ESPN received considerable blowback Saturday for giving Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R) nearly 10 minutes of free airtime on “College GameDay” to shill for the Protect College Sports Act, a bipartisan Senate bill he co-sponsored with Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell (D), which he is hoping to get passed as soon as this week. Rece Davis conducted the interview.
This is the same show that a week earlier saw retired coach Nick Saban openly lobby for the bill during a segment on LSU’s attempt to add NFL players. (The show’s analyst also appears in TV commercials for the bill, along with Colorado coach Deion Sanders.) Conspicuously absent from both episodes: anyone who provides an opposing viewpoint on the bill, despite public opposition from the likes of Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), the Congressional Black Caucus and NAACP leaders.
To be clear, ESPN is under no obligation to grant “equal time” to another politician. An ESPN source told The Athletic on Saturday that Cruz — who was relentlessly booed during the segment from Austin, Texas, ahead of the Ohio State-Texas showdown — asked to come on and that it was an “easy decision” to say yes. That source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the topic, said “GameDay” had not received any requests from a potential guest opposed to the legislation but would “obviously do the same” if it received one.
But the whole thing felt odd for a previously apolitical show, and it raised suspicion given ESPN’s parent company, Disney, has mentioned the bill in its lobbying disclosures, according to OpenSecrets.
I’m not here to argue for or against the PCSA. I have no vested interest in whether it passes. What’s bothered me, though, is how its backers have anchored their messaging around a lot of misleading generalizations about the state of college sports. Cruz regurgitated many of them on the air Saturday with zero pushback.
The public deserves to know which of his points were defensible and which were deceiving. So, if “GameDay” won’t do it, then allow me.
Here were his main comments, edited for length, and my accompanying responses.
“Right now, college sports is in chaos. The current situation is nuts, between Lane Kiffin down in Louisiana trying to bring NFL players back to college sports, or up in Lubbock and Brendan Sorsby being allowed to play. What we have now is chaos. There are no rules.”
Cruz smartly opens with two polarizing news stories he can easily use to make the case why Congress should grant the NCAA an antitrust exemption to make and enforce rules. After all, if local judges are willing to strike down such common-sense restrictions as “players can’t gamble on their own teams” or “a player can’t go from an NFL roster back to college,” then the NCAA is probably not long for this world.
“The situation with the transfer portal, where kids go and transfer two, three, four, five times — it’s terrible for the game, it’s terrible for the players, it’s terrible for the schools, and it’s terrible for the fans.”
No doubt the schools, and probably the majority of fans, would love to see the transfer portal reined in. But I’m not sure how he concludes it’s “terrible for the players,” when no one’s asked them.
That’s pretty much the central counterpoint by skeptics of this movement. Everyone from the president of the New York Yankees (Randy Levine) to an oil billionaire (Cody Campbell) to a private equity firm (Smash Capital) is shaping the future of college athletics with no meaningful input from actual college athletes. Personally, I doubt it’s been beneficial for players’ skills development to hop from one school to the next, but who cares about my opinion. Maybe ask some of the young men and women who’ve done it. (My colleague Bruce Feldman reported in April that some NFL coaches do believe the portal is harming development.)
“(The bill) brings order to the chaos. It protects the students, and it protects the students’ ability to be compensated for their name, image and likeness. And I think that’s only fair, only right; they’re producing enormous value.”
The bill, to its credit, contains a lot of admirable protections for athletes, most notably a 5 percent cap on agents’ commissions on NIL deals. Some exploitative agents have been taking as much as 20 percent. And yes, it’s true the bill does not prohibit players from making NIL money, nor cap it at a certain amount.
What Cruz doesn’t mention, though, is that the bill would enshrine in law the House v. NCAA settlement provision that requires outside NIL deals to be “commensurate with compensation paid by third parties to individuals with a similar profile, reputation, or notability.” In other words, “only fair” really means “only at fair market value.”
“But it also puts reasonable rules in place. For example, every player gets one free (transfer). It puts in an eligibility rule that every player has five years of eligibility — not six, seven, eight — and it puts a hard end on that at age 24.”
The bill would restore the NCAA’s one-time transfer exception, which lasted only from 2021 to 2023 before a judge blocked it. Meanwhile, the five-years/age 24 rule is the exact policy the NCAA adopted in June that has already faced dozens of lawsuits. Maybe they’d have better luck if it becomes federal law, but there’s also nothing stopping an aggrieved athlete from suing the government.
“It lets the schools compete, and it also slows down … a spiral of costs that is bankrupting almost every college program in the country. They’re losing tens of millions of dollars.”
Here, we get to College Sports Inc.’s No. 1 scare tactic. They make it seem like athletic programs would be doing just fine financially if they didn’t have to pay those pesky players. When, in fact, most put themselves in this predicament long before players were allowed to make money off their NIL in 2021 and the schools started to pay players through revenue sharing in 2025.
Last year, The Athletic found that from 2005 to 2023, college athletic departments’ revenue rose by an astounding 212.4 percent, fueled in large part by skyrocketing TV deals. But over the same period, their expenses soared by 210.8 percent. Yes, the cost of scholarships went up, but not by that much. (Tuition inflation was about 3 to 4 percent a year.) The majority went to coaches’ and athletic directors’ ever-escalating salaries, lavish facilities and small armies of support staffers, nutritionists — even barbers.
None of which the bill attempts to restrict.
“As a result, they’re canceling women’s programs, they’re canceling nonrevenue sports, they’re canceling Olympic sports. If we don’t act, within three to five years, we’re going to see 40 to 50 schools that have competitive football programs. And everyone else goes under. That would be a tragedy.”
It’s difficult to find an exact number of canceled sports teams since 2021, but the NCAA does track broader participation rates. Since 2021, the total number of Division I sports teams has risen from 6,638 to 6,812, and the total number of athletes from 185,444 to 204,255.
It’s unclear what Cruz’s bar is for “competitive football programs,” or where he gets his timeline, but so far there’s been no data to suggest “everyone else will go under.” If anything, it’s been the opposite. Since 2021, the number of FBS programs has risen from 130 to 138, and the number of four-year schools sponsoring football across all four NCAA divisions has risen from 659 to 673.
At this point, Rece said to Cruz, “Other senators contend there are restrictions placed on the players in terms of the amount of income they can generate, and that is not the case with coaches and administrators. How do you respond to that?”
“The players are allowed to participate in revenue sharing (as established by the House settlement). All told, the (amount) adds up to $47.5 million (per school). It’s $20.5 million (the schools) can use to recruit new players, an additional $22.5 million in retention payments, and on top of that there’s an additional $5 million that can only go to women’s sports and nonrevenue sports.”
That $47.5 million rev-share cap — up from $21.5 million this year — was an eleventh-hour concession the senators made to gain approval from the Big Ten and SEC. Even accounting for “above-the-cap” payments, only a small handful of schools are spending that much on their athletes. Most of the ACC and Big 12 are well below it.
But it’s still a salary cap, established without collective bargaining. And it would remain in effect for the next nine years, by which point a free market would have caused that number to rise far above $47.5 million. Already, schools such as Ohio State, Texas and LSU are proably spending more than that just on football, much less all their sports.
For what it’s worth, the 171-page bill includes a section that establishes a Congressional Commission on the Future of College Athletics, charged to “study and develop recommendations regarding an alternative structure for providing compensation for student athletes, including consideration of the positive and negative implications associated with a collective bargaining structure and employment status for student athletes.”
“What this bill does prohibit is a booster in a back alley just showing up with a bag of cash and doing things under the table. It’s got to be ‘real’ NIL.”
Good luck with that.
Left unmentioned is that the bulky bill also tries to tamp down realignment by capping conferences at 19 members and allows conferences to bundle their media rights. But the show had to cut to a break at some point.
Cruz expressed confidence the Senate will pass the bill this week, though he said the same thing back before the Senate’s recess in early August, only to find out they didn’t have the votes yet. But perhaps the full-throated TV blitz to start the season will help push it over the top.
Of course, the thing then needs to make it through a divided House just weeks before the midterms. But that’s for another column.
