Last Night, College Athletes Lost

The best way to understand what happened yesterday evening on the Senate floor, where the Protect College Sports Act overwhelmingly passed by a vote of 77 to 22, is that Congress responded to the college sports establishment’s plea to save it from itself. Not that anyone put it that way, of course. The bill’s lead sponsor, Ted Cruz, insisted last week that the Protect College Sports Act will “bring order to the chaos consuming the new era of college sports.” My reading of the bill, however, is that it will deprive a distinct group of Americans—college athletes—of the economic rights that every other citizen is entitled to in a country that claims to believe in capitalism.

Is there chaos in college sports? I can’t deny it. Ever since the Supreme Court concluded in 2021 that long-standing NCAA rules preventing college athletes from being paid violated the nation’s antitrust laws, an absolute gusher of money has poured into college sports. At the big-time sports schools, “collectives” of wealthy boosters are handing out millions to athletes under the guise of payments for their “name, image, and likeness” (NIL). Ohio State University, for instance, paid its football team between $49 million and $55 million this season, with star wide receiver Jeremiah Smith receiving an estimated $5 million. When you throw in what the school and its boosters pay its basketball players, its soccer players, its tennis players, and so on, it probably approaches $80 million. A similar story can be told at Louisiana State University, University of Michigan, Indiana University, and most of the other schools that get the College GameDay treatment from ESPN during football season.