The Senate Commerce Committee voted 19-9 on Thursday to advance the Protect College Sports Act out of committee and onto the Senate floor, brushing past fierce opposition from the two richest conferences in college athletics and setting up a high-stakes legislative sprint before the August recess.
The bipartisan bill, co-authored by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), represents the most significant congressional attempt yet to impose federal order on a college sports landscape that has lurched from crisis to crisis since name, image, and likeness rules upended the old system in 2021. Two prior legislative efforts, the SCORE Act and the SAFE Act, never made it to a floor vote. This time, backers believe the math and the momentum are different.
But the clock is unforgiving. Congress has roughly 50 days before summer recess, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune must decide whether to bring the bill to the floor in that window. Even then, AP News reported the measure would need 60 votes to clear the Senate, and it still has no companion legislation ready in the House.
The Protect College Sports Act would grant the NCAA an antitrust exemption to enforce rules that courts have steadily dismantled. It caps athlete eligibility at five years, limits players to one free transfer, restricts mid-season coaching departures, and sets a 5% cap on agent fees. Media rights pooling among conferences is described as voluntary under the bill's framework.
Critically, the legislation also sets minimum scholarship and roster size requirements, protections that, in earlier drafts, only kicked in if conferences agreed to pool media rights. The revised version decouples those safeguards, meaning Olympic and women's sports programs get baseline protections regardless of what the power conferences decide to do with their television money.
On Wednesday night, the bill's anti-expansion provision received a notable revision. The revenue threshold for conferences subject to the provision dropped from $1 billion to $700 million, and the language was broadened to include the Big 12 and ACC alongside the SEC and Big Ten. Conferences pulling in $700 million or more in revenue are now prohibited from "joining forces", a direct response to the conference realignment frenzy that sent schools like Stanford and Cal to the Atlantic Coast Conference and ballooned the Big Ten and SEC to unwieldy sizes.
As the Washington Examiner detailed, the bill even includes a so-called "Lane Kiffin Rule" aimed at coaches who abandon teams mid-season for bigger paychecks, along with crackdowns on recruiting tampering. Schools are already passing revenue-sharing costs onto students, Clemson added a $150-per-semester athletics fee, Minnesota tacked on $200, and South Carolina added $150 per term.
The two conferences with the most to lose made their displeasure known hours before the vote. Thursday morning, the SEC and Big Ten released a joint statement opposing the bill in its current form.
"From the outset, we identified a set of essential revisions to the PCSA necessary for the long-term sustainability of college athletics. We have worked with both majority and minority staff to advance those revisions, which focus on better supporting student-athletes and stabilizing the college sports environment. We continue to believe revisions are needed to secure our support for the bill."
The statement went further, claiming their concerns had been ignored despite what they characterized as "sustained engagement and good faith efforts." The conferences said they were "encouraged that several Commerce Committee members share our concerns and support these recommendations", a nod to the nine dissenting votes.
What specific revisions the SEC and Big Ten demanded remains unclear. The joint statement spoke in generalities about "long-term sustainability" without naming particular provisions. The conferences' chief objection, as the Washington Times noted, centers on the media rights pooling provision and anti-expansion language, provisions that would constrain the very strategies that made the SEC and Big Ten the dominant forces in college athletics.
That context matters. These are conferences whose aggressive expansion and massive television contracts reshaped the sport to their benefit. Asking Congress to defer to their judgment about "sustainability" requires a generous reading of their motives.
Sen. Cantwell framed the vote as a direct rebuke to the conferences' lobbying campaign. As OutKick reported, she told reporters after the markup:
"What we did today was say we're not going to let the most powerful, richest conferences dictate to the rest of America what's going to happen to 500,000 athletes."
Cruz struck a more conciliatory tone while making the same essential point. "No one got everything they wanted," he said. "But, we did create a framework that stabilizes college athletics."
The fact that a Texas Republican and a Washington Democrat could produce a 19-9 committee vote on anything in this Congress is itself notable. The bill's co-sponsors also include Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), reinforcing its bipartisan credentials.
Earlier this year, major conference commissioners rallied behind President Trump's executive order on college sports, signaling a willingness to work with the White House on reform. That goodwill, however, clearly has limits when legislation threatens the conferences' competitive and financial advantages.
Thune offered an encouraging signal after the vote. He called it "a really strong vote coming out of the committee," though he stopped short of committing to a specific floor date. Whether he prioritizes the bill before the recess window closes will determine whether this effort joins its predecessors in the legislative graveyard.
The Senate math is daunting. Sixty votes means Cruz and Cantwell need support well beyond the 19 who backed the bill in committee. And the opposition is not limited to the SEC and Big Ten. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), himself a former college football coach, has publicly questioned whether the bill overreaches.
"Two weeks ago, my colleagues here rolled out a bipartisan bill that aims to fix some of these problems. I respect the work that they put into it... But I think their bill goes too far."
Tuberville has his own legislative priorities in the college sports space. Newsmax reported that Thune previously used Senate Rule XIV to fast-track Tuberville's Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, bypassing committee referral entirely to place it on the calendar. Whether that same procedural urgency extends to the Protect College Sports Act remains to be seen.
Even if the Senate passes the bill, the House presents another obstacle. The competing SCORE Act has failed to reach the House floor multiple times. No House companion to the Protect College Sports Act appears ready.
Strip away the conference logos and television contracts, and the core question is straightforward: Who governs college athletics?
Courts have steadily eroded the NCAA's authority to enforce its own rules. State legislatures passed a patchwork of conflicting NIL laws. Conferences pursued expansion strategies that enriched their members while destabilizing everyone else. Athletes gained new earning power but lost structural protections. Coaches move freely while players face restrictions. The system, as the New York Post reported when the bill was introduced, has been in regulatory chaos since 2021.
The Protect College Sports Act represents a bet that federal legislation, not the courts, not the conferences, not the NCAA acting alone, is the only institution with enough authority to impose order. Cruz described it plainly: "We can sit in the stands and watch the system continue to unravel, or we can step onto the field and lead. I believe the moment calls for leadership. No more punting. We are in four-down territory. Time to go for it."
Whether that leadership arrives before the recess clock expires is the question that matters now. The SEC and Big Ten will spend the next 50 days lobbying hard to water down or stall a bill that limits their power. Athletes, smaller conferences, and the schools footing the bill for this chaos have no comparable lobbying operation.
That imbalance is precisely why legislation exists, to protect the people who can't afford a lobbyist from the institutions that can.
