Late Friday night, in the last hours before the Senate left for August recess, there was still a chance, however slim, that the Protect College Sports Act would go to a vote. Hours earlier, President Donald Trump had posted about the bill on Truth Social, telling senators to stay in Washington until they passed it. Sure, a handful of Republicans had filed last-minute amendments, some of which called for significant changes to the 171-page legislation. But Republicans pushing the bill started riding the president’s endorsement as hard as they could, hoping it would get the PCSA to the floor.
And it was about that time, when there was a “new groundswell of interest in the bill,” as one Senate aide put it, that Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) and Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) went to work. Each called a number of their fellow Democrats to explain why they don’t like the bill. They called labor groups, civil rights groups, all kinds of groups that could strengthen the public and private pushback. Their staffers called one another. A lot.
Around 11:30 p.m., Senate leaders needed unanimous consent to proceed to a vote on the bill. Murphy and Booker objected. Then around 2 a.m., they objected a second time, as did a handful of other lawmakers from both parties, according to multiple aides.
“Booker and Murphy put stakes in the ground and said we’re not moving,” said a lobbyist working on the bill. “And that was basically that.”
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According to the bill’s lead sponsors, Majority Leader John Thune agreed to make the bill a priority when the Senate returned in mid-September. But Murphy and Booker hadn’t just compressed the timeline for the bill to pass through the Senate and House before the midterms in November. They also gave themselves five more weeks to build up the Democratic opposition to it.
“This month is now our opportunity to explain what’s in the bill,” Murphy told NOTUS. “And explain to people, and explain to our colleagues on the left, that this is a fundamental civil rights issue. That this is an unprecedented restraint on compensation for student-athletes, but particularly young Black student-athletes.”
Booker and Murphy aren’t new to college sports legislation (or to the sports-politics crossover in general). Booker, a former football player at Stanford, has spent years discussing how — or whether — Congress should regulate college sports. Murphy has, too, while also taking a recent interest in prediction markets and how youth sports have been co-opted by private equity.
But even as Democrats with a genuine interest in sports, their alliance against the PCSA isn’t totally natural. Murphy has occupied the far-left end of discussions on college sports in Congress, previously introducing bills that would have granted athletes employment status and collective bargaining power. Booker, on the other hand, spent a long time negotiating with Republicans like Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Jerry Moran of Kansas, who was one of Booker’s co-sponsors on a college sports bill in 2023. Before Cruz partnered with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) on the PCSA, there were long-running talks between Cruz, Booker and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut). Booker’s main focus has typically been on health and safety protections for athletes.
Where Murphy and Booker align, however — or where they align most — is in believing athletes should have a real say in any college sports legislation, especially if it gives the NCAA an antitrust exemption to regulate compensation and player movement. This is what they stressed to fellow Democrats on Friday, according to a handful of aides. They kept the argument simple. But in the weeks ahead, as Murphy told NOTUS, they plan to drill down on specifics to limit Democratic support.
Murphy has been public with his opposition of the PCSA, at least in spurts. Booker has operated in the background.
The bill has four Democratic co-sponsors in Cantwell and Sens. Chris Coons of Delaware, Peter Welch of Vermont and John Hickenlooper of Colorado. That has long made it seem as if Cruz and Cantwell could secure the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster. But after the SEC and Big Ten agreed to support the bill on July 31, Cruz and Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri), another co-sponsor, set their sights on running the count past 70, if not higher, in hopes of giving the bill momentum heading into the House. And that’s when dissent started coming in from all sides.
The AFL-CIO and its sports council, including most professional players associations, opposed the bill last Wednesday.
The Congressional Black Caucus opposed it the next day, a decision influenced by Booker lobbying the CBC against the bill behind the scenes.
On the other side of the aisle, three Republicans filed an amendment calling for the bill to explicitly protect existing state laws that bar transgender female athletes from competing in women’s sports.
“Booker and Murphy were everywhere at the end of last week,” a Republican Senate aide told NOTUS. “And usually when the opposition to a bill scores a win like this, you only see it get more organized, more emboldened. Cruz and Cantwell have their work cut out.”
“I think there are very few people who understand the implications of this bill,” Murphy said. “It was not ready for prime time on Friday night, and that became apparent to everyone. I don’t think this bill is going to become more popular, and it’s not going to get more popular amongst legislators as time goes on. I give a lot of credit to Maria and Ted, I know how hard they worked on this. But I think it’s going to raise a lot more questions than it’s going to answer about the future of college sports as people get into the details.”
On athlete compensation in particular, the PCSA would permit the NCAA to enforce a quasi salary cap of about $21.3 million per school (for all sports) without legal liability. That cap, established by a massive legal settlement last summer, would keep rising incrementally each academic year. In a revised version of the bill, the lead sponsors also agreed to an annual $22.5 million fund for schools to retain players, which could grow an additional $5 million if money is used to pay athletes in women’s or Olympic sports.
In recent years, big-spending schools have used third-party name, image and likeness (NIL) deals, including through their multimedia rights partners, to spend above the loose cap. One goal of the PCSA is to aggressively regulate — or even eliminate — that kind of over-the-cap spending. Murphy vehemently disagrees with how, in his words, the bill “essentially puts the NCAA and its member schools in charge of determining what endorsement deals athletes can get and what they can’t get.” The College Sports Commission would be in charge of enforcing those strengthened compensation rules.
“I just don’t think you can defend caring about the influence and money in college sports only when it pertains to largely Black athletes who are being vastly underpaid in football and basketball,” Murphy said. “This bill doesn’t do anything to constrain endorsement deals for coaches. It doesn’t stop billionaires from plowing money into the schools. It only really limits the ability of the highest-value athletes to get paid. And I don’t think that that is going to save college sports.”
And that’s all just a preview of what people will hear when Murphy calls about college sports in the next five weeks.
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