LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — For years, the NCAA was accused of being too powerful.
Too restrictive. Too controlling. Too willing to limit what athletes could earn, where they could transfer and how the money generated by college sports could be shared.
The courts agreed.
Louisville | Kentucky | Indiana | Eric Crawford
One by one, major legal decisions chipped away at the NCAA's authority. NIL restrictions collapsed. Transfer restrictions loosened. In 2021, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously against the NCAA in NCAA v. Alston, one of several legal defeats that accelerated the unraveling of the association's old model. Athletes gained more freedom to move, earn and challenge the rules that had governed college sports for generations.
Now Congress is considering something remarkable:
Giving college sports much of that authority back.
Only this time, through federal law.
A bipartisan Senate proposal unveiled Wednesday by Sens. Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell would do far more than regulate NIL. It would attempt to build an entirely new governing structure for modern college sports, one designed to preserve athlete compensation and revenue sharing while restoring national rules, enforcement power and competitive guardrails to a system many leaders believe is drifting toward chaos.
The bill is called the Protect College Sports Act of 2026. But in many ways, it reads less like an NIL bill and more like an attempt to answer the question college sports has spent the past five years struggling to solve:
How do you govern a multibillion-dollar industry after the old governing model collapsed?
The proposal would allow athletes to continue profiting from NIL deals and preserve direct revenue sharing from schools. But it would also give the NCAA and conferences legal protection to enforce rules involving transfers, eligibility, compensation caps, tampering and certain NIL restrictions — powers repeatedly challenged in court in recent years.
The legislation would establish a national NIL disclosure system, create athlete-agent regulations and require medical coverage protections for athletes. It would limit undergraduate athletes to one penalty-free transfer, with additional transfers subject to restrictions.
Consider what the five-year eligibility clock provision actually means in practice. Under the bill, the clock starts ticking when a student enrolls full-time or turns 19 — whichever comes first. A highly recruited athlete who spends a year in a professional development program, or takes time away before college, could arrive on campus already burning eligibility. The provision is aimed squarely at preventing seasoned professionals from cycling into college rosters. But it would also affect plenty of ordinary players whose paths to college weren't straight lines.
And buried deeper in the legislation is perhaps its most ambitious provision: a framework allowing conferences to voluntarily pool media rights together under federal antitrust protection, provided at least 75% of FBS schools participate. The bill also prohibits any conference that reported more than $1 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2025 — currently only the SEC and Big Ten — from merging with or acquiring another conference in a way that would reduce the field below that participation threshold.
In other words, Congress is no longer merely reacting to the changing economics of college sports.
It is attempting to shape them.
The philosophical tension at the center of the bill is impossible to miss.
For years, critics attacked the NCAA as a cartel, a centralized power structure restricting athlete freedom and suppressing compensation. The Supreme Court repeatedly ruled against the organization. Now lawmakers from both parties are openly arguing that the collapse of centralized authority has created a different kind of danger: transfer chaos, unregulated booster collectives, escalating spending arms races and conference consolidation.
The bill attempts to thread a difficult needle.
It does not return to the past. That era is over.
Athletes would still receive NIL opportunities, direct revenue-sharing payments and expanded protections. The legislation even avoids declaring athletes to be non-employees — leaving open, and in some quarters deliberately unresolved, the possibility of future labor battles and collective bargaining.
That question, with enormous financial stakes for every university in the country, may be the bill's most consequential silence.
It faces a long road, with not only legal but political obstacles. A related effort died in the House, over objections of the Congressional Black Caucus to what it saw as voter suppression efforts unrelated to college sports in the Southeastern U.S.
But the proposal also reflects a growing belief among many college leaders — and now some members of Congress — that unrestricted free-market competition may not preserve the version of college sports that fans and universities still want to exist.
That may ultimately be the real story here.
Not that Congress is trying to save a bygone version of college sports.
But that after years of courts dismantling the NCAA's authority in the name of athlete freedom, Congress is now confronting a different question:
What happens if nobody is really in charge anymore?
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