The Protect College Sports Act passed through the Senate on Monday with a 77-22 vote, but California’s Democrat senators were split on the issue. Sen. Alex Padilla voted to pass the bill, while Sen. Adam Schiff voted to reject it.
“Colleges are facing impossible pressures in this new era, and the vast majority of the colleges that I represent – the ones that may never see their games televised or their players go pro – are fighting an uphill battle,” Schiff wrote in a statement to Annenberg Media.
The act covers some eligibility and transfer rules, conference realignment, the departure of coaches and revenue sharing, among other changes.
“While this bill includes some important reforms on these matters, it does not strike the right balance overall, delivering a good deal for coaches and administrators and some of the powerhouse schools, but not enough for the students at the center of college sports,” Schiff wrote.
For Padilla, the bill was positive not only for athletics but for student education.
“College athletes are students first,” he wrote in a statement released September 28. “I am proud to have secured critical provisions to better support their success both in and out of the classroom by strengthening oversight of health and safety standards, holding colleges and universities accountable for ensuring students achieve academic success.”
With the act seeking to enact a one-time transfer rule, student-athletes would only be able to transfer once during their eligibility period without having to sit out a year.
College basketball athlete AJ Storr has used the transfer portal in pursuit of playing time and NIL cash, according to Sports Illustrated. Storr has played at eight different schools. The bill would prevent similar cases from occurring.
The current proposal also discourages conference realignment. USC, along with a number of other teams such as UCLA, University of Washington and University of Oregon, recently switched from the Pac-12 to the Big Ten Conference, leading to the collapse of the former.
Under the act, conferences would be capped at 20 teams to avoid “superleagues,” and schools wanting to switch would first have to spend three seasons as independent, meaning schools would be without a conference for three years, losing revenue as a trade-off for the switch.
Among the other big changes are antitrust protections for the NCAA, required usage of media rights money from high-revenue sports to maintain non-revenue-generating athletics programs and a requirement for athletes who represent themselves as a sports agent to register with the federal government, according to Yahoo Sports.
While the bill has cleared the Senate, the House will vote on its enactment after the midterm elections.
Schiff wrote that the bill would increase the difference between “the haves and have-nots of student athletics, at a time when that is already an overwhelming problem.”
“We should choose either a narrower bill that focuses on specific existing abuses, or a broader one to tackle systemic problems, before granting such a broad antitrust exemption to the NCAA,” Schiff wrote in his statement.
Edited by Scott Hills, Miranda Huang and Adilene Gomez Santiago.