There is a considerable degree of angst about the seismic changes affecting major college sports in the last few years, and there’s no indication that these changes will stop anytime soon. For instance, the college basketball playoff will soon expand from 68 to 76 teams in 2027, and it appears likely that the college football playoff will soon expand as well.
What’s more, the antitrust settlement in the House vs. NCAA lawsuit resulted in a revenue sharing agreement that directed $2.8 billion for player compensation, which has led to many schools choosing to reduce funding for minor sports or eliminating them altogether. The upheaval has angered more than a few fans and athletes whose teams or sports have lost status or funding, and Congress--always anxious to maintain the status quo--has seen fit to try to get involved.
Last month Senators Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell, who are the chair and ranking member for the Senate Commerce Committee, introduced the Protect College Sports Act. The bill is remarkably conservative--in the William F. Buckley definition of the word--as its clear intent is to stand athwart the college sports world and yell STOP, for better or worse. Mainly for the worse, since college basketball and football have never been more popular.
For people who yearn to return to a world where a small number of schools perpetually dominate college football while most other schools fight over their scraps, this bill is welcome. However, for the players and fans at other major schools, it is unclear how this legislation would benefit them.
The Protect College Sports Act is chock full of banal ideas. Perhaps the most prominent provision is its prohibition on the SEC and the Big 10, currently the two major sports conferences, from merging. Why should such a thing fall under the purview of the federal government? Why should Congress concern itself with how universities in the top conferences choose to organize their activities? Where is the public interest in all this?
The degree to which the legislation seeks to get into the weeds of how college sports operates is maddening. For instance, the bill attempts to dictate teams’ schedules by mandating a certain amount of out-of-conference rivalry games; it attempts to force that home games be shown on “local” TV; it would effectively give the FCC the power to ratify--or veto--conference television contracts; and it would even dictate the television football calendar by mandating that the college season end by early January and expand the NFL prohibition on Friday and Saturday broadcasts that currently runs from early September to early December.
Each of these appear intended to take college football back to some halcyon time that has long since passed, but whose interests would be served by doing so? I get that the Republican Party has abandoned all pretense of being in favor of a limited government, but since when does it want the government to dictate Florida State’s nonconference football schedule and when the college playoff would begin and end?
It also proposes a freeze on the current scholarships made available for the non-revenue sports--often referred to as “Olympic Sports” without bothering to justify the broader benefits to the universities of doing so or why it feels compelled to tell the conferences how to run their sports.
The SEC and Big 10--the bogeymen of the proposed bill--have found a new revenue stream for these sports by broadcasting major competitions and packaging these broadcasts with their football and basketball contracts. In Washington D.C. the Big 10 volleyball tournament was on all the TVs in my neighborhood sports bar and attracted a full house.
While they may not approach the popularity of football, the attention that volleyball, softball, and women’s basketball receive has served to generate revenue for the schools and help pay for their expenses. Why Congress feels compelled to dictate how conferences and schools organize and fund their non-revenue sports is beyond me.
The courts mandated that players in revenue sports be paid a competitive wage for their services and that they be permitted to make money from their name, image, and likeness. Some schools--like my alma mater, Indiana University--proved themselves to be adept at competing in the new environment after decades of mediocrity. For us Hoosiers, this development has been nothing short of wonderful--besides having a lot more fun watching the team on Saturdays, the school has seen applications almost double in the last two years, and the school’s prestige and alumni donations have grown vertiginously.
And it’s not just rich schools that have proven themselves adept at competing in the new environment. The college in my hometown of Peoria, Bradley University, has excelled in men’s basketball in the 2020s, winning the conference or making it to the conference tournament championship nearly every year while enjoying robust crowds and more revenue than ever before.
The new economic environment for college sports has greatly upset the status quo, but I don’t know why that’s necessarily a bad thing. To insist that the last five years of college football--when fandom and revenues have skyrocketed--as evidence of the need for Congress to enact a major reform is mystifying to me.
