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WASHINGTON — The Senate overwhelmingly passed a sweeping bill regulating college sports Monday, bringing Congress closer than ever before to enacting national standards around where — and for how much — intercollegiate athletes play.
The bipartisan Protect College Sports Act, approved in a 77-22 vote, grants the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and its member schools a limited antitrust exemption, allowing them to set and enforce rules around athlete eligibility and transfers without worrying about being taken to court.
It also raises the limit on how much each school can directly pay athletes to around $49 million, more than double the $21.5 million cap put in place as part of a 2025 settlement reached by the NCAA to wrap up three separate federal antitrust lawsuits.
Under the Senate bill, co-authored by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), athletes will be allowed to transfer between schools once without sitting out a year and will be subject to the NCAA’s five-year eligibility rule, with the clock starting the academic year after they turn 19 or when they first enroll full-time in college, whichever comes first.
“College sports is at a breaking point,” Cruz wrote in an X post last week, promising the bill would “restore order to a system being torn apart by too few rules and too much litigation. It establishes national standards for transfers, eligibility, tampering, inducements, and revenue sharing while protecting athletes’ right to earn [name, image and likeness] compensation.
“There are hundreds of thousands of college athletes competing today. We should be fighting to protect their scholarships, their roster spots, women’s and Olympic sports, and the institution of college athletics itself,” Cruz added. “College sports is worth saving, for the athletes, for the schools, for the fans, and for America.”
The bill must now pass the House, which is not due back in session until after the Nov. 3 midterm elections and may change the legislation further. A revised House-passed version of the bill would have to clear the Senate again before heading to President Trump’s desk.
Cruz has called for the lower chamber to reconvene earlier than planned to pass the Senate bill — though such a move would also likely trigger an impeachment vote against Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
In addition to instituting new rules around athlete pay, the Protect College Sports Act caps the fees of agents acting on behalf of players at 5% of earnings, while barring college football coaches from leaving for another job in the middle of the season following the high-profile departure of Lane Kiffin to LSU from Ole Miss prior to last season’s College Football Playoff.
The bill leaves open the question of whether athletes should be considered university employees with collective bargaining rights, and opponents of the bill argue it gives too much power to school officials accused of exploiting players to make money for the university.
“The legislation that we are going to be voting on tonight is predicated on a simple idea: The idea that college sports is in crisis and that it requires a fairly extraordinary act of legislative intervention to address this crisis,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said ahead of the vote.
“The facts don’t back up that characterization of college sports,” the senator claimed.
Murphy expressed concern that the “sweeping bill” will allow colleges to “preserve the system of exploitation” that the Supreme Court deemed illegal in a landmark 9-0 ruling in 2021.
The legislation “allows schools to make a whole lot more money … and keep that money for themselves,” Murphy argued.
Other opponents of the measure, like Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), a former college football head coach, say it goes too far to regulate what athletes can be paid and should only standardize transfer and eligibility rules.
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