Why the Protect College Sports Act deserves to pass, flaws and all

To love college sports right now is to accept that it cannot love you back. The institution is a cluster of warring factions clinging to self-interest, an environment that has made villains of universities, boosters, corporations, judges, lawyers, agents, athletes and families, none of whom have shown appropriate concern for the damage they’ve done to the average fan.

It has allowed an off-putting kind of fatigue to seep into the fandom. Little works the way it once did. You spend a season falling for a developing roster — the ferocious young linebacker who advances from overpursuing to maintaining gap integrity, the precocious quarterback who no longer fixates on his first read — and by the next August, half of the squad is gone, sold to the highest bidder. You don’t get to watch a program get built anymore. You are forced to realize that everything is for rent, including your devotion.

That fatigue makes the strongest, most honest case for the Protect College Sports Act. It’s an ambitious yet imperfect Senate bill. It’s also absolutely necessary. It won’t solve every problem that ails college athletics because, sadly, that’s impossible for even a bipartisan governmental effort to accomplish. It neither assigns blame nor delivers retribution for all the parties that created the mess. But it does stand far enough above the chaos to look down and provide sustainable direction on a path forward.

It standardizes, for the first time in writing, what has been improvised and relitigated for five exhausting years: ground rules for name, image and likeness compensation that can’t be blown up in a lawsuit’s whim. In addition, it provides a revenue-sharing cap with real teeth instead of a wink and a workaround. There haven’t been enforceable, national guidelines since the walls collapsed on NCAA exploitation of student-athletes. There’s a chance this bill can become law by the end of summer, and if so, college athletics will have a degree of stability that should benefit both the major revenue-generating sports and the nonrevenue teams on which the athletes are truly students.

It would be much better than the current “Don’t hate the player; hate the game” way that everyone in the sport functions. The cynicism is so deep. No one takes responsibility. Everyone is working an angle. Coaches despise the atmosphere, but not enough for most of them to give up their multimillion-dollar deals. Athletes don’t take college tours as much as they sift through contractual agreements for compensation. Presidents and athletic directors serve money men without pretense. Supporters with throwback collegiate amateurism beliefs are mocked for their naivete.

It took 171 pages for lawmakers to reckon with all the problems and provide reasonable solutions that senators would actually support. There’s still a chance to squeeze in a Senate vote before a monthlong recess at the end of this week. If that happens, it moves to the House of Representatives for another round of scrutiny. If the bill doesn’t lose momentum during election season, if it doesn’t lose its meaning after more tweaks, President Donald Trump is expected to sign it into law.

For such a polarizing time in American history, the process has seemed almost quaint. Senators negotiated, at length, with people they don’t fully trust, working toward an outcome that nobody can claim as their own. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who don’t agree on much else, spent months leading an effort durable enough to survive a collision with the SEC and Big Ten and versatile enough to garner the endorsement of colleges and professional sports leagues that have vastly different views. This bill is neither a partisan trophy nor a capitulation to the most powerful forces in college football.

The authors have taken difficult steps in a genuine attempt to look at what college sports have become and take a stance while satisfying as many parties as possible. The Senate Commerce Committee lists current student-athletes among the bill’s supporters, in addition to the NFL, MLB, NBA, various coaches associations and the players associations for the NFL and NBA, which are predisposed to distrusting management. It does not make the bill infallible, but it means something. It shows people aren’t so cynical that they’d rather let chaos reign.

Still, there is reason to believe lawmakers could’ve done a better job seeking stronger student-athlete involvement. Some of the loudest organized athlete voices — Athletes.org, the National College Players Association — remain the sharpest critics. Their most persuasive complaint is that the antitrust exemption sitting at the center of this legislation gives the NCAA undeserved cover, something that a decade of lawsuits has denied it. In 2021, the NCAA lost the Alston case in the Supreme Court, which reshaped the entire landscape. The courts haven’t stemmed the NIL free-for-all, and the legal system also gave athletes freedom of movement through transfers. The NCAA’s rigidity and profiteering from athlete exploitation put it in a bind, and once its sins were dragged into a courtroom, the holes in its rationale became embarrassingly clear. Fortifying an antitrust exemption for college sports is key to establishing true rules, but it also disarms the athletes who keep winning in court. Making a clear-eyed endorsement of this bill requires grappling with that conflict.

Predictably, the bill stops short of making a college athlete a full-fledged university employee. It’s an issue that would destroy the NCAA’s entire financial model, and it’s one that no coalition this fragile was ever going to resolve. That’s an existential fight bound to outlast a bill that only renovated an old system.

But look at what those 171 pages actually accomplish. Uniform NIL rights, so a player’s earnings don’t depend on which state line he happened to be recruited across. A revenue-sharing cap that adjusts for inflation, so it doesn’t age into the same joke every number before it became. One protected transfer, not an auction every December. Agents’ fees capped at 5 percent, so that young athletes aren’t so easily fleeced. Medical coverage and injury protections that exist by mandate, not because a compliance office felt generous.

These are among the most important policies that make the bill a worthy candidate to become a law. Provided the text can stave off augmentation from bad-faith politicians trying to fight culture wars, the clarity in the Protect College Sports Act can be a stabilizer. It reduces risk that NIL, which has become a donor-funded subsidy for schools to pay players, has created a false economy. None of it fully repairs college athletics. All of it is better than a status quo that results in finger-pointing and vacuums that opportunists fill without remorse.

Can you imagine staying exactly where we are for much longer? Do you want another winter and spring of collectives bidding against one another for a sophomore who hasn’t started a game because, well, there’s nothing to stop them? Another year of 50 states going with 50 conflicting NIL statutes, each one written to protect its local teams? Another round of lawsuits that strips away what’s left of actual enforcement in college sports?

Continue down this road, and the long-feared super league likely stops being a hypothetical, and in that world, women’s and Olympic programs become even less prioritized in the chase for more football television money.

Rules, even ones we resist, sustain games. Consistency fuels habits. Parents pass down favorite teams to their children because the structure of these games holds and enables new fanatics to grow into the same rivalries, heartbreaks and triumphs that the previous generation taught them. You cannot pass down a moving target. Underneath the antitrust language and revenue formulas, this bill is trying to create space for us to keep holding that passion.

It’s not commanding a return to an exploitative past. It’s trying to hit the present in stride, providing just enough structure for the fans who want to follow their teams again — like, really follow them, season after season — without needing a spreadsheet, or a lawyer to translate what’s happening, or an unusually high tolerance for grief.

This bill won’t make college sports lovable again by August. But it might, finally, stop the sport from breaking your heart on purpose.