isabella Grust, a former goalkeeper for the USC women’s soccer team, witnessed the changing landscape of college athletics firsthand during her five years as a student athlete. Grust said she saw the benefits and challenges of the current NIL system.
“I think on a national level, where there’s an equal playing field across all sports, all athletics, all programs is, in my head, the best way to go about this,” Grust said.
The current NIL system makes it difficult for athletic programs in smaller schools to compete against bigger, more populated schools. Under the current system, student athletes in larger schools accrue larger compensation that comes from sponsorships and promotional events.
Mateo Morales, a sophomore studying public relations and advertising, said that the current NIL system is “validating” for student athletes.
“The introduction of NIL has made the experience for college athletes a lot more validating, because at the end of the day, they are the people who are bringing in the fans, and they are the people putting in the work,” Morales said.
Grust, for her part, said the NIL system at USC allows athletes to access more resources and funding than those at smaller schools.
“Obviously at USC, you’re at one of the top named schools,” Grust said. “Money-wise and things like that, you’re ahead of smaller schools who just don’t get that opportunity.”
Those differences are among the issues the Protect College Sports Act is trying to address by creating a national standard across college athletics. Grust also said national regulation could affect college sports differently, particularly for female athletes, who haven’t experienced the same NIL opportunities.
“In terms of female representation in sports, I think putting more strict legislation would obviously hurt certain teams,” Grust said. “I do think there needs to be some type of balance of laws now where, you know, a lot of players are making insane amounts of money for being a college athlete.”
When it comes to women’s and Olympic sports protections, the bill would codify, or standardize, Division I sport minimums and enhance grant aid minimums for larger schools. According to the California Women’s Law Center, female athletes missed out on $1 billion in athletic scholarships in 2020. The bill would address this by creating an equal baseline in how much student athletes are paid, regardless of their gender, and would allow women’s and Olympic sports to remain the same size.
This new approach that the bill would implement would place all institutions under one national framework, regardless of geographic location and conference, and do what the NCAA said in a press release will “restore common-sense rules to college athletics.”
Edited by Jadon Frank and Bennett Weinschenk