The Patriot Post® · Can Congress Protect College Sports?

Virtually everyone who knows anything about college sports knows that the overall landscape is deteriorating. It has become a lawless land ruled by an elite few schools, while the rest of its constituents have become powerless peasants in comparison. It’s gotten so bad that Congress got involved, drafting the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA), a bill that passed the Senate 77-22 yesterday.

It all started with the 2021 Supreme Court ruling in National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston. The judges argued that limiting athlete compensation to the cost of attendance violates the Sherman Act; therefore, strict amateurism was against the law. The NCAA couldn’t prevent players from being paid. At the time, this ruling had bipartisan support. Most people agreed that the players, being watched by a hundred million fans every week and driving a multibillion-dollar industry, should be compensated for their efforts.

The issues arose in the aftermath.

Teams can pay players as much as they want, with no concrete salary cap. Players can now sign endorsement deals as early as they want, to the point where most elite high school recruits make more than any middle-class professional. With the advent of the transfer portal, players can sign with the highest bidder every year, even if they go to a different school each time. Even former professional athletes have spurned real professional leagues and returned to college.

The biggest 30-50 schools with millions of dollars on tap snatched up all the best talent, leaving everyone else with the scraps. There simply isn’t a way up the ladder for most schools anymore, and even if those schools develop talent themselves, said talent will leave for greener pastures. As players demand more money, schools have seen costs grow so much that it could threaten the viability of other sports, or even nonathletic programs within the university.

To solve these issues, Congress got involved. Why did Congress get involved? In the simplest terms, nobody else fixed the problem. After the Supreme Court ruling, the NCAA became a shell of itself, and the organization quickly found that the local and state judicial system was heavily biased toward [insert favorite college team here]. Congress essentially became the only organization with the will and capability to regulate college sports. So what does this legislation do?

First and foremost, the bill would establish a hard salary cap that all teams would have to abide by. The cap is relatively fair, coming in at nearly $50 million for the entire student-athlete payroll, more than double what the NCAA had prescribed five years ago. Ideally, this would allow athletes to be adequately generously compensated without bankrupting America’s most notable universities. It would end the common practice of using outside endorsement deals provided by the school to circumvent the salary cap.

Second, the bill prevents conferences from growing larger than 19 teams and forces any school jumping from one power conference to another to first spend three years as an independent. Most major conferences currently have 16-18 teams. This was added to discourage the formation of a “Super League,” or one major league with the biggest teams that would further exclude the rest of the NCAA from the revenue stream.

The PCSA would also set a hard rule for college eligibility and transfer rules. All athletes would get five years, or however long someone has until they turn 24. It also allows athletes one free transfer without having to sit out a year. The pool of college athletes would hopefully return to what it once was: college-age students who attend the same school their entire career.

Lastly, and arguably most importantly, the PCSA has provisions requiring schools to maintain their Olympic sports for nine years. Since the modern Olympics began, the NCAA has been the backbone producing American and foreign athletes for the competition. Rising football and basketball costs have put those sports at risk of being cut. Since the U.S. Olympic Committee doesn’t receive federal funding, the burden for developing the next crop of athletes falls to the NCAA. The only way Team USA can beat China every four years is for colleges to maintain their Olympic sport programs, and this bill would help that.

All in all, the Protect College Sports Act attempts to solve all of the issues currently plaguing college football and college sports as a whole. Passage of this bill will undoubtedly lead to some unintended, difficult-to-address consequences, as it is all in the hands of the federal government. However, this solution will hopefully safeguard at least some aspects of the college sports America has loved for decades.