Senate Hearing on Protect College Sports Act; What Happened?

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The Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee held its first Senate hearing on the Protect College Sports Act on Wednesday. The Senate is now in full motion with legislation as it heard from a panel of past and present college representatives.

Senate Hearing on Protect College Sports Act

Former Alabama football coach Nick Saban, Pac-12 Commissioner Teresa Gould, Gordon Gee, who has been president of several universities, Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua, and University of Utah football player Lance Holtzclaw gave testimony and answered questions from the committee members for nearly three hours.

The committee hearings were dramatically different from what many are used to seeing on television. There is little disagreement that college sports are broken, so the questions and answers were downright congenial. The challenges came in determining what the proper fixes are.

Saban

In his opening statement, Saban decried the new system, even as it developed while he was still coaching. “If you had the biggest, baddest Ferrari that you could ever have, and it was going 150 mph toward the Grand Canyon, someone needs to tap the brakes. That’s what we all need to do here.” Saban said Name, Image & Likeness has become pay for play because of the collectives that came to be within weeks after NIL became legal in 2019.

Saban testified that the NCAA no longer acts as the governing body over college sports. “The NCAA cannot enforce its own rules because of the litigation that happens every time it tries.” He added, “Congress does need to fix the mess in the courts and create a national framework so the people inside college sports can enforce fair rules. Without that legal certainty, every rule becomes another lawsuit, every standard becomes another risk, and the system keeps drifting toward a professional model.” Saban said that while the bill is bipartisan in structure, it should be “nonpartisan.”

Early Pushback

Just before the hearings began in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday morning, the Congressional Black Caucus issued a statement saying it opposes the bill. The opposition of the bill is not based on the details of the legislation, but on the CBC asking that black athletes take a stand against gerrymandering of state and federal districts in Southern states. This was the same move that killed the SCORE Act in the House of Representatives last month. There are four members of the CBC in the Senate. One of them, Lisa Blunt Rochester, is a member of the Commerce Committee holding the hearings.

Tuesday night, the SEC and Big 10 issued a joint statement opposing the bill. The biggest issue for the two largest conferences is the potential bundling of television rights negotiations. That bundling would likely shrink the revenue advantage those two have over the rest of the conferences in college sports.

Conference commissioners from the ACC, the Big 12, and the smaller Group of 6 conferences had already issued letters of support for the bill.

Bevacqua

The SEC and Big 10 letters also said the legislation would alter the House v. NCAA settlement from last year, something that all conferences signed off on.

Bevacqua testified that the House settlement does need to be adjusted through the proposed bill. He testified that no one is adhering to the $20.5 million revenue-sharing cap with the athletes. He said money from collectives and donors is coming in disguised as NIL money. “I believe that the cap number in the House settlement is too low. I believe we need to fix a more realistic cap. There is no cap right now.” The Notre Dame athletic director said there are reports of some schools carrying a player payroll budget of up to $40 million for a football season. He said the legitimacy of NIL has been “littered by abuse.”

He testified that he believes the escalating payrolls for college football programs will eventually whittle down the competitors to a handful or two of schools. “If you continue to have all your resources pulled into football with escalating roster fees and not knowing where that ends, I believe the inevitable outcome is there’s going to be a small handful of schools that will differentiate themselves from others and play football at a super league-level. I don’t think it’s good for college football to be a mini-NFL. That’s not the spirit of college football. That’s not what college football is about.”

Gee & Gould

Gee, who has been the president of Colorado, Ohio State, Vanderbilt, and West Virginia (twice), placed the blame for the current chaos on school administrators, in part by capitulating to conference commissioners. “We’ve agreed to outrageous salary contracts, reduced the academic mission of being a student athlete, and abrogated too much power to athletic directors and conference commissioners, some, by the way, who seem more aligned with media companies than with their own universities.”

Gould brought up an element that was addressed in the House’s SCORE Act last month but is not in the Senate legislation. That is the issue of student-athletes gaining employment status. She said that, and collective bargaining for student athletes needs to be brought into the conversation, although she did not come down on one side or the other of either issue.

Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) did not ask any questions of the panel, but did also address the employment issue. He said the final version of the bill needs to address employment for student athletes and needs to have more targeted antitrust exemptions for the organizations that will be in charge of enforcing the rules.

Bevacqua, a former NBC television executive, addressed the bundling of media negotiations for the conferences. The bill makes it voluntary for any conference to join others. But it states that at a 75% acceptance rate, it becomes a somewhat de facto issue. That would mean they would need to get to about 103 schools to go along with it. A very unofficial head count currently puts the number at approximately 109 yes “votes,” with only the SEC and Big 10 publicly opposing the idea.

Bevacqua said it becomes a complex issue with each conference currently having its own television contract for at least the next four years, and the ACC contract with ESPN going through 2036.

What Happens Now?

The bill, co-authored by Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA), would need 60 votes to pass the Senate. But we are a long way from that. When Cruz gaveled Wednesday’s hearing to a close, he said the committee had until June 10^th to submit further questions in writing for the panel members. The panelists would then have until June 24^th to respond.

The coming weeks will also see the bill go into markup sessions where committee members can suggest changes. That will also be the time Cruz and Cantwell will be negotiating with fellow senators to try to secure the needed votes.

The earliest the bill would go to the floor of the Senate for a vote would be the end of July, before Congress adjourns for a month-long break.

Main Image: Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

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