DESTIN, Fla. — The bill is finally coming.
After years of dead ends, a bipartisan bill on college sports from Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and ranking member Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., is expected to be introduced within days, sources familiar with the legislation told CBS Sports on Tuesday night. Language for the bill is being finalized and is now moving through the standard pre-introduction process.
The bill is expected to carry the prize college sports leaders have chased for the better part of a decade: a limited antitrust exemption regarding player eligibility and transfer rules — the legal shield that would let the industry write its own rules and enforce them without being challenged in the court system by players seeking additional years on the playing fields and courts.
What else is in the bill has largely remained a mystery, frustrating university leaders who previously backed the since-withdrawn SCORE Act, which also promised antitrust protection. As with any bipartisan bill, compromises were part of the process in drafting the Cantwell-Cruz bill, and what did and didn’t make it into the upcoming legislation is paramount to the power players.
What is known among those leaders is that the bill will address player movement in the transfer portal and eligibility windows, legally limiting player movement to as few as one transfer per career. The NCAA is close to adopting an age-based eligibility model that would allow players to compete in up to five seasons.
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Getting salaries under control
Sources familiar with the upcoming bill told CBS Sports that the upcoming bill would also impose a hard, enforceable salary cap on players.
Schools began sharing a portion of their revenues with players because of the House v. NCAA settlement a year ago, but outside NIL deals, including those affiliated with booster collectives and multimedia rights holders, have allowed universities to circumvent the system and supplement players’ salaries outside the $20.5 million that schools are permitted to share with players.
Additionally, the College Sports Commission, which is tasked with policing those deals, has come under fire from athletic directors after similar NIL deals were flagged in the system. The CSC recently won an arbitration hearing involving contracts for 18 Nebraska football players that it deemed were tied to an “associated entity,” blocking the players from deals totaling more than $1 million. Athletic directors have voiced concerns about rival schools circumventing the rules. Booster and third-party money have been routed around the system, resulting in paydays that balloon beyond those of the revenue-sharing program.
The bill would not kill name, image and likeness money, sources said. Legitimate, true-market NIL deals would face no cap at all. What it would kill is the workaround with multimedia rights holders and other associated entities.
Asking for help
Texas A&M athletic director Trev Alberts, who helped build the College Sports Commission as a member of its implementation committee, put the stakes plainly. Schools agreed to the rules, which clarified NIL deals tied to a “valid business purpose,” and yet several have rebelled against the system.
“We’ve got a simple choice to make,” Alberts said Tuesday. “Do we want to be governed or not? And we are sending a very strong message that college athletics refuses to be governed.”
President Donald Trump’s executive order earlier this year also drew a line between fraudulent NIL schemes and a safe harbor for deals struck at fair market value.
Perhaps the most controversial language in the bill is the expected introduction of media rights pooling, sources told CBS Sports. The bill would allow schools and conferences to combine their broadcast inventory and sell it together. It’s the same concept Cantwell has pushed since March, when she and Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., released a discussion draft of the College Sports Competitive Act. Backers have estimated that pooled rights could generate more than $9 billion in new revenue, with guardrails meant to keep schools from cutting scholarships in women’s and Olympic sports.
Cantwell’s draft provided schools with the option to be included in pooling rights, rather than being forced to participate.
Concern over pay for coaches
One question hangs over the draft: coaches’ pay. Earlier this month, a presidential committee circulated a draft of ideas for discussion that would place a cap on coaches’ salaries, which have ballooned over the last decade, with 13 major football coaches set to be paid at least $10 million next season. A person familiar with the drafting was unsure whether a provision addressing coaching salaries made the introduced version, but said lawmakers “will try to get it in markup if it didn’t.” Schmitt has named “skyrocketing coaching contracts” among the forces breaking the model.
The big question lingering over college athletics is the unknown. What’s in the bill that athletic directors and conference commissioners are not expecting?
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said he has been briefed on the Senate talks. Speaking Tuesday on the second day of the SEC’s spring meetings, Sankey declined to characterize what’s inside. Asked how informed he was, he answered in two words.
“I’m informed,” he said.
Will the bill pass?
Several conference and university leaders signed a letter endorsing the upcoming bill last week without having seen the final draft. Leaders who signed the commissioners from the ACC and Big 12, two of the four largest conferences in college sports. Noticeably absent were the signatures of Sankey and Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti.
“I was asked a week and a half ago to sign on to support a bill I haven’t seen. I think that’s an enormously bad way to take a position,” Sankey said. “It would be important to learn what might be identified.”
Last week, for the second time in under a year, House leadership pulled the NCAA-backed SCORE Act before a floor vote — this time after the Congressional Black Caucus came out against the bill, which would have granted the NCAA its own antitrust protections. Sankey said he “spoke candidly” with the SEC’s athletic directors and coaches about the collapse.
The Cruz-Cantwell effort has a better chance to reach the president’s desk.
Obstacles still face the bill, including committee hearings typically tied to the slow-moving legislative process. A tightening calendar is the primary pressure. Trump’s April 3 executive order set an Aug. 1 deadline for new national rules and threatened federal funding for schools that don’t fall in line. Sankey called it “well-purposed to try to motivate people towards solutions in that period of time.”
The Senate’s summer recess begins in August, and legislators will be in campaign mode for the midterm elections when they return to Washington, D.C. If momentum stalls on the bill before August, there is pessimism that it will be introduced for a vote.
Sankey and other commissioners have cautioned what could happen if federal legislation fails to cross the finish line. He said Tuesday that the absence of federal legislation “creates more fracturing because conferences will have to make decisions.”
Big Ten and SEC leaders have discussed self-governance and the creation of new bylaws to police the ever-changing world of college athletics on the conference level. Those rules would likely differ from conference to conference, setting the stage for more concerns about competitive inequality.
