College Athletes Deserve Better Than an Antitrust Giveaway
College athletes have been getting a raw deal for a long time. The NCAA built a multi-billion-dollar industry on their backs while hiding behind the fiction of amateurism. So when Senators Maria Cantwell and Ted Cruz announced the Protect College Sports Act, the Sports Fans Coalition read it carefully and found somethings genuinely worth praising. Then we kept reading.
There's a lot of real, meaningful athlete protection in this bill:
It guarantees student athletes the right to earn compensation for their name, image, and likeness.
It protects scholarships for 10 years, meaning a school can't yank your grant-in-aid because you got hurt
It requires Division I institutions to cover out-of-pocket medical costs for sports-related injuries during eligibility, and extends health coverage for five years after a student athlete's last competition.
For athletes who sustain long-term conditions such as CTE, the bill establishes a $60 million trust fund that must be replenished each year.
It requires the NCAA to provide women's programs with comparable facilities, lodging, meals, and transportation.
It gives student athletes one-third of the seats on governing boards and rule-making committees.
It creates an independent Ombudsman's office to advise athletes on their rights at no cost.
It provides whistleblower protections. And, critically, it prohibits forced arbitration and class-action waivers — which means that when something goes wrong, athletes can actually go to court.
These are real wins. We want to say that clearly before we explain why this bill, as written, is still a problem.
The Antitrust Exemption Changes Everything
Section 118 of the Protect College Sports Act grants a sweeping antitrust exemption to intercollegiate athletic associations, conferences, and institutions to enforce the bill's provisions, including transfer restrictions, revenue caps, and eligibility rules. The stated logic is that the exemption is conditional: to claim it, associations must first implement all of the athlete protection requirements. But conditionality doesn't change what Cantwell and Cruz are handing over. Once that immunity is statutory, the conditions become a compliance checklist, not a meaningful check on power. These exemptions allow the NCAA to:
Restrict NIL eligibility if a deal violates the student code of conduct or if the athlete uses school facilities/trademarks without consent.
Ban agents from representing athletes without antitrust exposure.
Enforce the ban on coaches jumping mid-season without antitrust liability.
Enforce a labor mobility restriction (transfers) with full antitrust immunity. This is as anti-athlete as it gets!
Enforce other eligibility rules generally.
Collectively enforce a ceiling on athlete compensation without it being treated as price-fixing.
Extend that same revenue share cap after the House v. NCAA settlement expires. Same immunity, indefinitely.
Enforce a restricted recruiting calendar without antitrust exposure.
We've said this before about the House Republicans' SCORE Act, which, admittedly, was far more sweeping in its exemptions. The Cantwell-Cruz bill is essentially “diet SCORE” A more targeted antitrust exemption is still an antitrust exemption — and history is not shy about what sports leagues do when they have one. The transfer restriction provisions alone are a flashing warning sign. Restricting a student-athlete's ability to move freely between schools isn't an athletic regulation; it's a labor-market restriction. Giving the NCAA antitrust cover to enforce those restrictions is akin to handing Amazon an exemption to enforce noncompete agreements on warehouse workers.
The Broadcasting Title Will Cost Fans Money
Title II of the bill extends the Sports Broadcasting Act's antitrust exemption, currently limited to professional sports, to college athletics. It comes with a condition: games must remain accessible to local fans in the relevant market, which is genuinely good. Fans shouldn't have to pay a premium for cable or streaming just to watch their hometown team play.
But we've been consistent on this: Sports Fans Coalition believes the Sports Broadcasting Act should be repealed, not expanded. The SBA is the original sin of sports policy. It gave professional leagues a cartel exemption to bundle and sell TV rights collectively, and over six decades, that cartel structure has been the engine of sportsflation, driving up the cost of broadcasting deals that get passed directly to fans through cable bills, streaming subscriptions, and blackouts.
Extending that model to college sports doesn't change the dynamic; it just adds another governing body with the legal authority to act as a cartel. While we are grateful that the bill protects local access, a cartel will still demand the highest possible rights fees from whoever is bidding; those fees will be recouped from fans, especially those out of the local market.
What We'd Like to See
Congress can and should pass the athlete protections on their own merits without the exemptions that completely undermine the bill. We've seen time and again what happens when you give a sports league an inch of antitrust immunity. They take the whole gridiron.