Senate To Consider Sweeping College Sports Legislation: A Vote In The Senate Next Week Could Set The Stage For The Passage Of The Protect College Sports Act

Background

The Protect College Sports Act of 2026 (PCSA), introduced in the Senate on June 2, 2026, by Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and joined by Senators Eric Schmitt (R-MO) and Chris Coons (D-DE), represents a comprehensive federal legislative effort to reshape the governance and economics of intercollegiate athletics, including redistributing the significant media revenues generated by college sports. Reported favorably 19-9 from the Senate Commerce Committee and placed on Senate Calendar No. 449 on June 24, 2026, the PCSA was substantially revised on August 7, 2026 (Senate Amendment 6768).

The PCSA arrives against a backdrop of cascading judicial decisions that have systematically dismantled the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) authority to regulate the economics of college sports. O’Bannon v. NCAA (9th Cir. 2015) struck down cost-of-attendance limits, NCAA v. Alston (S. Ct. 2021) invalidated restrictions on education-related benefits, and House v. NCAA (N.D. Cal. 2025) produced a $2.78 billion settlement that authorized prospective revenue sharing—effectively ending the NCAA’s ability to set compensation limits or impose meaningful sanctions without antitrust liability.

The result has been an ungoverned arms race: name, image and likeness (NIL) spending exceeded $1.2 billion in 2025, pay-for-play collectives now function as de facto salary vehicles, mid-season coaching poaching proliferates without enforceable rules, former professional players are seeking to return to college athletics and disparities in media distribution revenues among conferences create incentives for further expansion and realignment.

Federal legislation has widely been viewed as the only viable path forward—the NCAA cannot act unilaterally without creating additional antitrust exposure, and more than 30 states have enacted sometimes conflicting NIL laws. An earlier effort at federal legislation, the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act (H.R. 4312), had the support of college conferences and passed two committees in the House of Representatives in 2025 but stalled on the House floor, prompting the bipartisan Senate effort that became the PCSA. The Senate plans to hold a cloture vote on the motion to proceed to the PCSA between September 15 and September 23, though the path for the PCSA through the Senate, and the House remains uncertain.

Changes to the NIL Framework

The PCSA fundamentally alters the college NIL landscape by imposing a federal valid business purpose standard, disclosure requirements and hard compensation caps, and by facilitating stricter review of deals involving “associated entities.” Significant provisions include:

Valid Business Purpose Standard. NIL agreements must be “genuinely related to promotion of goods or services,” and compensation must be “commensurate with similar-profile individuals who are not athletes.” This codifies the standard that courts and the NCAA have been migrating toward and will render salary-substitute collective models nearly per se violations. The “benchmarking” aspect of the standard (measuring fair market value against non-athletes) seems likely to provoke litigation.

Institutional NIL Exemption. NIL agreements between student athletes and their own institutions are exempt from the valid business purpose standard, permitting schools to compensate athletes directly for institutional promotional activities without meeting the benchmarking requirements. These payments would be subject to the overall revenue sharing cap.

Disclosure Threshold. Any NIL compensation exceeding $600 must be disclosed within five days, significantly tightening from the 30-day window in prior versions of the legislation.

Pre-Enrollment Compensation Prohibition. Section 114(a)(1)(C) prohibits NIL compensation to prospective student athletes prior to enrollment, with a narrow exception for development camps open to non-prospective athletes.

Revenue Share Cap. The Bill ties the permissible revenue share to the Benefits Pool Limit established in the House v. NCAA settlement—year one was approximately $20.5 million per school for 2025-26 and will be calculated at 22% of average power-conference revenue. The cap will be recalculated every three years, with 4% annual increases between recalculations, and will be independently audited. The next round of conference media renewals could produce windfalls for members of the largest conferences which might serve to increase the Revenue Sharing Cap for all schools—even those whose media revenues did not rise.

Retention Fund. Section 114(a)(2) permits each school to spend an additional $22.5 million per season above the calculated Revenue Share Cap to retain athletes who have completed at least one full competitive season. The bill also earmarks $5 million for revenue sharing with non-revenue, women’s and Olympic sports—bringing the total per-school ceiling to approximately $48 million. The Retention Fund carries a nine-year sunset—meaning that if Congress fails to reauthorize the fund, schools could be required to cut spending to conform to the applicable Revenue Share Cap calculated for that season.

Anti-Circumvention. Multimedia rights holders, sponsors and apparel companies must certify they are not circumventing the cap and that the institution for which the athlete plays is not the originating source of the compensation (Section 114(c)).

Antitrust Immunity and NCAA Enforcement Authority

Perhaps the Bill’s most consequential provision, Section 118 grants the NCAA and its member conferences immunity from federal and state antitrust laws—including Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Act—to implement and enforce rules for intercollegiate sports including:

• Compensation caps (Section 114) and cap continuation (Section 115)
• Eligibility rules (Section 113) and transfer rules (Section 112)
• NIL disclosure requirements
• Recruitment and tampering rules (Section 117)
• Mid-season coaching transition restrictions (Section 110)
• Agent certification requirements (Section 103)

The NCAA’s enforcement authority includes fines, restricting participation in championships and tournaments, restricting eligibility of non-compliant athletes and decertifying agents. Section 118(d) permits the NCAA to designate an enforcement entity under its control—consistent with the House settlement structure—to enforce Section 114. For clients who have challenged NCAA rulemaking on antitrust grounds, this provision would effectively close the courthouse door on those claims going forward.

The Pooled Media Entity and Revenue Distributions

Title II amends the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 to create a voluntary “covered entity” with an antitrust exemption for joint media rights sales of college sports. The bill attempts to facilitate the pooling of college sports media rights on the assumption that this approach will generate more revenue per game than current conference media deals and that the additional revenue can be distributed to schools with less revenue and used to support women’s and Olympic sports. Other key features include:

Formation Threshold. At least 75% of Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) institutions must elect to participate in the pooled entity before the entity can form. Membership must be offered on fair and nondiscriminatory terms to all Division I institutions, though participation remains voluntary. The Big Ten and Southeastern Conference (SEC) won additional concessions barring the use of a school’s or conference’s decision not to participate in any subsequent antitrust litigation—which are reflected currently only in the Senate version of the bill.

Contribution Requirement. Members must contribute their media rights as a condition of receiving distributions from the entity. The covered entity holds exclusive authority to negotiate, sell and license contributed rights. The only explicit carve-out is for March Madness (the NCAA basketball tournament).

Three-Tier Distribution Waterfall. Revenue generated by the pooled media assets flows through a structured waterfall:

• Tier 1 (Floor Guarantee): Each institution receives more than the highest single-year media rights revenue from 2021-2025 (excluding College Football Playoff (CFP) revenue).
• Tier 2 (Equal Distribution): 15% of the remainder is distributed equally among all FBS members from the 2024-25 season.
• Tier 3 (Performance-Based): The residual is distributed based on each institution’s contribution to collective media rights revenue.

Revenue allocation changes require a unanimous vote. The Bill also mandates “reasonable efforts” to promote and distribute women’s and Olympic sports programming and to preserve current carriage levels. The Bill additionally requires preservation of traditional rivalry and conference opponent scheduling and includes a savings clause that existing contracts are not abrogated.

Practical Note: Current Power 4 and CFP revenue (approximately $3.9 billion) is sufficient to fund only the Tier 1 “Floor Guarantees.” Tier 2 and Tier 3 distributions will depend entirely on the next media renewal cycle for the major conferences and their decision whether to participate in the media pool—Big Ten in 2030, Big 12 and CFP in 2031 and SEC in 2034.

Broadcast Outlet Provisions and Their Impact on Exclusivity

Section 204 introduces a “market-level broadcast access” requirement for college football and basketball that could reshape the economics of media rights deals.

The PCSA mandates that the Covered Entity must make commercially available, on a non-exclusive basis, at least one “Local Outlet option” in the local Designated Market Area (DMA) of each member institution participating in a football or basketball competition. The local DMA includes the DMA encompassing the institution’s principal campus, plus optionally one adjacent or in-state DMA. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) must publish a list of qualifying DMAs within 180 days of enactment.

While this might seem like a windfall for broadcasters, a national rights holder might be able to satisfy this requirement by making games available through a freely available “affiliated offering” in the applicable local DMAs—meaning a platform like Peacock, Tubi or a similar free-tier service could fulfill the obligation without necessarily licensing content to independent local broadcasters. However, a significant portion of the value of sports media distribution for streaming platforms is the ability to add subscribers—consumers who want to see the game must subscribe to the platform. Streamers are often able to pay more for sports content because they can rely on two revenue streams: the advertising generated by distribution of the content and the revenues generated by new subscribers. The PCSA could force streamers that seek to acquire college sports rights to facilitate free distribution in the cities where the playing teams are from—the audiences most likely to subscribe to watch the game—potentially undercutting the economics of streaming distribution and thereby reducing the number of bidders for college sports rights—perhaps even reducing the overall value of those rights.

Good faith negotiation is required, and the FCC has jurisdiction over complaints. Critically, the Bill does not limit the covered entity’s ability to negotiate nationwide or regional agreements.

Merger Prohibitions and Implications for Private Equity and Conference Realignment

Section 205 introduces targeted antitrust prohibitions aimed at limiting conference consolidation. Under the new Section 7 of the Sports Broadcasting Act, it would be unlawful for any “covered conference”—defined as one reporting more than $700 million in revenue for fiscal year 2025 or any subsequent year—to:

• Merge with, consolidate with or acquire the assets or media rights of another covered conference or institution if doing so would result in less than 75% FBS membership in the pooled entity.
• Acquire the assets or media rights of a non-covered institution if it would result in more than 19 member institutions.

The Bill further prohibits any entity from merging or acquiring covered institutions for the purpose of creating a new conference or association. Transactions violating these provisions may be voided and, notably, no efficiencies defense or procompetitive effects defense would be permitted.

Implications for Private Equity. The $700 million revenue threshold combined with the 19-institution cap and the prohibition on creating new conferences could significantly constrain private equity consolidation strategies in college athletics. PE investors considering deals structured around conference media renewals—such as the reported Louisiana State University (LSU) private equity transaction—should note that individual school-level private equity (PE) transactions could create complications for broader pooling efforts.

Impact on Sports Agents and Agencies

The PCSA imposes significant new restrictions on agents and agencies operating in the college athlete NIL space:

• Fee Cap: Agent fees are capped at 5% of endorsement contract values—well below the customary 10-20% charged for NIL deals.
• Contract Duration: Agent contracts cannot extend beyond the athlete’s eligibility period, precluding college-to-professional lock-up arrangements.
• Certification: Agents must certify with both state authorities and the intercollegiate athletic association.
• Private Right of Action: Athletes may bring claims for actual damages and voiding of contracts. The 30-day cure period (reduced from 60 in prior versions) applies under Section 119.
• Arbitration Limitations: Pre-dispute arbitration agreements and joint-action waivers are unenforceable where seven or more plaintiffs are named.
• Prohibited Conduct: Materially false or deceptive representations are expressly prohibited.

NIL collectives will need to restructure as legitimate marketing entities, as salary-substitute models may become per se violations under the valid business purpose standard. Agents and agencies will need to address new compliance and certification requirements, as well as assess the impact of the proposed fee cap and limits on contract duration.

What’s Next

The immediate timeline centers on the Senate cloture vote on the motion to proceed to the PCSA, scheduled no earlier than September 15 and no later than September 23, 2026. If cloture succeeds, the bill moves to Senate floor consideration, where amendments remain possible. Whether the House takes up the Senate text of the PCSA or pursues its own legislation remains unclear.

The PCSA would represent a paradigm shift in the governance and economics of college athletics—granting the NCAA meaningful antitrust protection for the first time in decades to facilitate the re-regulation of college sports, while simultaneously creating a pooled media entity that could reshape conference economics and imposing hard limits on agent compensation and conference consolidation. With bipartisan support, presidential endorsement and a cloture vote weeks away, colleges, conferences and others looking at investments or transactions in college sports across the sports, media and private equity sectors should be monitoring developments and preparing for a dramatically changed college sports landscape.