Congress Should Not Put College Sports Under Federal Control

The Protect College Sports Act raises serious concerns about NIL and athlete rights, especially because it would cap compensation, limit transfer freedom and protect the NCAA from legal challenges.
That has been the through-line of college sports’ backlash against athlete empowerment from the beginning: not safety, not education, not competitive balance, but control.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz has long had a gift for aligning himself with powerful figures in college football circles, so it is of little surprise that this bill favors university presidents, conferences, coaches and the NCAA — the same groups that have fought for years against allowing the people who fuel the college sports money machine to receive a fair portion of the riches they generate, or meaningful power over the rules governing the sports they play.
The old power structure wants control back
Think Nick Saban and Dabo Swinney, two wildly successful coaches from the era directly preceding NIL and broad freedom of movement through the transfer portal. Both built championship programs when the power imbalance was obvious: coaches could leave, schools could make millions, conferences could cash television checks and athletes were expected to accept scholarships, wait their turn and be grateful.
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College sports changed when athletes gained the ability to leverage their own value. Suddenly, the old recruiting pitch about “creating value” was not always enough to convince elite players to sit for two or three years behind someone else. Suddenly, players had options. They could transfer. They could earn. They could listen when another program offered more playing time, more money or a clearer path to the field.
That reality made life more complicated for coaches. It also made college football more honest.
The Protect College Sports Act seeks to reverse that shift. Its central bargain is dressed up as stability, but it is really about returning power to administrators, coaches, conferences and the NCAA. It would limit athletes’ freedom to move and earn while giving the institutions that control college sports broad protection from antitrust challenges.
NIL protections come with a catch
The bill claims to preserve athlete NIL rights by barring schools, conferences and athletic associations from restricting an athlete’s ability to market NIL, earn NIL compensation or enter NIL agreements, subject — of course — to exceptions.
Those exceptions are the point.
Athletes would be required to report NIL agreements worth more than $600. The institutions they play for would send anonymized NIL data to the NCAA and College Sports Commission, which would maintain a public database supposedly designed to help athletes and agents estimate fair market value.
“Fair market value” is the kicker.
The bill was written to ensure athletes and their representatives remain at the mercy of schools, conferences and enforcement bodies in determining what that value is. It says NIL deals must have a valid business purpose and be commensurate with compensation paid to similarly situated non-athletes. That language is aimed at policing booster-driven or collective-funded payments that are framed as NIL but function more like recruiting inducements or roster payroll.
But the language is also vague enough to become a weapon. Who decides whether a business purpose is valid? Who decides whether compensation is commensurate? Who decides whether a quarterback, gymnast, point guard or softball pitcher is being paid for market value or being paid too much?
The answer, under this bill, is not the athlete. It is not a union. It is not a collectively bargained system. It is the same college sports power structure that spent generations insisting athletes were amateurs while everyone around them got rich.
A pay cap without collective bargaining
That is how we know what this bill really is. It does not recognize athletes as employees. It does not give them the right to unionize. It does not create a collective bargaining process. It does not require schools, conferences or the NCAA to bargain with athletes over compensation, health care, scheduling, roster limits, media-rights revenue or working conditions.
Instead, it studies those questions. It creates a commission to consider them later, after Congress has already handed schools the legal protection they have been asking for.
The bill would effectively federalize the House settlement’s revenue-share cap approved June 6, 2025, prohibiting schools, conferences, employees, volunteers and associated entities from arranging or providing compensation that would circumvent or cause a school to exceed that cap. Then it would extend that cap beyond the life of the settlement, adjusting it for inflation but preserving the basic structure.
That is not a free market. That is a federally protected compensation limit imposed on athletes who have no collectively bargained say in the system.
In professional sports leagues like the NFL, Major League Baseball and the NBA, salary caps and luxury taxes exist within labor systems that include collective bargaining agreements. Players have unions. They negotiate revenue splits. They bargain over free agency, benefits, discipline, travel, pensions, health care and workplace rules.
College athletes would get the cap without the union.
That distinction matters. A salary cap in a collectively bargained professional league is part of an agreement between labor and management. A compensation cap imposed on college athletes by Congress, while simultaneously declining to recognize them as employees, is something else entirely. It is management asking the federal government to lock in cost control before athletes gain the leverage to demand more.
Athlete protections around the edges
The bill includes provisions its supporters will tout as athlete protections. It would prohibit athletic department personnel from pressuring athletes into particular courses or majors, retaliating against academic choices or blocking internships, jobs and volunteer work — unless those activities conflict with class time or mandatory team activities.
That may sound fair until you remember that class time and team activities are always mandatory, and in college sports the team calendar often swallows everything around it. Coaches may not be allowed to pressure an athlete into a major on paper, but the athletic schedule still dictates what an athlete can realistically study, when they can intern and how much of the college experience they can actually access.
The bill also includes medical coverage requirements, scholarship protections and an athlete ombudsman. Those provisions are not meaningless. Some of them are overdue. But they do not change the power structure. They offer protections around the edges while preserving institutional control at the center.
That is the deeper problem with this legislation. It asks Congress to solve college sports by doing what college sports has always done: giving more authority to the people who already have it.
Federal control could backfire
The danger is not only to athletes. It is also to universities and conferences.
The bill would pull the federal government deeper into decisions about media rights, transfer rules, coach movement, recruiting windows, NIL valuation, postseason timing, broadcast access, conference structure and the preservation of rivalries. That is an extraordinary amount of federal involvement in what has historically been a messy but independent ecosystem of schools, conferences, courts, state laws, television partners and athletic associations.
College sports clearly needs national standards. The current system is chaotic. State NIL laws conflict. Transfer rules keep changing. Enforcement is inconsistent. The House settlement created a new compensation model without resolving the bigger labor question. The NCAA has spent years reacting instead of leading.
But a bad federal fix is still a bad fix.
Once Congress starts writing the operating manual for college sports, every major stakeholder will race to Washington for favorable treatment. Conferences will lobby for media-rights advantages. Schools will lobby for carve-outs. Coaches will lobby for roster and recruiting rules that protect their interests. Television networks will lobby around access and scheduling. The NCAA and CSC will lobby to preserve enforcement power. Athletes, who are younger, less organized and cycling through the system every few years, will be the least powerful constituency in the room.
That is how a bill sold as stabilization becomes regulatory capture.
Washington is not the answer
It is not hard to imagine how badly this could turn out. The federal government could freeze into law a system that is already outdated by the time it takes effect. It could create national standards that favor the richest conferences while claiming to protect everyone else. It could make it harder for athletes to challenge unfair rules in court. It could turn NIL enforcement into a bureaucratic guessing game. It could leave universities stuck complying with a federal sports regime that satisfies neither athletes nor administrators.
And it could give Congress a recurring role in college sports politics, which should worry everyone.
Imagine annual hearings over playoff access. Imagine senators pressuring conferences over rivalry games. Imagine lawmakers from football-rich states using federal law to protect local interests. Imagine every future dispute over transfers, revenue sharing or media distribution becoming another lobbying fight.
That is not stability. That is Washington discovering a new playground.
Media-rights pooling leaves athletes outside the room
The bill’s media-rights provisions are especially revealing. It would allow a broad entity of schools and conferences to pool and sell media rights with antitrust protection, provided certain conditions are met. Supporters will argue that this could prevent a Big Ten and SEC breakaway and preserve broader access across Division I. That may be the sales pitch. But the mechanism is still a federally blessed media cartel in which schools and conferences would coordinate the sale of rights while athletes would remain outside the bargaining structure.
The people on the field would still not have a true seat at the table.
That is the central flaw running through the bill. It treats athletes as the subject of regulation, not as parties to negotiation. It gives them representation in limited governance settings, but not bargaining power. It gives them an ombudsman, but not a union. It gives them disclosures, databases and compliance processes, but not control over the economic system built on their labor and fame.
Athletes need bargaining power, not more restrictions
College sports does need rules. It needs transparency. It needs enforceable health and safety standards. It needs real medical protections. It needs mechanisms to preserve Olympic and women’s sports. It needs a sustainable model that does not destroy every non-revenue program in the pursuit of football money.
But none of that requires Congress to cap athlete earning power while shielding schools from antitrust scrutiny. None of it requires pretending NIL is protected while building a federal apparatus to police whether athletes are earning too much. None of it requires giving administrators more legal certainty than the athletes whose work creates the value.
A better bill would start from a different premise: athletes are not problems to be managed. They are central stakeholders. They should have a legally protected right to organize, bargain and participate in shaping the future of college sports. Any national revenue-sharing system should be collectively bargained. Any compensation limits should come with athlete consent. Any health care, scholarship and transfer rules should be negotiated with the people affected by them.
That would be stability rooted in fairness.
The Protect College Sports Act offers something else. It offers stability for the powerful, cost control for the schools, legal protection for the NCAA and conferences and a smaller, more regulated version of freedom for athletes.
Congress should reject it.
College sports does not need a federal law that drags athletes back toward the old amateur model under a new name. It needs a system that finally admits the obvious: the money is real, the work is real and the athletes generating the value deserve more than another set of rules written by everyone but them.