In what's being called a major breakthrough, the Big Ten and SEC agreed late Friday to support a Senate bill that seeks to regulate college sports, ending a holdout by the two most powerful conterences in the nation that threatened to kill the bill.
As reported by Eddie Pells of The Associated Press, school presidents from both conferences voted to back the bill after receiving last-minute concessions over language regarding third-party name, image and likeness deals and the so-called “associated entities” that often broker those arrangements between players and schools.
"More details need to be worked out, but the headline is that the bill still has a chance to earn the 60 votes it needs to halt debate and head to an up-or-down vote before the Senate heads for summer break next Friday," Pells wrote Friday. "The summer recess is increasingly looking like an intractable deadline for the Protect College Sports Act, a bipartisan effort headed by Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash."
After the conferences announced their support for the act “as currently drafted,” Cruz put out a short statement on social media thanking the leagues and saying: “Let's save college sports.” And Cantwell said: “Good. Now progress can be made in protecting women and Olympic athletes and moving the legislation closer to the President’s desk.”
The most groundbreaking part of the reworked deal is the $27.5 million that schools would be allotted to retain players, in addition to the $21.3 million cap already established by the House v. NCAA settlement. "The idea is that the extra money will take the place of payments from 'associated entities' that were allowed above and beyond the $21.3 million cap," Pells wrote. "It was those payments that, many schools complained, obliterated any idea of a cap or controlled cost."
The SEC and Big Ten sought stronger language in the bill to guarantee that any third-party deals are truly outside deals and not coming from the schools’ multimedia-rights partners, which currently arrange the majority of those deals, Pells added.
Among the questions still unanswered are whether the new cap will comport with the House settlement, which had very specific instructions about the hard cap (22% of a certain part of athletics department revenues, which equals $21.3 million this season, according to Pells. There’s also the matter of whether smaller conferences, long in favor of the bill, would remain so now that their bigger competition is being allowed to directly pay players more than double what was previously allowed.
"The news broke only hours after the NCAA lost a pair of key court cases involving its new rule that would give most Division I athletes five years to complete five seasons of eligibility," Pells wrote. "Using those losses as another chance to urge for passage of the bill, NCAA President Charlie Baker said 'It is long past time leaders across college sports call for the immediate passage of the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act.' ”
