It's been clear for a while that Republican Senator Ted Cruz wants to be known as the person who saved college sports -- or at least who passed the right piece of legislation for the times. As the head of the Senate Commerce Committee for the last year and a half, he's seen plenty of hearings and other legislation fall by the wayside. But in Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell, he evidently found just the right partner for establishing a piece of bipartisan legislation that might clear the 60-vote bar in the Senate.
The Protect College Sports Act, co-sponsored by Sens. Chris Coons (D) and Eric Schmitt (R), was introduced on Wednesday as a genuine bipartisan effort that checks plenty of boxes for people on each side of the aisle. There's no guaranteeing that it will pass, but it seems to provide more reason for optimism than the recent and one-sided SCORE Act, which was recently pulled due to lack of support.
There are plenty of landmines to avoid, and with midterm elections only a few months away, things have to move pretty quickly for it to pass. But let's look at what makes this one different and what the pros and cons might be if it gets all the way to the finish line.
Pro: The bill's authors understood the assignment
With how long it's taken for any piece of legislation to even come up for a vote, it appears that all of the co-sponsors understood that there was one shot at passing something. So they put everything in this bill.
As a piece of NIL legislation, it protects NIL as a concept and allows athletes to transfer once without any sort of penalty (and then forces them to sit for a year with a second transfer); it establishes a five-year eligibility framework with the fewest possible exceptions, which would significantly discourage a player to transfer a second time; it mandates the creation of an agent registry and NIL database; it aims to protect educational opportunities by requiring Division I schools to guarantee scholarships for a decade after an athlete's final season; and it also requires schools to cover out-of-pocket medical costs for five years. (And as a compromise, it doesn't mandate that athletes are deemed employees.)
As a piece of media rights legislation, it updates the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 -- as requested by Texas Tech billionaire booster Cody Campbell, among others -- and creates an antitrust exemption if schools want to pool media rights (as long as at least 75% of FBS is included in the deal*) and pushes for free broadcast options for local teams; and it requires schools continue to offer a steady number of opportunities in women's and Olympic sports while requiring media rights partners to "make those competitions reasonably available to the public."
(* Conveniently, all conferences that aren't the Big Ten or SEC currently account for 75.4% of FBS. If Notre Dame's against it, too, however, that makes it 74.6%. How does rounding work in federal legislation?)
As a piece of athletic calendar legislation, it prevents schools from hiring a coach from another school until that school's season is done (call it the Lane Kiffin Rule) and pushes for the college football season to end no later than January 8.
As a piece of conference realignment legislation, it prevents particularly lucrative conferences (read: the Big Ten and SEC) from merging or consolidating with each other, presumably to avoid the creation of a long-rumored superleague of top schools; it also creates guidelines to require schools participating in a pooled media rights deal to schedule historic rivals.
This legislation contains genuine compromises. And it's comprehensive. There are a lot of things in here that administrators and/or the NCAA would want (including some long-coveted antitrust protection that might slow the number of lawsuits directed at them and their eligibility rules), but athletes get at least a few wins, and Campbell and his cohorts do, too. Generally speaking, this is how legislation is supposed to work, but previous executive orders and bills were dramatically one-sided regarding which entities they wanted to protect.
Con: College sports don't need "protecting"
It's not great to start out on false terms. The industry of college sports doesn't need protecting -- the athletic departments who can't control their spending (and can't help but hit the same boosters up for more and more money) do. "Unsustainable," as it has been used throughout this saga, always means "We can't stop ourselves."
This bill provides plenty of regulations that could turn out to be very helpful in that regard, but the system as it stands has worked out awfully well for athletes, so "protecting" college sports means protecting schools, not athletes. That brings us to an even bigger con.
Con: Athletes will make less money, at least in the short-term
This is a big one. We've heard a lot of talk about "$40 million rosters" and whatnot as athletic departments (and their boosters) have figured out how to use collectives to extend far beyond the supposed $20.5 million athletic spending cap the House settlement put into place last year. If the College Sports Commission is able to actually put a stricter cap into place, it will certainly help to "protect" runaway spending, but it will also result in less money landing in athletes' pockets. This is a pretty bitter compromise considering an even bigger reason for the runaway spending has been the lucrative coach contracts and buyouts that schools haven't been able to stop themselves from signing. Coaches will still get that money, but now athletes will get less overall.
Nothing in this bill, according to Cantwell, stops the $20.5 million cap from getting raised in the future.
"If the parties want to come back to the table and say let's raise the cap to 50% of revenue," she said, "the bill allows them to do that. We're not curtailing the opportunity for more revenue sharing."
Granted, it's hard to see the parties agreeing to that anytime soon -- success in this regard will require loud and constant effort -- but there could still be some long-term gains at least.
Athletes will also have less freedom of movement thanks to the reinstituted transfer restrictions. You still get one free move, but that's it. I'm of two minds about this part. I have loved watching certain athletes grind away and work their way up the ladder, and this -- plus the far stricter five-year clock for eligibility -- would hinder that dramatically. You are only guaranteed one big move. But at the same time, it's easy to wonder about how many credit hours transfer with a player from school to school, and it's easy to doubt that graduation rates are helped by the current structure. One can suggest that freedom of player movement probably wasn't 100% positive for the players; still, despite the assurances of post-eligibility scholarships and a few years of medical care, athletes still ended up losing more in this deal than anyone else.
Pro: It really could fix the football calendar
One thing Campbell's team fought pretty hard for -- to the extent that they aired commercials during football games last year -- was an update of the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 to allow for conferences to pool media rights. We can debate how much more money schools might find by doing this, but another update could turn out to be helpful: This bill stretches out the portion of the calendar in which college football Saturdays are protected from the spectre of the NFL. Previously, that period ended following the second Saturday in December, but now it would include the third Saturday, too. From the perspective of staging a College Football Playoff, that could turn out to be very helpful.
Combine that with the recommendation that the season end by January 8, and it's pretty easy to conclude that the tracks are being laid for a CFP that has a couple of free early Saturdays in December, then plays its semifinal on January 1 and its title game a week or so later. That would free up the rest of January for the coaching carousel and a less hectic (but still rather hectic) transfer portal and recruiting window.
Pro: It wasn't written with the Big Ten and SEC in mind
Letter from the President's Council on College Sports. Big thanks to @SenTedCruz and @SenatorCantwell for their hard work and bi-partisanship! pic.twitter.com/xFFvw8zFq3
— Cody Campbell (@CodyC64) May 19, 2026
A few days ago, Campbell posted a letter in support of this legislation. It was signed by quite a few members of the President's Council on College Sports, but while Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey were part of that council, their signatures were nowhere to be found.
While seemingly everything in college sports revolves around the two behemoth leagues, everything about this bill was designed to function without their support. We'll see if and how they try to lobby against the legislation -- and we'll see how effective that lobbying may be - but in principle, this is a very, very good thing. They indirectly used the spectre of a breakaway superleague to bully other conferences into concessions, especially as it pertains to revenue from the expanded College Football Playoff. "Protecting" college sports from being run by powerful people with even more powerful self interest might turn out to be the most useful part of this legislation.
The authors of the Protect College Sports Act envision a land with no superleague threats, with better preservation of rivalries, with an orderly (and preferably four-round) College Football Playoff that doesn't extend past inauguration day, with the competitive balance that is always supposed to come from spending caps, with fans watching their teams play familiar and historic rivals, and with athletes at least getting extra protection from shady agents and from schools attempting to short-change their educational opportunities or falling short of helping them with medical costs.
This vision comes with a massive and pretty one-sided trade-off -- far less money for athletes for the foreseeable future -- and for many people reading this, that might be a deal-breaker in itself. But that's still going to be a pretty seductive vision for others, and it might still represent a net step forward. All of this might be even more effective if the SEC and Big Ten were to actually agree to take part in the pooling of media rights, but that's a concern for another time.
