What do actual athletes think of the Protect College Sports Act, the Senate bill that could go to a floor vote in the very near future? It’s a hard question to answer for a few reasons, the biggest one being that there are more than 500,000 athletes playing college sports, many of whom don’t have the time — or interest — to read 171 pages of dense legislation.
But on Monday, a pair of news conferences got us a tiny bit closer to some answers, in that they offered a snapshot of how two distinct groups of athletes view the bill. These groups represent a clash of ideologies on how (or even whether) to regulate college sports with federal legislation. They also mirror the two biggest forces that will tug at Congress over the PCSA this fall.
The first news conference, organized by the AFL-CIO, included a handful of speakers that vehemently opposed the PCSA. Four active Division I athletes spoke, calling for collective bargaining and unionization as an alternative to a bill crafted without athletes at the negotiating table. The call also included Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut); Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP; Meghann Burke, president of the National Women’s Soccer League Players Association; and Marty McNair, whose son, Jordan McNair, died from heatstroke after a University of Maryland practice in 2018.
And the second news conference, organized by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), one of the bill’s lead sponsors, was held outside the U.S. Capitol building in the late afternoon. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), the lead Democratic sponsor, hosted with Cruz. The event featured five D-I athletes supporting the bill as a way to protect the future of women’s and Olympic sports, along with three big-name college basketball coaches: Arkansas’ John Calipari, Gonzaga’s Mark Few and Houston’s Kelvin Sampson.
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After those athletes and coaches spoke, Cruz expressed confidence that the PCSA would be voted on this week or next. Earlier in the day, Majority Leader John Thune told Punch Bowl: “We’ll see if we have 60 [votes]. I don’t know the answer for sure yet. I hope we do.” If the bill does pass the Senate, it would still need to get through the House before the midterms in order to avoid a potential flip of the majority.
The clock’s ticking, in other words, and Monday felt like a preview of how the bill’s opponents and proponents will approach this upcoming stretch.
On the opposition side, Oluchi Okananwa, a junior guard for Maryland’s women’s basketball team, said: “The Protect College Sports Act is being presented as a way to bring stability to college athletics. And let me be clear: Athletes want stability, too. We want scholarship protections. We want health care. We want protections for women’s and Olympic sports. We want clear rules. But the question is not whether college sports needs rules. The question is who gets to make those rules. Under this legislation, the NCAA, conferences and schools would receive special antitrust protection to enforce restrictions involving athlete compensation, transfers, eligibility and other major parts of our careers. … The institutions on one side would be able to collectively agree on rules that would affect how much athletes can earn, where we can play, when we can transfer and how long we compete. But where is our collective voice on the other side?”
In support of the bill, Diego Diaz, a senior for Fairleigh Dickinson’s men’s volleyball team, said: “Being a student-athlete has transformed my life. That is an experience I want to protect for future generations. During my career, I witnessed a Final Four men’s volleyball program get cut and a longtime member dropped to Division III … erasing over 40 opportunities and two Olympic pipelines. With only 32 Division I programs in men’s volleyball, I understand how fragile men’s volleyball is and all Olympic sports are across the board in this current landscape. Therefore, I am urging for your support of the Protect College Sports Act.”
How Diaz and Okananwa wound up speaking Monday tells a story, too. Diaz is the current chair of the Division I Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, an NCAA-sponsored program. Okananwa is interim president of the United College Athletes Association, a labor group focused on organizing women’s basketball players, including the active unionization push at Oregon State. The NCAA has long opposed athlete employment. The UCAA is one organization pushing extremely hard for it.
The PCSA states neutrality on employment, though many labor advocates believe it would stunt athlete organizing by giving the NCAA antitrust protection to set rules on compensation, eligibility and player movement, as Okananwa laid out. As for how the PCSA could protect opportunities in women’s and Olympic sports at certain schools, the bill would require schools that make more than $50 million in annual athletic revenue to maintain those teams — and their 2024-25 roster sizes — for a set period of time. For schools that generate between $50 million and $80 million in the year before the bill is enacted, this rule would sunset after four years. For schools that generated more than $80 million, it would sunset after nine.
Again, it’s basically impossible to get an accurate cross-section of opinions from the more than 200,000 D-I athletes, let alone the 500,000-plus across the three divisions. But one semi-reliable barometer is whether an athlete plays a revenue or Olympic sport. Naturally, football and basketball players — both men and women — are more skeptical of a bill that could curb athlete earnings or restrict certain name, image and likeness (NIL) deals. On the other side, smaller-sport athletes are more likely to worry about what an uncapped, unregulated economy could mean for the future of their sports, which is a key talking point for Cruz, Cantwell and the lobbyists for the NCAA and conferences.
Both groups talked about the need for stability. They just differed in significant ways about how to achieve that.
Jackson Pruitt, a Temple football player, said on the AFL-CIO call: “Do not make rules about us without us. We simply don’t want the PCSA to be passed. We want a full stop on it. … Do not give the institutions permanent legal protection without having educated athlete representation. We need a players association.”
Then Ella Brooks, a hammer thrower for Clemson’s track and field team, said outside the Capitol: “Constant litigation has denatured a once simple, coherent and fair set of rules. The NCAA and student-athletes are now subject to the decisions of activist judges. Most recent eligibility cases are a perfect example. At the rate at which precedent is changing, I fear that the NCAA will no longer be able to sustain itself.”
Expect much more of this in the days and weeks ahead.
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