If Congress passes the bill being sponsored by Sens. Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell to end the Wild West era in college sports, the federal government will have essentially conspired with the NCAA to do something that simply does not happen in American life.
It will, in practice, be issuing a unilaterally imposed paycut on an entire class of workers. And do you know what people sometimes do when their paychecks get cut?
They go on strike.
In the discourse around the “Protect College Sports Act,” there has been an enormous amount of back-and-forth over various elements of the bill, including whether the SEC and Big Ten can support legislation that restricts their rights to future conference expansion.
But there has been almost no conversation about the unintended consequences of taking a system that has created enormous wealth for thousands of college athletes over the last few years and essentially pulling the circuit breaker overnight.
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Even if you believe college sports badly needs a mechanism to pull back some control over a system that has created unsustainable spending on football and men’s basketball rosters, it is difficult to predict what would happen after a sudden turn back to a world where schools are adhering to spending caps and the College Sports Commission has real power to deny fake NIL deals.
Current college athletes and high schoolers on the cusp of cashing in have grown up in a world where their contemporaries have used the system to make tremendous amounts of money. If that abates, nobody really knows whether athletes will accept a new normal they had no part in creating or whether it will lead to what many in college sports had long feared before NIL: athletes boycotting games en masse.
Think of it this way. Schools at the top level are essentially paying $40 million for their football rosters and $20 million in basketball right now. If that pool of money shrinks by half — and it likely would, by design, if the Protect College Sports Act becomes law — it would be a huge mistake to underestimate the wildfire of discontent that could follow.
“There’s a virality to it,” one source who operates in the space told Yahoo Sports.
Historically, organizing college athletes into a real labor movement has been an impossibly difficult task. Various groups have tried to build underground movements, but they only go so far.
It’s not just a numbers problem — try getting a football locker room of 100 diverse backgrounds to do anything in unison, then multiply that by the amount of teams you need to execute a real national boycott — but an issue of incentives. Pre-NIL, most athletes fell into two camps: They were either making a pit stop before the NBA/NFL, or they had no future in pro sports and just wanted the education. Neither had much reason to rock the boat.
As former Michigan basketball player Duncan Robinson revealed to The Athletic after graduating, he and two teammates started down the road of organizing a player boycott of the open practice on the Friday before the 2018 Final Four. They approached players on the other teams, who also had interest. And then, because of concerns it wouldn’t be a unified front, they backed away.
And that was just for an open practice, not a Final Four game with millions of people watching and massive amounts of money at stake.
From the NCAA’s perspective, this is how an unjust and ultimately illegal system stayed in place for so long. Yes, administrators deeply feared what could happen if a team refused to play in a Final Four or CFP game. But ultimately they counted on the athletes to be too disjointed and too focused on their own goals to do anything about it. The athletes largely obliged.
Make no mistake, those challenges are still firmly in place. Several people contacted this week who work in the athlete-advocacy space came back with the same answer about whether a real boycott could happen: No way. Too big, too complex, too many people who wouldn’t be willing to risk a paycheck on a greater cause when it might be the last one they’ll get for being an athlete.
But when that paycheck is smaller than it once was because the rules have changed — rules imposed by the government, not collectively bargained by a union — college sports will be playing with fire in a way that it hasn’t before. As one administrator acknowledged: “Labor costs never go backwards.”
Another person pointed to the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd and the real moment of power that athletes seized. You had Oklahoma State’s locker room on the verge of mutiny over Mike Gundy’s response to the social justice movement sweeping the country at that time. You had Clemson players forcing stubborn-as-nails Dabo Swinney to acknowledge a racially charged incident that happened with an assistant coach in 2017. You had Iowa players coming forward with allegations of racial bias against Hawkeyes strength coach Chris Doyle, forcing his removal.
Memories have faded a bit about what that moment felt like, but it was the first time administrators and coaches were truly frightened by the power athletes collectively held over their programs and their careers. And nobody really saw it coming until it was on their doorstep.
Could the same kind of movement sweep college football if the money that has been growing exponentially every year suddenly shrinks — all while the coaches and ADs, assuredly, continue getting raises?
None of us can really predict that. But in their thirst for Congress to legislate college sports back to a more controlled world, nobody is giving nearly enough thought to what the aftershocks might look like.
And by the way, the same agents who are successfully persuading players to enter the transfer portal every year are going to get their fees capped at 5% if this bill goes through. You think they might have incentive to throw some wrenches into that system?
The Protect College Sports Act is a big piece of legislation that is creating strange bedfellows on both sides of the aisle. The Big Ten and SEC, which spent years and millions of dollars lobbying for congressional help, are now suddenly against this version of the bill. It’s still unclear whether there’s enough time and political alignment before the November midterms for it to pass.
But more than any particular element of the bill, the biggest danger for college sports is that its primary goal — stabilizing player costs — will accidentally give life to a real organizing principle around unionization that has never existed before. It’s irresponsible how few people are even considering what that might look like.
Simply by refusing to play one regular-season game, college football players hold the power to make hundreds of millions of dollars go up in smoke for schools, sponsors and television networks. If that ever becomes a real risk, the Protect College Sports Act could turn into a case where the cure is worse than the disease.
