Inside high-stakes scramble that brought Protect College Sports Act back from the dead

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White House phone calls. Talks with NCAA leadership and every major member conference.

A day that started with bill co-sponsors and their staffs already working the phones shortly after 7 a.m. Friday, July 31, ended with arguably the most significant step to date for the Protect College Sports Act.

Facing stiff headwinds to keep alive hope of a U.S. Senate floor vote before recess on Friday, August 7, Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Eric Schmitt (R-MO), specifically, held a litany of conversations with college athletics’ top powerbrokers — most notably Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti, as well as the SEC’s Greg Sankey.

Schmitt, who late Friday night spoke exclusively to USA TODAY Sports, peeled back the layers of the day — and how the past two weeks helped resuscitate a Protect College Sports Act that had nearly been left in the dustbin.

“I mean we've spent the entirety of the week before (July 20-24) negotiating this with Senator Cantwell, Cruz, and myself and staff; it was pretty intense,” said Schmitt, a former NCAA student-athlete during his football career at Truman State. “Seven to eight hours a day on it a day, kind of in the middle of all the other stuff we were doing in the Senate.

“Then (Friday) started probably about 7:30 (a.m.) on the phone with the commissioners and the White House. I talked to the president (late Friday night) after we got with the SEC and Big Ten. He's very happy; it's a priority for him. But yeah, it started pretty early and it was nonstop.”

Here’s how it unfolded.

Early-week, USA TODAY Sports obtained a copy of the 12 “major concessions” being workshopped to garner Big Ten and SEC support. Eight of the 12, per three people with direct knowledge of the Senate Commerce Committee’s work on the Protect College Sports Act who were granted anonymity due to the sensitive nature of deliberations, were deemed “full concessions.”

By Wednesday, in continued conversations with people on Capitol Hill, USA TODAY Sports learned more revisions had been made but optimism had dwindled.

“Major concessions were made overnight,” a person directly involved with the drafting of the bill told USA TODAY Sports. “At this point, with every passing minute, odds are slimmer that we can move the bill (to the Senate floor vote) before the August recess.

“We’ve been working night and day to make the revisions they (Big Ten, SEC) said that they needed (to publicly support the bill). We need an answer. This wasn’t a superficial deadline.”

Schmitt echoed those sentiments.

“Coming out of committee, my feeling was that that was not going to be a finished product, that this was … we needed to have more voices at the table,” he told USA TODAY Sports. "And clearly, the conferences in the breadth of interests that they spoke to, it was going to be important in trying to get as much support as we could. And, they had issues. We tried to address those. I felt like we got to a good place (Thursday). And then, you know, I was kind of … it didn't go as I had hoped. We thought that we had done enough to get support, but I am just not wired to like quit. Maybe that's the former student-athlete in me.”

First on Friday night, the Big Ten conducted a vote with its member institutions’ presidents and athletics leadership; it voted yes, a move that left the present fate of the bill strictly up to the SEC’s similar vote.

At 9:58 p.m., the Big Ten and SEC issued a joint statement of support.

Schmitt had been on the SEC’s call and outlined the bill modifications that helped position the bill to potentially be included in the current legislative session scheduled to end Friday.

“What people were really focused on was on the (revenue/de facto salary) cap. If you're going to go through this, because we've got all the really important protections for player safety and health care and all those sorts of things, that was always top of mind,” Schmitt said. “The transfer issue, eligibility issues, optionality for pooling of media rights was always important. But also, if you're going to go through this and you're going to have the $21.5 million cap and then what can you do to retain players?

“We recognize that the market is much bigger than that because people are just shifting dollars away from rev-share. And it's like these side deals that everybody knows are out there and how you end up with rosters that are $50 million rosters, like if you're paying attention, that's what's going on.”

With that specific obstacle looming, what helped the Protect College Sports Act’s working committee finally marshal the Big Ten’s and SEC’s support?

“The idea was to say, 'OK, we've got the cap, we've got the retention pool cap. We've got the women's sports $5 million (dollars that do not count against school-issued rev-share as outlined here). But how are we going to protect against that?' And so (Friday), the language really was like, OK, if you are Nike or whoever, Under Armour, and you’ve got a deal with the school, but you want a separate deal with like the quarterback or the running back or the star linebacker, that if that was legit, if that was outside, that's a legit NIL deal. There is an attestation about that. It's going to go through CSC (College Sports Commission) review, which it should. That wouldn't count against the cap but it can't be phony.”

It was that seemingly simple distinction that nudged across support.

“You just can't have a phony redirection like we've seen a lot recently, so that was important to get that language right,” Schmitt said. “I think once we did that and people had greater assurance that this was a really kind of a real cap, it's still allowing individual NIL deals. I think that was important. And then I was asked to and had a lot of conversations with Petitti (Friday), Randy Levine (a key member of Trump's college sports advisory council) in the White House. Working on this was great. Greg Sankey was great to work with. And then I was on the SEC call at the end there, walking through these various provisions and why I just think now's the time to move.

“We're at a place where there is a real sense of urgency now in college sports with what's going on in the trajectory, but our legislative calendar like that's just the reality of the situation. There is just not going to be a lot of time for this beyond this coming week.”

The impending August recess, coupled by September’s expected legislative priorities and October’s mid-terms, Schmitt explained, made timing of this bill the second-biggest element beyond the ability to finally gain sign-off from the Big Ten and SEC.

“I just think, culturally, college sports is very uniquely American and it brings us together,” Schmitt said. “What is happening right now is not sustainable. If you want to see those half a million scholarships out there in men's and women's sports, that won't be the case in two years.

“So, I felt like we had to do it because our calendar, August is theoretically a recess. We could be there. I don't know, but September is going to be government funding debates, then you roll into elections, and you just don't know if you are going to get another shot at it. You just see this thing slipping away a little bit in college athletics. And if you kind of look down the road, it's at real risk. I was committed to it.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Inside high-stakes scramble that brought Protect College Sports Act back from the dead

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