At the first hearing for the Protect College Sports Act in June, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) acknowledged the strange nature of his alliance with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), his co-sponsor on the bill. He and Cantwell, Cruz said, probably couldn’t have agreed on the color of the sky before walking into the Hart Building that morning, let alone most issues of substance. But college sports, Cruz explained, is a unifier, a way for Democrats and Republicans to come together, hold hands, agree just enough for the sake of the great American traditions of mascot pushups and watching Penn State blow the big game.
College sports, however, are never just about college sports.
For more than five years now, ever since lobbying picked up in the name, image and likeness (NIL) era, that’s been especially true in Congress, most recently with the Senate not holding a full vote on the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA) before the August recess. While the Senate expects to pick up the bill in September, not voting this week only tightened the window to pass the bipartisan legislation before the midterms this fall. And in the past few days alone, there were multiple examples of why legislating college sports is complicated, to say the least, and ripe for odd factions forming.