At the first hearing for the Protect College Sports Act in June, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) acknowledged the strange nature of his alliance with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), his co-sponsor on the bill. He and Cantwell, Cruz said, probably couldn’t have agreed on the color of the sky before walking into the Hart Building that morning, let alone most issues of substance. But college sports, Cruz explained, is a unifier, a way for Democrats and Republicans to come together, hold hands, agree just enough for the sake of the great American traditions of mascot pushups and watching Penn State blow the big game.
College sports, however, are never just about college sports.
For more than five years now, ever since lobbying picked up in the name, image and likeness (NIL) era, that’s been especially true in Congress, most recently with the Senate not holding a full vote on the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA) before the August recess. While the Senate expects to pick up the bill in September, not voting this week only tightened the window to pass the bipartisan legislation before the midterms this fall. And in the past few days alone, there were multiple examples of why legislating college sports is complicated, to say the least, and ripe for odd factions forming.
On Wednesday, the AFL-CIO and its sports council, which includes most professional players unions, opposed the bill. On Thursday, the Congressional Black Caucus swung hard against the legislation, too, saying it cannot support it as written. Big Labor and the CBC are regular opponents of any bill that could even be perceived as NCAA-friendly. Later Thursday, three Republican senators — Josh Hawley of Missouri, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Jim Banks of Indiana — introduced an amendment to protect existing state laws that ban transgender female athletes from participating in women’s sports. In a letter to senators, the attorneys general from six states raised the same concern.
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Tuberville, a former college football coach, has spent his summer rallying fellow Republicans against the PCSA for a variety of reasons. On the other side of the aisle, Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) and Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) have done the same, albeit more privately, according to multiple people familiar with how they’ve approached the bill.
“Some strange, strange bedfellows with this bill, though obviously their reasons for trying to slow it down or crush it altogether are all over the map,” a Republican Senate aide told NOTUS on Friday. “That was always the risk of trying for something that’s really, really sweeping.”
The updated bill text is 171 pages. A major part of it — and a sticking point for many Democrats and outside labor groups — would grant the NCAA conditional antitrust protection to set rules for athlete compensation, eligibility and the transfer portal. Broadly, a lot of Democrats are rejecting the bill as bending to the NCAA and its conferences without the direct involvement of athletes. The AFL-CIO’s statement also stunted additional Democratic support this week, according to a handful of Senate aides.
Republicans, on the other hand, have been more likely to hold off support until the bill meets their wishes on specific issues. They were still filing new amendments into Friday evening, right up until the PCSA was bumped behind more pressing matters. Sen. Ashley Moody (R-Florida) introduced an amendment to the section that limits further expansion and realignment at the power-conference level, which read as giving Miami and/or Florida State the option to switch leagues in the near future without the penalties the PCSA would impose. The conversation on transgender athletes is not going away, either.
Beyond at least five more weeks of this type of scrutiny for the bill, not voting in August means any eventual action in the House would be on a compressed timeline. In July, it was Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri), one of its original co-sponsors, who said that waiting until after recess in the Senate could really complicate the PCSA’s chances, seeing that his colleagues’ attention would then be split by campaigning and budget negotiations.
“It’s clear that this bill is the only way to save college sports and women’s sports,” Cruz and Schmitt said in a joint statement after midnight Friday. “With the strong support of President Trump, we look forward to him signing the bill on [ESPN] College GameDay in the fall.”
In a separate statement, Cantwell said: “Time may have run out to protect college sports in August but there is plenty of time in September. I’m glad Sen. Thune set a date certain in September to bring it up because the challenges facing student athletes and universities aren’t going away.”
Cruz and Schmitt also said Thune has “locked in” a vote for September. Given the proposed amendments, though, and the dissenting opinions on both sides, there should be more negotiating post-recess.
A big reason for the pushback this week was that the bill had real momentum. On July 31, late-night negotiations led to the SEC and Big Ten throwing their support behind the bill, a huge development given the conferences’ collective political influence. In turn, Republican Sen. Todd Young of Indiana, home of the defending national champions in football, a Big Ten team, flipped from against to in favor of the PCSA. Publicly, Cruz and Schmitt expressed confidence it would pass — and by a significant margin — before the August recess. The bill even picked up another pair of bipartisan co-sponsors on Thursday in Sens. John Hickenlooper (D-Colorado) and Pete Ricketts (R-Nebraska).
Four Republicans and four Democrats now have their name on the bill —a type of bipartisanship that has long provided a realistic path to the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster. But all along, a goal of the lead senators had been to land somewhere between 70 and 80 votes in the Senate, according to multiple aides who have worked on the bill. They believe that would give the PCSA the momentum needed to advance through the House before the midterms.
Yet advancing in the House, should the bill get there, is no guarantee either. The compressed timeline is only one factor. Another is the ongoing tensions between the House and Senate. And another is that a number of House Republicans want any broad college sports bill to bar athletes from becoming employees. (The SCORE Act, pushed by House Republicans in 2025, did that. The PCSA states it is neutral on employment.) And then another is the Congressional Black Caucus, which had a major hand in sinking SCORE before it reached a House floor vote.
But there are, of course, some very powerful people behind the PCSA. One of them lives in the White House. After Hawley, Tuberville and Banks introduced their amendment Thursday, the White House clarified, through a public statement, that the bill’s preemption of state laws would not affect existing restrictions for transgender female athletes in women’s sports. And just before 5 p.m. Friday, President Donald Trump posted to Truth Social about the PCSA, urging senators to remain in session until they pass it.
That didn’t happen in the end. We’ll now see what the political pressure is like in September.
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