What is the Protect College Sports Act?

It is always controversial when sports and politics collide. We saw this in 2016, but the Colin Kaepernick protest in the NFL, and there are lots of different examples throughout history, which is why I was very confused when on a recent college football Saturday, I saw an ad that sounded like this. Every major conference, the NCAA team USA and universities across the country support the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act. I've never asked anyone to call Congress before. If they voted, I'd be at practice. Tell Congress to act now, Protect College Sports. It made me wonder, Protect College Sports from what? It's the MPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Eric McDaniel. I cover Congress. An MPR Sports Correspondent Becky Sullivan is here with us. Hi, Becky. What's going on? Yay! Welcome to the best time in sports of the year, right? I mean, MLB. Playoffs are going. Football is back. Does the NBA play off? Exactly. It's going to be hockey and bat. NBA is about to start. I feel like this is your time to shine for me. I'm really busy right now. Well, we appreciate you coming on to do our podcast as well. Absolutely. I want to miss it. And I guess what? I just want to start with the basics on this bill, Protect College Sports Act, which passed in the Senate recently. Let's start there. How are we reporting to protect college sports from? Yeah. I mean, if you hear the supporters of this bill talk, College Sports is a wild rest right now. It is just pure chaos. Those are direct quotes you hear from these guys all the time. And basically, what they're referring to is that over the last decade plus college sports, the NCAA, the organization that oversees most college sports that, certainly the ones that, you know, most of us are watching on TV. Just to have all these longstanding rules around how players couldn't be paid, how they could only play college sports for certain years while they were actually in college. And you know, there were rules about how many times they could transfer from school to school. But lawsuits over the last decade have chipped away at a lot of those rules and led to this environment now where players get paid a bunch of money at least in the revenue generating sports of football and basketball. Players can transfer freely from school to school. So you play for one school in one year and then the next year another school offers you more money. You can just transfer and start the next year at the new school. And then there's been all these questions about eligibility now too. And so there was even this controversy this summer that helped inflame some of these talks in Congress where a couple football players who'd gone to an NFL training camp were signed by Louisiana State, LSU. They didn't end up actually playing on the field at any point. But having these like quote-unquote former professional players come back to college sports was this new frontier. I feel like that's got to be the plot of some B-level comedy movie and feel a buddy comedy or something. But I do feel like if people had watched college sports or college football in the 90s or something and then fell asleep for 26 years and woke up, the industry, I mean, the landscape does look, I mean, you mentioned all the specific things, but it has ballooned into a thing where there is just a lot more money, the things are in different comfort. It is pretty radically different than it was a few decades ago, right? Absolutely. Yes. I mean, and I think that the lawsuits followed that, right? Like, there was more money increasing in college sports. This dates back to a Supreme Court case in the 80s that basically allowed schools to make money more directly from their TV broadcasts, right? So selling these TV rights for football especially led to suddenly this more and more and more money over the years, over the decades into college sports. Athletes wanted a piece of that pie, so they started following these lawsuits. And now here we are. And in fact, the runaway spending is definitely a trend across all of these high level college sports. It's not just the athletes who, of course, are making money these days. Becky, how much money are we talking about here? These are coming to the athletes through these name, image, likeness, NIL deals. How much money are they making? I mean, it really depends on what sport you're playing and sort of what level you're doing it at. But at the very high end, you've got, like, Dairy and Mensa, he is the quarterback at Miami. He is reportedly making six and a half million dollars this season just on his, you know, sort of like NIL school payment deal, right? So that's a lot of money. And that is for football. That's for big conference. There's plenty of players making more than a million dollars a season at the sort of high levels of football and basketball. But even below that, you know, we're talking like $50,000, even $25,000, even just $10,000 at this point, we've got thousands of college athletes across division one mostly who are making that kind of money. But colleges are spending more on a bunch of stuff. And in fact, this is part of what has like gone into this whole bill, Senator Maria can't well. She's a Democrat from Washington. She's one of the co-sponsors on the bill, one of the lead negotiators. She put out this report last month where she kind of ticked off some of these things. So we got the report with you. I've got it. Yeah. Oh, print it out. I'm old school, but so it says from 2005 to 2023. So this, this exact period, you're talking about miles, schools saw increases of years. I'm just going to list some of these numbers, 322% in recruiting costs, nearly 300% in sports equipment, around 250% in medical expenses and game day expenses, travel costs up 200%. And then I think the really big notable one that has caught a lot of people's attention is, of course, coaching salaries, which are way up in this period. She says 370%, that's a wild increase. There are about 50 coaches in college football right now who make more than $5 million a year. It's there's some expensive buyout clauses that have gotten a lot of attention. And of course, for the most part, these are public institutions, right? Not all of them. I think that's worth noting here. That are state schools. Exactly. So these are basically public employees, these coaches who are making these millions of millions of dollars. I understand the problem. I get it. Actually, I've kind of tuned out of college football at least the last few years because it has changed so much. And I've just got other things that I feel like I spend my time and energy on. But Eric, there's a lot of problems in this world that the Senate doesn't get involved in. I guess I don't fully understand why this is something that Congress needs to get involved in versus just letting the NCAA or the college just figure this out. I mean, I think there's a lot of acknowledgement from all spheres politics and otherwise that the status quo is unsustainable, right? Every couple of months, you get a new kind of frontier like these former quote unquote, professional players returning to collegiate eligibility or something like that. And in fact, part of the thing I think about with this is who the NCAA hired to lead the organization a couple of years ago, former Republican Massachusetts governor, Charlie Baker. This clearly political figure whose mandate it seems is to try and get the regulatory environment sorted out for college sports. So lawmakers in both the House and the Senate have been working on this for months to years to try and figure out a path forward. And it's been a bumpy road to get here. But now the Senate has passed a version of a proposal to better regulate this environment, which is called the Protect College Board Act. Yeah, let's lay out exactly what this bill would do in terms of addressing all of these different problems that have kind of popped up the last few years. Yeah. I mean, it does a lot. It's a result of a long period of negotiations and it's ballooned to do quite a lot of things. But sort of in essence, I would say this sort of main goal or one of the main goals of the bill is to sort of find a way to let the NCAA reinstate some of these rules we're talking about around transfers and eligibility. And the way that it does that is it grants the NCAA a limited antitrust exemption, which has been the basis for all these lawsuits that we've been talking about. You know, these judges were essentially finding that the NCAA had, you know, this illegal monopoly that it was in violation of antitrust laws and in order to change that dynamic, Congress has to step in and grant an antitrust exemption or at least they can. And that's what this bill would do. And so that would let the NCAA reinstate this, you know, their eligibility rules. It would reinstate this sort of traditional transfer rule where you only get one free transfer so to speak. And then if you want to do it again, you have to sit out a year. Another one is to sort of get this whole world of athlete payment. Look that toothpaste isn't going back in the tube. Athletes are going to keep getting paid. Nobody's seriously trying to end that. What this bill is trying to do is to get that payment system kind of out of the shady backroom, weird NIL deals and kind of just like on the table. We're going to get these deals paid for directly from schools. It dramatically ups what is essentially a salary cap that was put in place by a legal settlement. Next year it sort of officializes that and it lets schools pay you know up to about $50 million per year across most sports to their athletes directly. And so that's kind of like the main, the main goals that I would say. But then it does all these other things too. It would allow conferences to pool their media rights deals, for instance. It has some protections for women's and Olympic sports. It has some guarantees that it requires schools to make around healthcare for student athletes and for some number of years after they leave the school. And then I think actually kind of one of the other big things that's notable and worth talking about is it has some rules around conferences and how big they can get, whether they can merge that kind of thing that are intended to try to keep, you know, these kind of big power conferences, especially the Big 10 and the SEC from getting too big, too powerful and trying to keep them from running away with color sports altogether. Those provisions around the super conferences have been one of the major points of friction where, you know. some of these schools might want to hop between conferences for a variety of reasons, but you know, it's led to some bipartisan opposition, including from Republican Rick Scott of Florida. So Republican Ted Cruz of Texas was one of the kind of primary forces behind this legislation. Rick Scott usually on the same page as Cruz opposed this because of resistance from major universities in Florida that wanted to retain more bargaining power. I want to talk big picture about most of the things you just mentioned, Becky, when laying out this bill would just give the NCAA more power than they currently have in terms of, I guess, leverage in terms of when I think about limiting the ability for players to transfer, for instance. Anytime you limit this is in any sport, player movement, you're limiting player leverage. And I guess I'm wondering how the players are talking about this potential deal. Yeah, I mean, well, first I should say that there's a lot of different ways a college athlete can look, right? Like the NCAA oversees some half a million college athletes every year across three different divisions of competition. And you know, when we turn on the TV in Saturdays in the fall and we're watching, you know, Ohio State play Texas or whatever, that's the very uppermost echelon, not just of all college sports, but then even of athletes in terms of like who is able to generate revenue, right? So like division two, division three sports aren't really making money. They're not making revenue. And then even in division one, the players that really we're talking about here who are getting a lot of money, whose sports are driving all of this revenue for schools and conferences and whatever, you know, we're talking about football, we're talking about basketball and even basketball, we're really talking primarily men's basketball, though of course, some women's basketball teams make money too. But not every college athlete has made the same, I guess is where I'm going with that, which means that the solutions can all be the same and it means their opinions can all be the same. But broadly speaking, the athletes who are making this kind of money, I would say, make that exact point. There are organizations around athletes. There's also the intable ACP has been quite active on this issue. And they oppose it for exactly those reasons. There's also labor groups that oppose it unions AFLCIO is on record against this bill for those reasons because kind of exactly how you put it like putting these restrictions on athletes. Obviously, that's how professional sports work, right? Like there's a salary cap in the NFL. There are rules and major league baseball around when a player can change teams when they're a free agent, when they're under team control. Those players in those sports have unions. They agreed to those things because they've unionized the union agreed that the league can place those limitations on them in exchange for other things like minimum salaries, like health care, in retirement, like pensions, et cetera. Those are things that college athletes right now, they're not unionized. It's probably too politically unpalatable for that really to ever happen. Certainly at any sort of really large scale. And so because they're not in a union, they can't agree to this stuff. A lot of opponents of this bill make that exact point. This bill puts limitations on athletes while not providing as many protections or at least not giving them a voice at the table the way that these opponents say that they should have. All right, let's say a quick break and more on all of this in just a moment. And we're back. So Becky, we were talking mostly earlier in this segment about how the athletes who are kind of in this upper echelon of paid athletes, the people who play football and basketball feel. But I guess I'm curious about how this bill would impact the other sports. You know, I went to the University of Tampa, a division two school where swimming is a big deal, a cross is a big deal. Like these are also people who are governed by the NCAA rules. How are those sports or people in those sports feeling about this bill? Yeah, I mean, that's a big part of what this bill's supporters say that it does is it works to protect the existence of those sports. You know, we're talking about these sports broadly speaking that don't generate revenue, which is most women's sports and a lot of Olympic sports, right? Like, you know, a lot of these big schools that we're talking about, like Florida or Ohio State or Stanford or whatever have like minstrac teams and women's swimming teams and golf teams and tennis teams. And yeah, those sports don't make money. And so they cost money for the schools to administer and to run a team. And with all of this rising spending that we've been talking about this, this feeling that schools have that they have to spend money on these expensive football and basketball rosters in order to compete in order to keep generating that revenue. That it's this sort of vicious cycle that is going to end supporters say with schools feeling like they have to cut these programs. And so one thing that the bill does is it requires institutions essentially to maintain the number of roster spots and the number of scholarships that they currently provide for women's and Olympic sports. However, opponents of the bill would point out that those provisions expire after four or nine years depending on how big the school is and that there's exceptions for those rules for cases of like financial hardship or whatever, which is kind of like the whole deal, you know, if revenue suddenly craters, then the schools don't have to maintain those scholarships, which is exactly what the supporters say that they would be trying to protect. So it's complicated. The data is mixed on whether those roster spots are or are not disappearing without the protection of the bill yet. But that is something that there is a lot of concern about. Yeah, and it's definitely something to watch in the coming years if the bill does end up passing. Eric, I want to dig into a little bit more of the political dynamic here. So a few things get bipartisan support in Congress these days. Have you been surprised at how bipartisan the support for this bill has been at least in the Senate? I would say no, only because it's taken so much work. Great Becky and I, but particularly Becky, have been covering this for months and months and months on end. It's gone through lots of different iterations. It's had to get a lot of stakeholders to the table. It cleared the Senate, you know, where it needed minimum 60 votes to even pass. And now it had significantly more than that. There is some democratic opposition. There is some Republican opposition, but it was not a pretty process. And so these are the kinds of things we do see by partisanship on is where it really needs to slog through. But things get a lot more complicated now that it has to go to the House. Right. I mean, before we get into the House dynamics because I do want to get there, I'm just curious about if lawmakers in the beginning as they were thinking about taking this issue on. Did they have any of the hesitancy that we were talking about earlier of like, is this really something we need to wait in on or something we should wait in on? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think you heard that from all sides. Like on one hand, recently I interviewed Senator Eric Schmidt. He is a Republican. He's from Missouri. He's one of the co-sponsors on the bill. He was a college athlete himself, actually a division to football and baseball player at Truman State University, which is a Missouri and a ringer on the congressional baseball team. He is. Yeah. Right here. Why are you serious? Yeah. But he told me that, you know, he's a conservative. He's a Republican. He's from Missouri. He told me if you would have asked me a few years ago, just a few years ago, whether or not Congress had a role in any of this, I would have been very, very skeptical. But he's spent a lot of time talking to like officials at schools in the University of Missouri. And how like schools have come to see this as like a sort of necessary evil that if they're not competing, they're not hanging in big time college sports, they're enrollments drop and it becomes like a little bit of a crisis for the public university. I think you also hear that kind of rhetoric in concern about public schools on the Democrat side. You know, one thing that Maria Canwell's report that I talked about earlier, one other thing that points out is that there's a concern that people are donating less money to schools to use for academic purposes because the athletic departments rising costs are causing athletic departments to put so much pressure on their donor base. And so we're starting to see these nine figure donations to athletic departments instead of these nine figure donations going to schools. Wow. It's hard to know how directly those things are related, but certainly there's a worry that they are. And that's a that's a reason that Democrats who might have otherwise wanted to stay on the sidelines feel like it's their duty to get involved. Okay. So then looking forward with where this bill goes because none of this matters if it doesn't get signed by the president, right? I mean, is this going to pass the House Eric? No, I don't think so. Like I sent, I sent probably two dozen emails this morning trying to get someone to engage with me on this because we're in the middle of campaign season. Believe it or not college sports, not the primary issue on the campaign trail right now. House is out of session. They're not coming back until after the midterm elections at which point all signs point to Democrats coming into the lame duck knowing they'll eventually gain control of the gavels come the new year. So they might not have a lot of incentive to play ball during the lame duck with Republicans trying to get this across the finish line then they might say, well, we can strike our own deal and we'll figure it out once we know the balance of power. You also have some Republicans with their own concerns either about these, you know, power school transfers between conferences about government regulation of like we were talking about with Eric Schmidt, right? You know, the government playing a role in this at all, right? And with the narrow majorities in the House that we talk about governing everything else, it seems unlikely that this is going to be a thing to me. You know, I'm not that great at prognostication, but I'm going to make an educated guess here that this is not a thing that they can sink a lot of time into, particularly because they have to do things like fund the government, right? They have contentious budget fights. The administration wants to see a trillion and a half dollars for the Pentagon. There's still controversies over the war in Iran. We're still dealing with a cost of living crisis. And they as always have to deal with government funding deadline that's coming up in December. So I just don't necessarily see this as having the momentum. And that means in the new Congress, they'll have to start clean, right? The fact that it's past the Senate won't mean anything. Can I ask big picture then in the next few years? Let's just, I want to play out a scenario where something like this legislation does pass at some point. And kind of getting back to the original theme that we talked about at the top of this protecting college sports. And how much this bill actually can take us back to the era before college sports became what it is now. I mean, is it the case that if a bill like this passed Becky that we would move back into an era where college football would feel like it did in like 1987? It's going to be Rudy Lover again. I mean, that's basically what I'm asking. It sounds like when you have a bill called protect college sports, that's what you're kind of promising. Yeah, I don't think that the 80s and even the 90s or even the like the odds that era of college sports is never coming back. We're never going back to regional conferences. We're never going back to amateur athletes. I mean, and how real was that ever even in those decades? Fair enough. But I think that that, you know, I said this earlier, toothpaste and the tube like I don't think those things are going back. And it's because there's just too much money involved. There's too many people who want to make money. And it's not just the athletes. I mean, there are a lot of athletes making a lot of money. You know, there's NIL deals right now for quarterbacks and basketball players and wide receivers like, you know, Jeremiah Smith with the Ohio State Buckeyes, you know, like that make $5 million plus a season. That's not going away. Those players, you know, for their part deserve that money that they're driving all this revenue. And I don't think that anybody's trying to take that away anymore. But some of these things are just hard to unwind, especially now that there's just so much money that people this sort of like media environment that we're in is so fractured anymore. And that live sports are really the only thing that is driving real profit and revenue in the broadcasting industry anymore. Everybody wants a piece of it. Those rights are getting more valuable. Those conferences aren't giving that up. That money's not going anywhere. And I think even if a bill like this comes into play, into force, something like this could I think help fans who maybe feel a little disconnected from their teams, right? Like if you're trying to tune in every Saturday or your college basketball fan and you might find that like your team basically looks different year to year. And maybe it's a little hard to feel invested in them that the transfer rules, those eligibility rules would kind of maybe bring a little bit of back, a little bit more stability and stability. But in terms of college sports going back to feeling like a small time regional, truly school oriented thing, I think those days are done miles. All right, well we can leave it there. MPR Sports Correspondent Becky Sullivan, thank you so much for joining us. You're welcome. And are the rays going to win the World Series? I mean, look, I think that they have a great, great shot before we leave it there. Come back tomorrow for a weekly roundup. I'm Miles Parks, I cover voting. I'm Eric McDaniel, I cover Congress. And thanks for listening to the MPR Politics Podcast. I'm not going to let you go brewers Dodgers envy on there on my podcast. We're not doing that right now. I mean, look, I love the rays. I love the rays a lot. We're not doing that right now.