Senate Panel Advances College Sports Bill 19-9 as SEC, Big Ten Balk

The Senate Commerce Committee voted 19-9 on Thursday to push the Protect College Sports Act toward the full Senate, handing the broadest attempt to govern college athletics in a generation a win the sport's two richest conferences had spent the morning trying to block.

The bill hands the NCAA a limited antitrust exemption, letting it cap what schools pay athletes and enforce national rules on transfers, recruiting and eligibility. It writes name, image and likeness rights into federal law, replacing a patchwork of state statutes, and it tries to slam the door on a breakaway "super league" by letting all 130-plus Division I football programs pool their future media rights.

That is the deal on paper. The fight is over who it protects.

Minutes before the vote, the Southeastern Conference and the Big Ten, the leagues with the fattest television contracts and the most to lose from a federal cap, issued a joint statement opposing the bill. Ranking Member Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat in her 25th year in the Senate, was not gentle about it. People have to wake up, she said, faulting conference commissioners for guarding their own revenue while the athletes who fill the stadiums get squeezed.

Chairman Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who wrote the bill with Cantwell, Eric Schmitt and Chris Coons, framed standing still as the real danger. In remarks prepared for the markup he reached, predictably, for a football line. No more punting. We are in fourth-down territory. Time to go for it.

Behind the bill is a coalition the sponsors are keen to show off: 24 athletic conferences and 267 colleges and universities across 49 states and Washington, D.C., according to the committee, alongside endorsements from the NFL, MLB, the NBA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. The Olympic piece carries more weight than it sounds. Cruz argued the legislation is as much about wrestling, swimming, rowing and track, the non-revenue sports that live off football money and feed the national team, as it is about the marquee programs.

The antitrust exemption is the hinge, and the reason this does not end in committee. Granting the NCAA legal cover to cap athlete pay is exactly what a decade of court rulings worked to tear down. Supporters call it the only route to order. Critics see Congress handing an industry the permission slip judges kept refusing to sign.

The substitute that passed tried to thread it. Cruz said the revised text dropped language that singled out the SEC and Big Ten and leaned instead on broad principles: fair competition, open access, protection for rivalries and scholarships. Whether that is enough to win the conferences over, or the nine senators who voted no, is the live question.

That bloc of nine is its own warning, and it was bipartisan. Republicans Roger Wicker and Todd Young lined up with Democrats Amy Klobuchar, Ed Markey and Tammy Duckworth, among others, as the bill cleared committee. A measure can pass 19-9 in markup and still die on the floor, where it needs 60 votes and a calendar that is already cramped.

Cruz said Majority Leader John Thune intends to bring the act to the floor and expects that in July. The Senate's summer recess starts August 10 and runs to September 11, a narrow lane to find the votes. College football season, and the next wave of NIL disputes that set all this off, kicks off right behind it.