Weeks before a midterm that is shaping up as a major Democratic blowout, Senate Republicans decided to spend their final days in session focused not on affordability, the main concern of voters, but on eliminating labor rights for a subset of workers who are disproportionately young Black men. And the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), thinks this could win the GOP the elections. Delusion isn’t a strong enough word for it.
The Protect College Sports Act (PCSA), which passed the Senate 77-22 on Monday, has been the subject of nonstop advertising campaigns during college football and basketball games for the last several years, and even more lobbying inside the Capitol. We did an Organized Money podcast about it last December. It has a lot of facets, but essentially, the people who made untold riches by turning college athletics into a sharecropper system appealed to Congress to effectively reinstate it.
The bill, co-authored by Cruz and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), grants the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) a limited antitrust exemption so it can avoid the parade of lawsuits that finally forced it to pay the athletes who generate all the value. Even the conservative Supreme Court, unanimously, agreed that denying athletes the fruit of their labor was unconscionable, and the subsequent lawsuits punished decades of unlawful conduct and are the only reason players are being paid at all.
The new antitrust exemption will allow the NCAA to hard-cap athlete compensation, limit player transfers to different schools, standardize eligibility, and impose other rules. The compensation cap is larger but with tighter control on the name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals that players have used to get paid. There are some modest, vague, and dubiously enforceable protections on scholarships and health care and caps on agent fees, all of which will be exclusively written by the NCAA. Even the rights of players to sue colleges over wrongdoing are limited.
It may sound logical that the NCAA, like professional sports leagues, should be able to set its own rules. But the reason that the NFL and NBA can do so is that they collectively bargain with their players; the exemptions allow the players to work together to improve their bargaining power. The NCAA wants instead to get an exemption to impose rules while cutting the athletes out of the decision-making process.
The PCSA does not explicitly bar students from being considered employees, as some Republicans would like to see. But collective bargaining in college sports was just getting started, with players singing union cards and Stanford’s football team organizing under the College Football Players Association banner. The antitrust exemption is clearly designed to obliterate these nascent efforts by putting the terms of bargaining firmly in the hands of management. If Congress creates a compensation cap without input from the players and makes the NCAA immune from liability, it’s a return to a cartel system.
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One way to see the PCSA’s intent: An amendment to cap coaches’ salaries and limit contract buyouts, which paid out $200 million last year just in college football, failed. The only senator who was a coach—Tommy Tuberville (R-AL)—is for it, and the only one who was a power conference athlete—former Stanford tight end Cory Booker (D-NJ)—is against it. This isn’t about a financial crisis ruining university budgets, because a major source of that crisis was untouched. This is about beating back hard-won labor gains for players, keeping them under the thumb of coaches and athletic departments, and entrenching the power of the biggest schools.
There are other elements as well, like discouraging conference realignment (though that restriction is temporary). Much of the bill is designed to appeal to old-school fans who don’t like having to look up the ever-changing roster and schedule every year, who miss the traditional rivalries. They don’t like the era of college sports free agency, where players have power.
As a Michigan grad who went to school with the Fab Five and a Heisman Trophy winner, I look fondly on the past, too, but I’m not so chained to nostalgia that I’d deny players their rightful share of the pie. Also, the idea that this bill would put old-school fans at ease is subverted by another amendment: It would have capped the face-value price of a college football or basketball ticket. That failed, too.
Cruz, who was lustily booed in his own state on ESPN’s College GameDay when speaking about the bill, actually believes that the House should return to Washington and pass the PCSA, attend a big signing ceremony by the president, and then go back and campaign on stealing college athletes’ labor while gas is $5 a gallon. Good luck with that.
