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ESPN Staff Writer- Dan Murphy is a reporter on ESPN's investigative and enterprise team. Reach him at daniel.murphy@espn.com.
The U.S. Senate adjourned for the week Thursday without scheduling a vote for a wide-sweeping college sports bill, making it increasingly unlikely that the floundering legislative effort will move forward this summer despite a flurry of negotiations in the past week to try to revive it.
Administrators from the Big Ten and SEC held separate meetings Thursday to decide if they wanted to support the latest version of the expansive Protect College Sports Act, a Senate bill aimed at reforming college sports. Neither conference ultimately voted on the matter, according to sources with knowledge of their meetings.
The two conferences are home to schools in 26 states. Their widespread influence would make it difficult to earn enough votes to pass a law without their public support. Despite several changes to appease the nation's two most powerful conferences spurred by conversations with the bill's co-sponsors Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) and Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri) earlier this week, the administrators are concerned that the current version of the bill does not provide enough legal cover to effectively enforce a salary cap, according to sources familiar with their discussions.
A senate aide told ESPN there was "technically still time" for Senate Majority Leader John Thune to call the bill for a full vote early next week, but the odds are growing longer with each passing day. The Senate begins its summer recess Aug. 7. Without a vote before then, the chances for passing the bill into law would face a very tight window of time during a part of the year when most lawmakers will be focused on the federal budget and campaigning. Cruz had previously called the bill the NCAA's "last, best hope" for congressional help.
NCAA president Charlie Baker released a statement Thursday afternoon stressing the importance of the proposed legislation.
"After speaking with conference leaders and university presidents in recent days, one thing is clear: there is overwhelming consensus that targeted intervention from Congress is necessary," Baker's statement read.
"... This is the legislation we need now. It will grant student-athletes unprecedented academic, health, and wellness benefits, rein in out-of-control agents, and stabilize transfer, eligibility, and revenue-sharing rules."
College sports officials have held out hope for the past several years that Congress could bring stability to the industry, which has rapidly changed since a 2021 Supreme Court ruling made clear that NCAA members could not collude to limit the money or other benefits that players receive. The NCAA, its conference and its schools have spent millions of dollars lobbying for a federal law that would give them the power to enforce rules such as how long athletes can play college sports, how often they can transfer and how much they can be paid.
"While no bill is perfect, I implore college sports leaders and Senators to support this bill now. It is our best chance to deliver the benefits and level playing field student-athletes deserve while providing the protections institutions need to sustain college athletics long-term," Baker added.
The Protect College Sports Act proposes giving the NCAA a limited antitrust exemption to enforce their rules along with a substantial list of other prescriptive changes to how college sports are governed. The latest version of the bill would cap the number of schools that could join any of the four power conferences at 19 (The Big Ten currently has 18 members. The SEC has 16.) It also would allow schools to pool their media rights to sell them as one large group rather than conference-by-conference, a change that was expected to help many schools outside the Big Ten and SEC increase their revenue.
The latest version of the bill also includes a provision that would more than double the amount of money schools are allowed to pay their athletes. Schools are currently allowed to spend roughly $21 million in direct payments to players. The new bill would add $22.5 million for a "retention pool" to pay current athletes and a $5 million pool dedicated for women's teams. In the past year, many of the NCAA's richest programs have built football and basketball payrolls that far exceed the cap by using their business partners to create endorsement deals for their players that serve as de facto salary payments.
"I think that whatever the salary cap is, there's always going to be concern about going over the salary cap and we're going to need enforcement in order to get that done," Ohio State coach Ryan Day said from Big Ten media days in Chicago.
Big Ten and SEC officials were concerned that the new bill would not do enough to close the endorsement loophole, making it hard to enforce a hard salary cap. Sen. Cruz and others tried to publicly assure college leaders through letters and social media posts Thursday that the bill would effectively prevent schools or their boosters from using endorsements as a loophole if passed.
In the absence of a new federal law, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti told reporters at conference media days his league would try to increase the spending cap by appealing to the College Sports Commission, the entity that oversees the current system for paying college athletes. If that failed, Petitti said the Big Ten would consider creating its own rules. SEC commissioner Greg Sankey also raised the prospect of his league creating its own rules at their conference media days this month.
Neither Petitti nor Sankey said that their league would fully break with the rest of the NCAA, but their stance continues to raise concerns with other college sports administrators that the two most dominant conferences (both on the field and financially) are positioning themselves to eventually leave everyone else behind.
