Senate approves bipartisan Protect College Sports Act in 77-22 vote
The Senate passed the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act on Monday by a 77-22 vote, advancing a federal plan to regulate athlete payments and transfers in college sports amid what lawmakers called industry “chaos.” The measure would give the NCAA new authority over name, image and likeness rules and limited antitrust protections to enforce them.
Backed by more than 70 senators from both parties, the bill is the result of years of Senate negotiations that intensified after a lawsuit settlement allowed colleges to pay players. Supporters say the legislation aims to end uncertainty and codify the settlement into law while creating new guardrails intended to rein in rapidly rising costs for colleges.
Republican Texas senator Ted Cruz, who negotiated the bill with a Democrat senator, Washington’s Maria Cantwell, argued Congress must act, saying: “It would be nice if college sports could somehow magically fix itself, but this is a matter of law, federal law, and only Congress can fix it.” Donald Trump praised the bill in a social media post after the late night passage, saying: “This is a really big deal,” he said. “It will not only save college sports, it will save the colleges themselves.”
Proponents say the bill would curtail constant litigation and uncertainty and would provide hundreds of thousands of athletes with new health and labor protections. Critics contend the measure falls short for athletes; Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat who has worked with labor and civil rights groups to rally opposition to the bill, said: “This is a bill that essentially ensconces a system of exploitation, and it doesn’t fix the broader problems.”
The legislation would codify the 2025 court settlement that allowed colleges to directly pay players and that reshaped the industry, a shift the Senate noted has produced football roster payrolls that can exceed $40m. It would enshrine a revenue cap allowing schools to share up to $21.5m with players and would permit up to an additional $27.5m in payments through a retention fund — a change that helped win the support of the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference — and would allow schools and conferences the option of pooling TV media rights.
The bill would limit transfers and eligibility by restricting players to one “free” transfer over five years without sitting out a year, with some exceptions, and by capping total eligibility at five years. It would also restrict coaches from leaving during the season, force schools that want to switch conferences to spend three years as independents, and prevent conferences from expanding above 20 programs; the bill’s proposed eligibility limit was cited amid backlash to schools’ boundary-pushing, including LSU’s now-canceled plans to place players on the roster who had participated in NFL training camps.
Opposition has also come from groups including the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus and the AFL-CIO in part because the bill leaves unresolved whether athletes should be considered employees with collective-bargaining rights. All four Black Democrats in the Senate — Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, Lisa Blunt Rochester and Angela Alsobrooks — opposed the bill; Booker, who played football at Stanford in the late 1980s on a scholarship, said it wasn’t until college athletes were able to begin to win cases in court that the power started to shift, “and now the NCAA is coming here to the United States Senate, asking for sweeping powers” to exempt antitrust laws, adding: “We know who this bill is protecting.”
The measure still requires House approval to become law; the House failed repeatedly over the last year to bring a different version to the floor and is in recess until after the November elections. Lawmakers will have to start over in the next Congress if the bill does not clear both chambers by the end of the year.