Next week in Congress, the clock starts ticking on a groundbreaking bill designed to overhaul college sports with nobody quite sure how an overwhelming wave of election-night victories for Democrats across the country will reset the debate.
Still run by Republicans for a lame-duck session that begins Monday, the House of Representatives will decide whether to proceed with the Protect College Sports Act, which passed the Senate by a 77-22 margin last month.
The bill, which among other things locks in rules that regulate how athletes are paid and builds in protections for Olympic sports, always faced tougher sledding in the House, even before Democrats won at least 247 seats with the counting still underway Thursday.
The questions now are whether the current set of House Democrats, who mostly oppose the bill, will see any reason to vote for it in this lame-duck session; and also how the results impact a smaller group of Republicans who didn't support the legislation.
“I don't think there's anyone who walked into a voting booth and said, ‘You know, I’m voting for this person because they're going to represent me well on college sports and those issues,'” said Brandon Copeland, a former NFL linebacker who is executive director of Athletes.org, which has pressed the idea that more problems in the industry could be solved through collective bargaining than through Congressional action.
Various voices — including the NCAA, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, New York Yankees president Randy Levine, Texas Tech regent chair Cody Campbell, Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and President Donald Trump, are pushing for the bill. They point to its overwhelming bipartisan support in the upper chamber as a signal that the legislation is as good a compromise as Congress can get on such a difficult issue.
“Not acting ... would mean not enshrining these transformative student-athlete benefits into federal law,,” said Tim Buckley, the NCAA's senior vice president of external affairs. “The association looks forward to working with the House to get this bill across the finish line.”
Player advocates question Olympic protections in bill
Supporters of the bill say that without a Congressional mandate, schools under pressure to pay players in the money-making sports, football and basketball, will let smaller sports that feed the Olympic pipeline wither.
Another players' group, the National College Players Association, say the measure doesn't protect Olympic and women's sports the way it claims to.
The group's analysis of the bill found that around 70% of Division I athletic departments don't reach the $50 million revenue threshold that would require those schools to support as many athletes in “non-revenue” sports — i.e., Olympic and women's — as they did in 2024-25.
The group cites language that sunsets those provisions after four or nine years, depending on the spending level, and also says the measure could allow the NCAA to rewrite rules to bypass the entire regulation.
“My hope is the election tanks the bill, because there's just not enough time to get it in a position to where it's fair to the athletes,” NCPA executive director Ramogi Huma said.
The USOPC doesn't question the conclusion that 70% of schools would be free to cut small sports. But it said its research showed that 77.2% of U.S. Olympians at the last two Olympics competed at Division I schools that produced at least $50 million in revenue and would be covered by the new regulation.
“I don't think any of us, whether it's a conference commissioner or an institution or us, would say this bill is perfect,” said Sarah Hirshland, the CEO of the USOPC. “But it is the best compromise we've all been able to get to with an enormous amount of effort. We're bullish on it as a significant vehicle to make real progress in protecting Olympic and Paralympic sport.”
SEC, Big Ten think of their future, with or without a new law
The nation's major sports conferences have spent months, even years, thinking about the future both with Congressional legislation and without it.
Last month, the Big Ten passed rules designed to make its spending guidelines conform with numbers in the bill. Plaintiffs' attorneys in the legal case — House vs. NCAA — that set the framework for NIL payments immediately disputed the move, while the Big Ten said nothing prevented a single conference from making its own rules.
Along those lines, the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference — which initially withheld support for the bill — have talked openly about moving toward "conference-led governance" if Congress doesn't act. The thought is they would set their own rules in an attempt, mostly, to rein in spending in what has become a costly bidding war for talented athletes.
What's clear, though, is that they'd really like Washington to tell them to cut out the spending wars instead of doing it themselves.
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