This article appears in the February 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Read more from the issue.
If you watched a minute of college football this fall, you saw the ads. A voice-over darkly warns that, without congressional action, college sports face an existential crisis. NIL is forcing schools to cut women’s sports and Olympic programs. The very fabric of amateur athletics is unraveling. The solution, viewers are told, is the SCORE Act. It would solve the crisis, though it’s not really explained how.
In reality, the SCORE Act was a desperate attempt by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and its members to clean up their own mess. The solution being peddled would take away the only tools college athletes have to protect their economic rights: the antitrust and labor laws that protect every other working American from corporate consolidation and abuses of power.
The NCAA and its member conferences say that their “educational mission” justifies special treatment from Congress. But that educational mission hasn’t stopped conferences from expanding across the country, forcing college athletes to spend more time in airport terminals than in classrooms. That mission didn’t stop schools from paying football coaches tens of millions while pleading poverty. And it certainly didn’t stop the NCAA from punishing athletes for accepting $3.83 worth of extra pasta while ruling that years of fake classes for UNC athletes fell outside its jurisdiction.
The NCAA’s monied interests hate having to share a tiny sliver of the revenue with players.
Ultimately, the NCAA’s hypocrisy became unbearable in Washington. In December, Republican leadership pulled the SCORE Act from the House floor, defeated by an unlikely coalition of conservative Republicans who saw it as corporate welfare, progressive Democrats who recognized it as an attack on worker rights, a bipartisan group of state attorneys general defending public institutions, and the Congressional Black Caucus, which refused to help strip protections from predominantly Black athletes whose labor generates billions in revenue from college football and basketball games. It was a rare legislative victory against the powerful monied interests of college athletics.
But it’s not the end of the story. NCAA executives and university administrators will continue seeking to hoard the money college sports generate, even though fans pack stadiums and arenas to see the players. This relentless drive for cash could lead schools into the waiting arms of private equity, and down a money spiral that would be bad for players and the game.
TO UNDERSTAND THE SCORE ACT, you have to understand how college sports got here. For over a century, the NCAA enforced what it called “amateurism,” a set of rules that restricted the ability to pay college athletes for their labor. The NCAA invented the concept of the “student-athlete” following a 1953 ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court in University of Denver v. Nemeth. The Colorado court held that a football player, as both a student and an employee, was owed workers’ compensation for a back injury suffered at practice. The NCAA’s mission became convincing courts otherwise, and the term “student-athlete” was born.
This ploy was a resounding success. Just four years after Nemeth, the same court denied death benefits for the widow of a Fort Lewis A&M student who died from a head injury sustained during a football game. Since then, the NCAA has used its invented subclass of nonemployees to tightly control and restrict what college athletes can earn. It restricted scholarships, education-related benefits, room and board, and game tickets for families, even as the system grew into a $19 billion business. It did this as universities built palatial athletic facilities, television networks paid astronomical sums for broadcast rights, and coaches and administrators took in millions. But everything they built was a house of cards.
The Supreme Court shattered the NCAA’s caste system in 2021. Its unanimous decision in NCAA v. Alston found the term “amateurism” unintelligible and refused to grant the NCAA antitrust immunity, finding its “education-related benefits” rules violated the Sherman Act. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in a scathing concurrence, wrote that “traditions alone cannot justify the NCAA’s decision to build a massive money-raising enterprise on the backs of student athletes who are not fairly compensated … The NCAA is not above the law.”
The ruling generated a cascade of change. The NCAA lifted its ban on athletes profiting from their names, images, and likenesses (NIL). The Department of Justice secured a consent decree prohibiting enforcement of anti-competitive player transfer rules. A separate class action, House v. NCAA, resulted in a historic settlement for past players, with $2.8 billion in damages. Finally, the NCAA agreed, for the first time in its history, to let universities directly pay their athletes. Meanwhile, a host of other lawsuits are challenging NCAA compensation and eligibility rules, restrictions on tennis players’ ability to collect prize money, bans on Canadian junior hockey players, and the Ivy League’s refusal to offer athletic scholarships at all.
Football fans have seen the results of a truly competitive marketplace on the field, something that research confirms. The College Football Playoff (CFP) this year included schools that have never come close to an FBS national championship—Texas Tech, James Madison University, and Tulane. And Indiana won the whole thing, earning the school its first-ever national championship and beating perennial favorites Alabama and Ohio State along the way. That’s partly because schools can no longer over-recruit high school seniors and stockpile them on a bench for four years. If a player is unhappy today, they can find a new school, negotiate NIL and revenue-sharing contracts, and actually play.
It’s not perfect: The “parity” of big college sports like football and basketball is reserved for those schools that can find a billionaire benefactor, like Cody Campbell at Texas Tech or Mark Cuban at Indiana. But for the first time, college athletes have leverage and the ability to benefit at least a little from the value of their labor.
The monied interests at the top of the food chain hate this new order, especially having to share a tiny sliver of the revenue with players. NCAA President Charlie Baker, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, calls it the “Wild West with no rules and no visibility and no accountability.” The NCAA has spent millions of dollars on lobbyists and made countless trips to Capitol Hill, imploring Congress to give them what a unanimous Supreme Court denied: “immunity from the normal operation of [United States] antitrust laws.” The SCORE Act, introduced this past July, would have done just that.
THE SCORE ACT IS DESCRIBED AS A BILL “[t]o protect the name, image, and likeness rights of student athletes and to promote fair competition with respect to intercollegiate athletics.” In reality, it contains one sentence barring the NCAA and its members from “restrict[ing] the ability of a student athlete to enter into a name, image, and likeness agreement.” The rest of the bill consists of exceptions and immunities that swallow the current rules.
Here are just some of the SCORE Act’s gifts to the NCAA. It prohibits any NIL deals that were not “for a valid business purpose,” a broad and undefined term. It requires college athletes to disclose the terms of their NIL deals and allows schools to publish anonymized details. It allows the NCAA to unilaterally create transfer and eligibility rules and recruitment windows for athletes. And it enables the NCAA to dictate which schools can participate in college athletics, including who can move up to lucrative Division I FBS football and gain CFP eligibility.
To fully insulate the NCAA from liability for anti-competitive behavior, none of this rulemaking would be covered by either federal or state antitrust laws, fully reversing the Supreme Court’s decision in Alston. And as icing on the NCAA’s cake, the bill declares that college athletes will never be considered employees.
The antitrust exemption is broad, written to apply not only to the NCAA but also to conferences, universities, and anyone else attempting to comply with its mandates (like advertisers, television networks, and talent agents). It is, in no uncertain terms, an enormous and unprecedented gift to a vast, wealthy, and growing industry. It upends all notions of fair competition that have governed the U.S. economy since the Sherman Act was passed in 1890.
The Sherman Act exists because Congress understood that concentrated economic power is destructive to both our economy and our democracy. As a result, antitrust exemptions are extraordinarily rare. Most of them correct imbalances of power. For example, antitrust laws do not apply to agricultural cooperatives, so farmers can better negotiate with larger buyers. They do not apply to unions, so employees can organize and bargain on more equal footing with their employers.
The SCORE Act exemption does the opposite. It strengthens the NCAA cartel and revokes college athletes’ ability to challenge it.
The absurdity of the SCORE Act is underscored by the fact that an antitrust exemption is already available to the NCAA. If schools would recognize college athletes as employees, or simply consent to players organizing into unions the way professional athletes in all major American sports leagues do, they could collectively bargain salary caps, limits on NIL collectives, transfer and eligibility rules, scholarship guarantees, health and safety provisions, and all the other terms and conditions of participating in college athletics. The resulting agreement, just like the CBAs in the professional leagues, would be protected from antitrust challenges by labor exemptions that have existed for over a century.
Perhaps even more important to the schools, the NCAA and athletes could reach agreement on enforceable anti-circumvention rules, like those that exist in the NBA (the kind that L.A. Clippers owner Steve Ballmer is currently accused of violating). That would prevent billionaire alumni from creating the pay-to-play problems that are plaguing the transfer portal.
But the NCAA is a calcified organization, and it refuses to recognize athletes as employees. It refuses to let them organize. It refuses to negotiate. Instead, the NCAA and its members pleaded to Congress for a nearly unprecedented exemption from antitrust laws that would give them free rein over a multibillion-dollar industry.
It is no surprise that groups as varied as the Tennessee, Florida, Ohio, New York, and D.C. attorneys general; the AFL-CIO Sports Council and the National Urban League; and even Cody Campbell, the Texas Tech benefactor and a billionaire Trump ally, denounced the bill early on. The SCORE Act’s demise was predictable and deserved.
On December 2, the SCORE Act barely cleared the procedural vote needed to bring it to the House floor. Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), a Freedom Caucus stalwart who took issue with the money grab of conference expansion, labeled the bill a “Band-Aid on a gunshot wound.” Reps. Byron Donalds (R-FL) and Scott Perry (R-PA) joined him and nearly all Democrats in voting against it. By the next morning, leadership was scrambling to whip support for a full floor vote. They needed to flip more than a dozen Republican holdouts while simultaneously wooing Democrats, particularly members of the Congressional Black Caucus who, concerned about the fate of financially strapped HBCUs, had been targeted as potential crossover votes.
The CBC wasn’t buying. That day, they met with Athletes.org, a group advocating for collective bargaining, and emerged unified in opposition. Then Lane Kiffin torpedoed whatever remaining momentum existed. He abandoned his Ole Miss team just before the Rebels’ first-ever playoff appearance for a seven-year, $91 million deal with LSU. Brian Kelly, the coach he replaced, was paid another $54 million by LSU to leave. All in all, fired football coaches earned $228 million in severance during the same months that the NCAA was asking Congress to rescue college sports from poverty. The NCAA’s claim of threadbare finances became impossible to defend.
When the smoke cleared, Rep. Lori Trahan (D-MA) succinctly stated that “[t]he SCORE Act was pulled from consideration because it simply didn’t have the votes, a clear sign that Members on both sides saw it for what it was: a gift to the NCAA and Power Two conferences [the Big Ten and SEC] at the expense of athletes.” Republican Rep. Michael Baumgartner (R-WA) was even more direct, calling Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti a “bullying jackass” and accusing him of “trying to buy votes.”
At the end of the day, the NCAA and its conferences spent over $15 million on lobbying and got the weight of the White House behind them. They even had bipartisan co-sponsors. And they couldn’t get a vote. It was a spectacular failure.
THE SCORE ACT WOULD HAVE DONE more than just grant the NCAA antitrust immunity. It would have blessed an entirely new enforcement apparatus that quietly emerged after the House settlement, the College Sports Commission.
The CSC was created by the Power Four conferences—the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, and SEC—to police college athletes’ compensation. Its primary tool is an algorithm called NIL Go, developed by accounting firm Deloitte, that reviews every NIL deal over $600 to determine whether it serves a “valid business purpose” and falls within a “reasonable range of compensation.” If the algorithm flags the deal, the athlete has four “choices”: renegotiate to a lower amount, abandon the deal, appeal through arbitration, or proceed and risk penalties. Those can include loss of eligibility for athletes and schools, fines, and reduced transfer portal access.
The CSC is explicitly targeting NIL collectives, the booster-funded entities that have been the primary source of college athlete income since 2021. This is a classic hub-and-spoke conspiracy between the NCAA, the CSC, and the conferences to suppress college athletes’ earnings. Without the antitrust exemption provided by the SCORE Act, the CSC’s rules, terms, and conditions are a likely violation of the Sherman Act.
The contract that the CSC circulated to schools garnered significant opposition last year from another bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general from Tennessee, Texas, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New Jersey. The group called it “cartoonishly villainous” and warned that it “obligates institutions to comply with new enforcement, circumvention, and investigatory rules that may conflict with [existing court] injunction[s]—without even telling them what the new rules are.” To date, universities have wisely refused to sign it and appear to be largely ignoring the NCAA’s compensation caps too.
But the failure of the SCORE Act and the CSC does not mean threats to college athletes have passed. Another transformation is under way, with private equity firms seeking a piece of the $19 billion pie. Schools eager for a cash infusion are listening.
With revenue sharing in place, schools are paying up to $20.5 million each to their athletes. They also had to contribute to the $2.8 billion House settlement. And there’s the aforementioned $228 million in severance pay earned by fired coaches in the 2025 football season alone, along with wildly expensive facilities like TCU’s new “snow room” and Northwestern’s new $800 million stadium. Layered on top are serious higher-education funding cuts by the Trump administration. In short, schools and their athletic departments are strapped for cash, albeit largely due to their own profligacy. Instead of balancing their budgets, they are turning to private equity.
The Big Ten spent the fall negotiating a $2.4 billion deal with UC Investments, the University of California’s pension fund. In exchange for the money, UC Investments would receive a 10 percent stake in a new for-profit entity called Big Ten Enterprises, which would control the conference’s media rights and sponsorship deals. Schools would also extend their media rights contracts through 2046, binding them to the conference for two more decades.
The deal promised immediate cash infusions averaging $135 million per school, but the details were troubling. Unlike the Big Ten’s traditional equal revenue sharing, this deal would create a tiered distribution system that favored Ohio State, Michigan, and Penn State over the other 15 universities. The deal process was also remarkably opaque. Trustees at multiple Big Ten schools said they were denied access to key details about the proposal. USC and Michigan balked, even amid allegations that the Big Ten threatened penalties if they refused to support the plan. Both schools lack permanent presidents and have powerful boards demanding accountability. Michigan regent Jordan Acker went so far as to suggest the Wolverines might consider football independence when the current grant of rights expires in 2036.
UC Investments eventually paused the deal, saying it would not proceed without “unity” among all 18 member schools. But the appetite for outside investment hasn’t disappeared.
The University of Utah’s board recently approved a proposal to give private equity firm Otro Capital a minority stake in its new for-profit arm, Utah Brands and Entertainment, the first deal of its kind in college athletics. Utah’s conference, the Big 12, is in talks with a private equity–backed investment firm called Collegiate Athletic Solutions for a $500 million capital infusion that involves future revenue sharing. Another firm, Elevate, has raised $500 million to invest in athletic departments, aiming to transform college football into a “premium experience” comparable to F1 racing.
Meanwhile, other investors want to create a super league that would put college football’s biggest brands under a single roof, excluding most of the smaller schools currently eligible for the CFP. Given how unhappy big programs like Notre Dame were about being left out of this year’s bracket while Tulane and James Madison got in, the idea may gain traction.
Congress has noticed these dealings and is already taking steps to curb the profiteering. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) sent a letter to Big Ten university presidents questioning the propriety of the UC Investments deal. Rep. Baumgartner introduced a bill that would outlaw such dealings. And while UC Investments has pushed back on being labeled “private equity” because it manages public pension and endowment funds rather than private money, the distinction may be less meaningful than it appears. In both scenarios, outside investors are seeking returns from assets that have historically been controlled by educational institutions for educational purposes.
More concerning is the potential for private equity firms to bring the same extractive and cutthroat methods they have used in other industries to college sports. It’s logical to assume that investors want to maximize their profits, and private equity usually does so not by growth but by cost cutting and wealth extraction. That could mean slashing the wages of athletic department staff; stripping assets like real estate or rehab services away from athletic departments and leasing them back; taking out loans against the newly formed for-profit entities to pay investors; and rolling up interests in multiple athletic departments that previously competed with each other for athletes, staff, and on-the-field results. None of this is good for the schools or the athletes. The question is whether anyone will stop the raids before they happen.
THE NCAA’S TALKING POINTS about crisis are not entirely fabricated. College sports face real challenges. Revenue sharing requires money that many schools don’t have. Title IX compliance—which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in higher education—in an era of direct payments to athletes is legally hazy. Olympic sports are being cut as athletic budgets strain under new obligations.
But these are problems of the NCAA’s own creation, a result of schools’ runaway spending when athletes were used as free labor. For decades, athletic departments built palatial facilities and handed out coaching salaries that would make NFL teams blush. Now that athletes are finally getting a share, the NCAA and its members refuse to adjust.
The NCAA wants to keep its iron grip on college athletics without curtailing its members’ reckless spending. Thus, the fight on Capitol Hill is not over. Republican leadership has signaled they hope to revisit the issue, and at least five alternative bills, from both sides of the aisle, are circulating. They include proposals for collective bargaining, a return to geographic conference alignments, and salary caps for coaches. Notably, almost nobody is pushing for antitrust exemptions for the NCAA.
Meanwhile, the courts continue to chip away at remaining restrictions. The Third Circuit followed the Supreme Court by rejecting the NCAA’s amateurism principles as justification for ignoring the Fair Labor Standards Act, saying it “refuse[d] to equate a prisoner’s involuntary servitude, as authorized by the Thirteenth Amendment, to ‘the long-standing tradition’ of amateurism in college athletics.” A Sixth Circuit judge questioned the legality of an NCAA rule that limits eligibility years for junior college transfers. And a federal judge in West Virginia found the NCAA’s five-year eligibility rule anti-competitive and unlawful, though an appeal by the NCAA is pending.
Support for collective bargaining is also growing. Multiple figures from college sports—including University of North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham, Tennessee athletic director Danny White, former Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh, and former Auburn basketball coach Bruce Pearl—have publicly supported the idea.
In short, the athletes have momentum. Every lawsuit reveals more about how the NCAA has operated and how nakedly the organization has prioritized institutional interests over athlete welfare. Each victory makes the next one more likely. A bill like the SCORE Act would stop that progress in its tracks.
The SCORE Act failed because enough members of Congress understood that the NCAA’s “educational mission” has always been a cover story. The real mission is control—over athletes’ labor, mobility, and voices, and the revenue that they create. The SCORE Act was a bailout for a $19 billion cartel that spent a century exploiting young athletes and now wants protection from the consequences. With Alston, athletes broke up the cartel, using the only legal tool they had to challenge its power: our antitrust laws. Congress, to its credit, has thus far refused to take that tool away.
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This article appears in Feb 2026 Issue.