Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, and Sen. Maria Cantwell, the Washington Democrat who is its ranking member, have made the Cruz Cantwell college sports bill the next vehicle for taming name, image and likeness (NIL, athletes’ commercial rights to profit from their identity), transfers and college football media money. The case for action is strongest if it stays narrow: protect athlete pay rights, give schools a workable rulebook and keep fans from becoming the quiet funding source for a federal broadcast bargain.
The danger is not that Washington notices college football. The sport is too big, too litigated and too tied to television to escape Congress forever. The risk is that a bill sold as stability writes today’s emergency into federal law before the market has finished adjusting.
The Senate Bargain Starts With Broadcast Money
Most NIL arguments begin with the player who changes schools or the booster collective that writes the check. The Senate’s most interesting paper trail begins somewhere else: the television contract. In March, Cantwell and Sen. Eric Schmitt, Republican of Missouri, released a college sports media rights draft built around an antitrust exemption for joint college football rights sales.
That matters because it changes the business question. A national college sports bill would not just police collectives or transfer rules. It could also amend the Sports Broadcasting Act (SBA, the federal law that gives certain sports leagues antitrust room to sell broadcast rights jointly) so colleges and conferences can pool football rights without the same legal exposure they face now.
The numbers explain why lawmakers are tempted. Schmitt’s office said college football generates 3.7 billion viewer hours, compared with 2.0 billion for the National Basketball Association (NBA, the top US men’s professional basketball league), while college football rights bring in $3.8 billion against the NBA’s $6.8 billion. If those figures are right, college football has audience scale that its fragmented rights system has not fully priced.
Pooling could raise more money for schools outside the richest conferences. It could also make the sport feel more like a national broadcast cartel, with Washington blessing the structure and fans meeting the bill later through bigger bundles, pricier streaming tiers or fewer truly local options.
The House Settlement Put a Cap on a Moving Market
The backdrop is the House v. NCAA settlement, the case that pushed direct school payments from theory into operating policy. The final approval order in the athlete NIL case described claims against National Collegiate Athletic Association rules that restricted third-party NIL money, broadcast-related NIL payments, athletic services compensation and scholarship limits.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA, the governing body for major college athletics) then moved toward a settlement system with direct payments, roster limits and new reporting. In an NCAA House settlement implementation memo, the first-year cap on new athlete payments was estimated at $20.5 million per institution, with the pool tied to 22 percent of average covered revenue and recalculated every three years.
- $20.5 million – estimated first-year cap on new payments and benefits per institution under the settlement framework.
- 22 percent – the revenue share formula for the athlete benefits pool in covered categories.
- 4 percent – the annual increase for the second and third years inside each three-year recalculation window.
Those figures are not the end of the market. They are the beginning of the next fight. Once the cap exists, every NIL deal that looks like payroll by another name becomes a pressure point. Once a clearinghouse rejects or delays a deal, athletes and schools ask why a private body gets to police fair value. Congress is being asked to answer that question before courts answer it again.
Athlete Rights Are the Hard Part
Cruz and Cantwell come to the same table with different public records. In 2023, Cruz released a Cruz NIL discussion draft that stressed uniform national rules, legal certainty and preserving college sports with limited federal interference. Cantwell’s more recent work with Democratic colleagues stressed athlete protections, health standards and broader revenue access.
The cleanest version of a bipartisan bill would separate three problems that keep getting mashed together: athlete rights, school budget stress and football media pricing. They overlap, but they are not identical. A statute that solves one by overreaching on the others will invite the next legal challenge.
| Plan Or Framework | Main Tool | Athlete Protection | Media Rights Piece |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cruz discussion draft | National NIL uniformity and legal certainty | Codifies NIL rights while preserving school governance | No central public emphasis on pooled rights |
| Cantwell SAFE Act | Federal athlete rights and safety standards | Health benefits, scholarship limits, agent rules and NIL protections | Amends the SBA for college sports rights pooling |
| Schmitt-Cantwell draft | Optional football rights pooling | Revenue goal tied to women and Olympic sports | Core feature |
| House settlement system | Direct school payments plus NIL review | Payment cap and reporting process | Broadcast revenue feeds the cap formula |
The SAFE Act text on Congress.gov shows how wide this can get. It covers health and safety rules, medical authority, scholarship protections, agent oversight and revenue provisions. That breadth may be necessary, but it also means a football bill can quickly become a national college labor code without openly calling itself one.
Fans May Pay for the Rescue
Cantwell’s office has tried to address the obvious consumer problem. Its SAFE Act summary from Cantwell’s office says football and basketball games would have to be available for free in a school’s local media market. That provision is not decorative. It is the piece that admits pooled rights can hurt viewers if Congress only listens to schools and conferences.
Local access sounds simple until the deal terms arrive. A top program can be local to one city, regional to a state, national to alumni and valuable to a streaming company that wants exclusivity. The more Congress allows joint selling, the more it has to decide who counts as the protected fan.
The pressure points are plain:
- Local TV – a free-market rule has to define the market clearly or broadcasters and streamers will argue over the edges.
- Streaming bundles – pooled rights can produce bigger packages that help conferences but make fans buy more than they want.
- Kickoff control – nationalized rights can move games into windows that suit television inventory better than campus life.
- Price opacity – fans rarely see the rights fee directly, but they feel it through subscription bills, cable renewals and fragmented access.
This is where the politics get awkward for Cruz. Texas college football is not an abstraction. It is Saturday traffic in Austin, Lubbock, College Station and Fort Worth. A federal fix that makes those games harder or more expensive to watch would be remembered more clearly than a committee explanation about antitrust.
Non-Revenue Sports Need Money, Not Mythology
The strongest moral case for intervention is not coach comfort or administrative neatness. It is the fear that women’s teams and Olympic sports will lose roster spots as football and men’s basketball absorb more cash. Schmitt and Cantwell’s March announcement said college sports had lost hundreds of roster spots since 2020 and cited 40 Olympic sport programs cut across NCAA Division I in recent years.
Those sports do need a funding answer. But nostalgia is a poor budget. The old college model subsidized broad athletic departments because football and basketball money, donor money and student fees could be routed through institutions with fewer outside claims from athletes. The House settlement changed that, and schools now have to fund the broad department while also paying at least some of the labor that makes the television product valuable.
A federal media pool could help smaller schools if the distribution formula is written tightly. It could hurt them if the biggest brands use Congress to raise the total price, then find ways to keep the best inventory and most flexible scheduling power. The same bill can be sold as a rescue for Olympic sports and still widen the gap between the schools with national demand and everyone else.
President Donald Trump’s April college sports executive order added urgency by warning that football and basketball spending, transfer changes and pay-for-play schemes could damage women and Olympic sports. That diagnosis is incomplete if it skips coaching salaries, facilities races and conference realignment. NIL is part of the cost spiral, not the whole machine.
Congress Can Narrow the Job
A good bill would resist the urge to make every college sports argument a federal matter. Congress has a legitimate role where interstate media rights, antitrust exposure, state-law conflicts and athlete commerce collide. It has a weaker claim when it tries to write transfer culture, roster management and competitive taste into national policy.
The practical test is whether the final text limits itself to durable rules that courts and markets cannot easily supply:
- Clear NIL ownership for athletes, including contract rights and basic agent protections.
- Limited antitrust language for specific broadcast and settlement functions, not blanket immunity for every NCAA choice.
- Consumer access rules that define local availability before rights are pooled, not after.
- Transparent sport funding so schools cannot cite Olympic sports in Washington and then bury the distribution math on campus.
That approach will frustrate administrators who want a broader shield and athletes who want full labor rights now. It may also be the only version sturdy enough to survive the next lawsuit and humble enough to avoid wrecking the parts of college football fans still like.
If Cruz and Cantwell write a narrow bill, Congress can give college sports a floor without owning the whole house. If they write a grand bargain for everyone with a lobbyist, the sport’s next unpopular price increase will have a Senate fingerprint on it.
