Big Ten votes to support Congressional college sports bill while SEC set to meet
The Big Ten and SEC may be on the brink of striking a deal with federal lawmakers over legislation to regulate the college sports industry.
Days of negotiations between U.S. senators and conference executives over the Protect College Sports Act reached a crescendo on Friday, as league executives hurriedly scheduled meetings with their respective presidents and chancellors in a stunning 11th-hour move.
The Big Ten presidents and chancellors, and league executives, voted to support the bill, sources tell Yahoo Sports. The SEC held a call Friday morning to review the latest revisions and is expected to hold an evening call to possibly vote to lend their support, too.
The scramble comes a day after the conferences missed, for a second time in as many days, a deadline set by lawmakers to determine their position on a revised bill and follows aggressive involvement from the White House. U.S. president Donald Trump engaged with stakeholders through intermediaries on Thursday evening, stating his intent to publicly condemn Big Ten and SEC leaders for opposing the bill, presumably through a social media account followed by millions.
Thursday night and Friday's negotiations — between lawmakers and the power leagues, plus Notre Dame — resulted in the addition of language to the bill intended to strengthen a provision that prohibits schools from circumventing the athlete revenue-share cap. The language, shared with Yahoo Sports, requires school-affiliated sponsors and apparel brands to enter into an attestation process to certify that their NIL agreements are kosher, not directed by the school and that the compensation doesn't originate from the school. Similar language is in the bill already related to NIL deals from multimedia rights partners, like Learfield and Playfly.
The goal is to establish a more strict cap by including into the cap all affiliated NIL deals, aside from those authentic deals that are ratified through the attestation process. This is a key point for university presidents and conference commissioners in all four power leagues, especially considering that the legislation raises the player cap from $21.3 million to $48.8 million.
The SEC and Big Ten's support is central to the bill's passage.
There remains a path for the bill to reach the Senate floor for a vote next week before lawmakers leave for a month-long recess. Majority Leader John Thune likely needs to file Monday for what's called "cloture," a formal procedural step that starts the process for a floor vote later in the week.
Many predict that the bipartisan legislation has enough support to easily surpass the 60-vote threshold necessary in the Senate — if the leagues throw their weight behind the measure. While the bill would still need to pass the House of Representatives, Senate ratification would stand as one of the most historic moves in college sports history and a victorious moment for the NCAA's seven-year lobbying effort for a congressional bill.
The key components of the bill would grant the NCAA and conferences a limited antitrust exception to re-implement the one-time transfer exception, standardize a five-year eligibility policy, ban professional athletes from returning to college, establish an agent registry and minimum fee (5%) and, as noted above, create a more strict athlete revenue-share cap.
The revenue-share cap, for weeks now, has been at the center of the negotiations between conference officials and co-authors of the bill itself, Sens. Ted Cruz, Maria Cantwell and Eric Schmitt, and their staffs.
Opposed to collective bargaining and employment, college sports leaders are working to establish a harder cap like the NFL as opposed to the current state of affairs, where schools are exceeding the $21.3 million cap, in some cases, by triple that figure, by redirecting sponsorship and apparel cash from the athletic department to their roster. According to the bill, all athlete deals with university-contracted businesses (associated entities), such as multimedia rights partners, corporate sponsors and apparel brands, would be included in a school's revenue-share payments and count against the cap.
However, the legislation keeps open a lane for authentic deals by creating the attestation process.
The cap itself is on the move.
In revisions obtained by Yahoo Sports on Thursday, the legislation now creates a $22.5 million retention pool for schools to use on retaining athletes in addition to the $21.3 million original cap, plus $5 million to be spent only on women and non-revenue sports. That's a $48.8 million cap, putting the figure more in line with the current market.
But a question still lingers: Will schools skirt the certification process and still exceed the cap with disguised third-party deals?
While the cap circumvention provision remains the top issue, there are others, such as a new, mysterious third section of the bill added just this week. Title III, called the "Ignite HBCUs Sports and Media Act," is a competitive federal grant program to assist historically black colleges and universities, though details of the act are unclear.
In general, the bill is the opposite of the narrow version that college leaders wanted. It is incredibly specific, touching on several concepts, including conference expansion and coaching movement. The legislation caps power conference membership at 19 schools and requires those programs moving from one power league to another to operate as an independent for five years.
The expansion provision may impact decisions from schools that are in position to move from the ACC to the SEC or Big Ten. Officials at Clemson, Miami, Florida State, North Carolina, Georgia Tech and others have expressed, some privately and other publicly in meetings, their opposition to the concept.
The legislation also prohibits coaches from leaving their team before a season ends, something that lawmakers refer to as "the Lane Kiffin Rule."
As for dissension over the bill, the senators and their staff members believe they've made "major concessions" to appease the SEC and Big Ten, a staff member said this week in a statement.
However, conference executives want more language prohibiting cap circumvention.
Senators themselves pushed back against the notion that the cap circumvention provision isn't strong enough. In fact, Cruz claimed that commissioners want to bar third-party companies associated with schools from striking any and all NIL deals with athletes, even kosher endorsement contracts. He contends language in the latest bill creates the hardest cap possible beyond violating a person's NIL rights.
"The cap is a hard cap. Full stop. That loophole is closed," Cruz wrote in a post on X.
Later in the day, a Senate staff member sent a memo to conference commissioners outlining the ways that the bill closes the loophole, writing that the NCAA and College Sports Commission has "clear authority to establish and enforce rules ensuring that associated entity compensation is counted against the cap."
The two leagues stand mostly alone.
Most other NCAA Division I conferences supported the act, including the NCAA itself, whose president, Charlie Baker, released a statement on Thursday imploring college leaders to "support the bill now."
Timing of a vote may be an issue.
Next week's Senate agenda is busy. Even if Thune believes the bill has the votes to file cloture on Monday evening, a plethora of issues clog floor time, including a spending bill, budget resolution, Russia sanctions and administrative nominations.
Without reaching the floor next week, the legislation faces long odds once the Senate returns in September as the mid-term election cycle cranks up.
In fact, a Senate staff member quipped to Yahoo Sports on Thursday that if the SEC and Big Ten did not support the bill and wish to "punt to September," that the leagues "will have to find new senators." It is an indication that Cruz, Cantwell and Schmitt are on their last gasp with the legislation.
