The Senate passed a sweeping bipartisan bill on Monday that would regulate college sports, an attempt to end “chaos” in an industry that has been upended by skyrocketing athlete payments and near-unrestricted transfers between schools.
The overwhelming 77-22 vote to pass the legislation is the strongest effort yet by Congress to set national regulations governing payments to college athletes for their name, image and likeness and how often they can transfer. It would give the NCAA new authority over those rules and limited antitrust protections to enforce them.
The bill is the product of years of Senate negotiations that intensified after a 2025 lawsuit settlement uprooted the college sports landscape by allowing colleges to pay their players. The legislation, which would still have to pass the House, would codify the settlement into law but also establish new guardrails around the system in an attempt to rein in the runaway costs for colleges.
“It would be nice if college sports could somehow magically fix itself, but this is a matter of law, federal law, and only Congress can fix it,” said Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who negotiated the bill with the top Democrat on the panel, Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell.
The bill’s backers — more than 70 senators from both parties — say it aims to curtail constant litigation and uncertainty across college sports for athletes, schools and fans. It would also give hundreds of thousands of student athletes new health and labor protections.
But critics say the bill doesn’t do enough to protect athletes or curtail the enormous sums of money flowing to coaches, colleges and conferences.
“This is a bill that essentially ensconces a system of exploitation, and it doesn’t fix the broader problems,” said Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat who has worked with labor and civil rights groups to rally opposition to the bill.
The bill’s future is still unclear.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed an interest in the legislation, and the White House formally endorsed the bill last month. But it could face an uphill battle in the House, which failed repeatedly over the last year to get a different version to the floor and is in recess until after the November elections.
Lawmakers will have to start over in the next Congress if the bill doesn’t pass both chambers by the end of the year.
Bill addresses skyrocketing spending, unlimited transfers
College sports have been reeling in the wake of the 2025 court settlement allowing colleges to directly pay players for their name, image and likeness. The fallout has reshaped the industry and led to football roster payrolls that can exceed $40 million.
The bill would codify the court settlement, including a revenue cap that allows schools to share up to $21.5 million in revenue with their players. The legislation would more than double that amount for some schools, allowing up to an additional $27.5 million in payments through a retention fund — a change that helped win the support of the two largest conferences, the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference.
To help schools raise more revenue, the bill would give schools and conferences the option of pooling their TV media rights.
The legislation also aims to stabilize the NCAA transfer portal that has led to players constantly switching teams. It would restrict player transfers to one “free” move over five years without sitting out a year, with some exceptions, and also would restrict players to five years of total eligibility.
The proposed eligibility limit comes amid backlash to schools that have increasingly pushed boundaries, including LSU’s now-canceled plans to place players on the roster who had participated in NFL training camps.
“That was probably like a big lamp for some people who saw it and said, ‘Oh my God, this is so out of control,’” Cantwell said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
The bill also would restrict coaches from leaving their schools during the season, force schools that want to switch conferences to spend three years as an independent and prevent conferences from growing larger than 20 programs — an effort to prevent so-called “superleagues” from taking over sports. A last-minute amendment proposed by Florida Sen. Ashley Moody raised that cap from 19 in the original legislation.
The vote was delayed several hours on Monday as senators negotiated Moody’s amendment and others that were eventually adopted, including provisions to make it easier for athletes to sue over sexual assault and a requirement to disclose foreign financing.
The Senate rejected an amendment by Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., that would have put limits on ticket prices for fans and two by Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., that would have capped coaches’ salaries at $5 million a year and increased compensation for athletes who have catastrophic injuries.
Oklahoma Senator James Lankford (R-OK) supports the legislation and explained to Griffin Media Washington Bureau Chief Alex Cameron last week why:
LANKFORD: “We’re going to pass Protect College Sports Act. This has been one of those issues that five years ago I said, ‘Why are we talking about this?’ And then, over the past several years, we’ve seen why this is so important. The NCAA has no ability to be able to make decisions across the country, and the decisions to be able to stick. And college sports has really become minor league sports for the pro sports. That’s not what it was ever designed to be. And so there’s some basics that are in this bill just to say, let’s return this to college sports. If there are minor league programs around there, that’s fine. We can have minor league sports on it.
But let’s put the college back in college athletics again. So, this limits us to 24 years old and down, so we don’t have a 27-year-old playing against an 18-year-old somewhere on a team, limiting the number of times that someone can transfer school-to-school to just one transfer. Controlling some of the abusive methods that some of these agents have used on some of these 18-year-olds coming right out of high school, even working with them when they’re in middle school or in high school to try to sign families on. Some of these things are just abusive practices. Allowing the different conferences to be able to cooperate together on their media rights. They don’t have to, but they want to be able to cooperate together to be able to do this.
LANKFORD: “This is really about the business side of college athletics, but also protecting the athletes themselves, as well. If an athlete gets injured in college athletics now, they’re kind of on their own once they leave, actually, from college. So this provides some health care protections for those college athletes, as you would if it’s a workers’ comp-type issue on this, though they’re not employees of the university. It tries to be able to put some protections around those college athletes, and around some of the decision-making that’s actually occurring around college athletics. But ultimately it’s anti-trust protections for the NCAA, so we can actually have rules that get a chance to stick.”
Critics say it wouldn’t do enough to help athletes
The legislation includes new protections for athletes, including caps on agent fees and guarantees for health insurance and scholarships. It would also require schools to maintain a minimum number of sports and roster spots — an effort to ensure that women’s and Olympic sports are not cut in favor of football, basketball and other sports that generate more revenue.
Still, some Democrats say it wouldn’t do enough to limit the big money in college sports.
The legislation “places a cap on the students’ cut of the revenues, but there are no caps on coaches’ salaries or on the size of donations to athletic programs,” Murphy said last week.
Groups like the NAACP, Congressional Black Caucus and AFL-CIO have also opposed the bill, in part, because it leaves unresolved whether athletes should be considered employees with the ability to collectively bargain.
All four Black Democrats in the Senate — Booker, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland — have opposed the bill.
Booker, who played football at Stanford in the late 1980s on a scholarship, noted the “outsized role” that Black athletes play in college sports. He said it wasn’t until college athletes were able to begin to win cases in court that the power started to shift, “and now the NCAA is coming here to the United States Senate, asking for sweeping powers” to exempt antitrust laws.
“We know who this bill is protecting,” Booker said.
House passage is uncertain
Despite strong bipartisan support in the Senate, the bill faces a murky path in the House.
House lawmakers won’t return to Washington until mid-November, after the elections. And it’s unclear what will be on Republican leaders’ agenda in the chaotic last few weeks of the session.
Pressure from Trump could help push the bill to passage. But some House Republicans have insisted on language explicitly stating that athletes are not employees, which the Senate bill does not have — a key concession to Cantwell to win enough Democratic support.
