The Senate voted 77-22 to establish nationwide rules for college athlete compensation, transfers, eligibility and health protections while granting the NCAA limited antitrust protection, sending a major restructuring of college sports to an uncertain future in the House.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
The Senate overwhelmingly approved legislation Monday that would establish the federal government’s most extensive rules to date for college athletics, setting national standards for athlete compensation and transfers while giving the NCAA greater authority to enforce restrictions across an industry transformed by direct player payments and name, image and likeness deals.
The Protect College Sports Act passed 77-22 on Sept. 28 after years of negotiations over how Congress should respond to court decisions, state laws and changing compensation systems that have dismantled much of the NCAA’s traditional model. The bipartisan legislation was negotiated principally by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and ranking Democrat Maria Cantwell of Washington.
The bill now moves to the House, where its prospects are considerably less certain. House lawmakers are not expected to return to Washington until after the Nov. 3 midterm elections, leaving Congress with a narrow window to complete action before the current session ends. If the House does not approve the legislation and send it to President Donald Trump by the end of the year, lawmakers would have to begin the legislative process again in the next Congress.
“It would be nice if college sports could somehow magically fix itself, but this is a matter of law, federal law, and only Congress can fix it,” Cruz said.
Trump endorsed the legislation after its late-night Senate passage.
“This is a really big deal,” he said. “It will not only save college sports, it will save the colleges themselves.”
At the center of the legislation is an effort to transform a system that changed dramatically following the 2025 settlement of antitrust litigation against the NCAA. That agreement permitted schools to share revenue directly with athletes, opening a new financial era in which some major football programs now operate player payrolls exceeding $40 million.
The Senate bill would put much of that framework into federal law.
Schools would initially be permitted to share as much as $21.5 million annually in revenue with athletes under the court settlement model. The legislation also establishes a separate retention mechanism capable of providing substantially more compensation. Revised versions of the bill created a $22.5 million retention fund that can grow to as much as $27.5 million when schools meet specified conditions involving NIL investment in women’s and Olympic sports.
That additional compensation structure was important in securing support from the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference, two of the most financially powerful conferences in college athletics.
The measure would also recognize a federal right for college athletes to earn money from their names, images and likenesses, replacing a patchwork of differing state laws with one national standard. It would impose requirements on NIL contracts and provide the NCAA with limited antitrust protection to establish and enforce certain rules governing compensation, transfers, eligibility and other competitive matters.
The antitrust provision has become one of the bill’s most contentious elements.
Supporters argue that college sports cannot operate under stable national rules if every eligibility or compensation restriction can generate another antitrust lawsuit. Opponents contend that granting the NCAA legal protection would restore power to an organization that athletes have successfully challenged in court and could restrict their future ability to improve compensation and working conditions.
“This is a bill that essentially ensconces a system of exploitation, and it doesn’t fix the broader problems,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said.
The measure would also substantially change transfers.
Under the proposal, athletes generally would receive one “free” transfer during five years of eligibility without being required to sit out a season, subject to specified exceptions. The current transfer environment has made it considerably easier for athletes to move repeatedly between schools, a development supporters of the legislation say has destabilized rosters, recruiting and team planning.
Athletes would also generally be limited to five years of total eligibility.
The eligibility provision follows increasingly aggressive efforts by some programs to test existing NCAA boundaries. LSU, for example, abandoned plans involving players who had previously participated in NFL training camps, an episode Cantwell cited as an example of how far eligibility questions had developed.
“That was probably like a big lamp for some people who saw it and said, ‘Oh my God, this is so out of control,’” Cantwell said.
The legislation reaches beyond players.
Coaches would face restrictions on leaving their schools during a season, an attempt to reduce disruptions caused when coaches accept jobs elsewhere while games are still being played.
Conference realignment would also become more difficult. A school leaving one conference for another would be required to spend three years competing as an independent before joining its new league.
The Senate additionally voted to prevent major conferences from expanding beyond 20 institutions. The bill originally contemplated a 19-school limit before senators adopted a last-minute amendment from Florida Republican Sen. Ashley Moody raising the maximum to 20. The provision is intended to constrain further consolidation into enormous national “superleagues.”
Schools and conferences would gain another option for generating revenue through the pooling of television media rights. Participation would be voluntary, according to revised legislative language, allowing institutions to collectively market broadcast rights in an effort to increase revenue and support athletic programs.
Negotiations continued into Monday before the final vote.
Senators adopted several late amendments, including one intended to make it easier for athletes to bring legal claims involving sexual assault and another requiring disclosures concerning foreign financing.
The Senate rejected an amendment from Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., that would have imposed limits on ticket prices for fans.
Two proposals from Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., were also rejected. One would have capped college coaches’ salaries at $5 million annually, while another would have increased compensation available to athletes suffering catastrophic injuries.
The legislation nevertheless contains a series of new statutory protections for athletes.
Agent fees would be capped, with the final bill limiting fees to 5%, and scholarship protections would be strengthened. Athletes would receive guarantees involving healthcare, including coverage for certain medical expenses after their playing careers have ended, and schools would face restrictions on revoking scholarships because of injury or athletic performance.
The measure also seeks to protect sports that do not generate the large television and ticket revenues associated with football and men’s basketball.
Schools would be required to maintain minimum numbers of athletic programs and roster positions, provisions designed to prevent institutions from financing major revenue-producing sports by eliminating women’s teams, Olympic sports or other programs with smaller commercial returns.
Backers say those safeguards are particularly important as schools redirect tens of millions of dollars toward direct athlete compensation.
Critics contend the legislation places more limits on athletes than on the administrators, coaches and donors controlling the rest of college athletics’ expanding financial system.
The legislation “places a cap on the students’ cut of the revenues, but there are no caps on coaches’ salaries or on the size of donations to athletic programs,” Murphy said last week.
The question of whether college athletes should legally be considered employees remains unresolved.
Organizations including the NAACP, AFL-CIO and Congressional Black Caucus have opposed the bill in part because it does not establish an employee status that could provide athletes with collective bargaining rights.
All four Black Democrats currently serving in the Senate — Booker of New Jersey, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland — voted against the legislation.
Booker, who played football at Stanford on scholarship in the late 1980s, argued that Black athletes have an “outsized role” in the revenue-generating portions of college sports and warned against shifting legal power back toward the NCAA after athletes gained leverage through court victories.
He said that only after athletes began prevailing in litigation did the balance of power start changing, “and now the NCAA is coming here to the United States Senate, asking for sweeping powers” to exempt antitrust laws.
“We know who this bill is protecting,” Booker said.
Supporters point to a different collection of organizations backing the legislation.
The Senate Commerce Committee says the bill has support from 32 collegiate athletic conferences and more than 380 colleges and universities across all 50 states and Washington, including historically Black colleges and universities. Professional sports organizations and athlete groups supporting the measure include the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, NFL Players Association, National Basketball Players Association, U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and Team USA Athletes’ Commission.
The bipartisan Senate vote demonstrates that the legislation commands substantially broader support in that chamber than previous congressional attempts to regulate the rapidly changing college sports economy.
Its path through the House remains the central obstacle.
Some House Republicans have sought explicit statutory language declaring that college athletes are not employees. That provision is absent from the Senate measure, a decision that helped Cantwell and other negotiators secure enough Democratic support for passage. Adding it in the House could disrupt the coalition that produced the 77-22 Senate vote.
The timing creates another complication. The House is out of session until after the November election and is expected to return with only a limited number of legislative weeks remaining in 2026.
Any House changes could also require further Senate action before the bill could reach Trump.
The legislation therefore represents the closest Congress has come to imposing a comprehensive federal framework on modern college sports, but Monday’s Senate approval does not yet make those rules law.
Cruz said after passage that he hopes the level of bipartisan support demonstrated in the Senate can be replicated in the House.
It is his hope, Cruz said, “that we see in the House the same thing we saw in the Senate: a big bipartisan vote.”
Whether that occurs before the current Congress expires will determine whether the new national rules governing athlete compensation, transfers, eligibility, conference expansion and NCAA enforcement take effect — or whether Congress must begin the fight again in 2027.
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