Senate nears final passage of bill rewriting NCAA pay and antitrust rules

The Senate is on track Monday evening to pass the most sweeping federal rewrite of college athletics rules in the NCAA's history, capping three weeks of bipartisan floor action on a bill that would write a new NIL and revenue-sharing system into law while handing the NCAA a limited shield from antitrust lawsuits.

Final passage of the Protect College Sports Act, formally S. 4668, is scheduled for roughly 5:30 p.m. ET, senators and aides said, with leadership in both parties predicting it will clear the same 70-vote-plus margins that carried it through three earlier procedural tests this month. The bill, authored by Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and ranking member Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), still needs House approval and a presidential signature, but the White House has already signaled Donald Trump would sign it.

The numbers

The legislation builds directly on top of the revenue-sharing cap created by last year's landmark settlement of the House v. NCAA antitrust case, then adds new money and new rules on top of it:

• The existing settlement cap, now roughly $21.6 million per school for the 2026-27 academic year, stays in place as the base for revenue-sharing with athletes.
• The bill layers on a new $22.5 million "retention pool" schools can use to keep existing players from transferring for money.
• A separate $5 million carve-out is reserved specifically for Olympic sports and non-revenue women's programs.
• Combined, schools could direct close to $50 million a year to athletes — more than double last year's ceiling.

Those figures come on top of a bill that caps agent fees at 5 percent, requires athletes to report any NIL deal worth more than $600, guarantees a five-year eligibility window, and allows one penalty-free transfer per athlete. Conferences could pool and jointly sell media rights only if three-quarters of FBS schools agree, and athletes who transfer between power-conference programs after that window would face a phased waiting period that starts at three years and disappears after six.

How we got here

The bill is Congress's answer to a legal and regulatory scramble that began with the Supreme Court's 2021 ruling in NCAA v. Alston, which cracked open the door to athlete compensation and triggered a state-by-state patchwork of NIL laws. That chaos culminated last year in the court-approved House settlement, which let schools begin paying athletes directly for the first time, set an initial $20.5 million cap, and created a new enforcement body, the College Sports Commission, while also awarding roughly $2.8 billion in back pay to former athletes over ten years.

Schools and the NCAA have spent the year since arguing that settlement alone was not enough, because it did not stop new antitrust suits over eligibility rules, transfer restrictions or conference realignment. Cruz has pushed the bill as the fix, telling colleagues that "student athletes, conferences, coaches, universities, professional sports leagues, and Olympic organizations know that the status quo is unsustainable," a reference, aides said, to complaints from athletes who describe the current system as a legal "Wild West." Cruz's office says 32 conferences, more than 380 schools and a group representing 500,000 student athletes back the bill.

Who is affected

The most direct effects fall on the roughly half a million athletes competing across NCAA Division I, II and III programs, though the new money is concentrated in Division I's Power Four conferences, where football and men's basketball revenue dwarfs other sports. The bill's Olympic- and women's-sports carve-out is meant to blunt criticism that schools would otherwise funnel nearly all new revenue-sharing dollars into football and basketball rosters at the expense of swimming, gymnastics, track and other non-revenue programs.

Athletic departments and the NCAA itself stand to gain the most legal certainty: the bill's limited antitrust exemption would let the association enforce eligibility, transfer and roster rules without facing the wave of lawsuits that have redefined college sports since 2021. Agents, who would now have to register with states and cap their fees, are newly regulated. And Congress would create a 24-member Congressional Commission on the Future of College Athletics to keep recommending changes after this bill takes effect.

Reaction

Opposition has come almost entirely from athlete-advocacy groups and civil-rights organizations rather than from schools or conferences. The NAACP formally announced its opposition last week, arguing the bill trades away athletes' bargaining power in exchange for legal protection for the institutions that profit from their labor.

"The so-called Protect College Sports Act does little to actually protect the student-athletes who make this multi-billion-dollar industry possible. Instead, it shields powerful institutions from accountability while asking Black athletes to surrender their rights, their leverage, and their voice." — NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson

The Congressional Black Caucus raised similar objections in a letter to Cruz and Cantwell, writing that institutions "that profit from Black talent and Black communities" owe those communities support rather than a new liability shield, according to a copy of the letter reported by Sportico. Labor groups have separately objected that the bill locks in NCAA control over compensation rules without giving athletes a formal seat at the table or a path to collective bargaining.

Supporters counter that the bill simply codifies a settlement athletes' own lawyers negotiated and adds real money on top of it. Cantwell, who has spent months building support for the bill alongside Cruz, held a joint appearance with Seattle Sonics Hall of Famer Spencer Haywood, a plaintiff in an earlier landmark athlete-rights case, to frame the bill as an extension of decades of athlete-rights fights rather than a rollback of them.

What happens next

Assuming the Senate clears final passage Monday evening, the bill moves to the House, which is not expected back in Washington in significant numbers until after the November 3 midterms. Speaker Mike Johnson has not committed to a floor vote, and any changes the House makes would send the bill back to the Senate for another round of votes — a scenario that could push final action into the compressed lame-duck session between the midterms and the swearing-in of the new Congress on January 3. The White House's own statement of administration policy recommends the president sign the bill if it reaches his desk unchanged, which would give supporters a rare 2026 example of major bipartisan legislation surviving both chambers in an election year.