7 Myths Behind the Protect College Sports Act

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https://reason.com/2026/09/22/college-sports-dont-need-saving-here-are-7-myths-fueling-the-protect-college-sports-act/

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The Senate is likely to pass the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA) this week. In procedural votes last week, it got 70-plus senators backing it. It still has to pass the House of Representatives, which is out of session until after the midterm elections—that's plenty of time for something to go wrong. Some people think the bill faces a difficult path in the House, but it's hard to argue with so much support in the Senate.

The bill is pushed by Sens. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) and Maria Cantwell (D–Wash.), who have garnered bipartisan support (and opposition) for the bill.

 

If the bill becomes law, it would be unprecedented government micromanagement of American sports. Sports and law have collided before, but not to the extent that Congress has told a sports organization how to cap compensation, handle athletes switching teams, or ban coaches from leaving their jobs at a certain time of year, among other minute details.

Fueling support for the bill are several misconceptions about the state of college sports. Here are the talking points behind the bill, and what you should know about reality.

1. The spending is too high!

The numbers on athletic department finances seem less than ideal: About 94 percent of Division 1 colleges, and 71 percent of power conference schools, directly lost money on athletics in the most recent academic year studied by the Government Accountability Office. What you don't see in those numbers is the reason schools are OK with this: There's evidence that athletics programs offset their losses by keeping up nonathlete student enrollment rates, and thus, raise university revenues through tuition (though the exact numbers can be hard to quantify). Furthermore, not every student-athlete is on a full ride—some economists say nonscholarship or partial-scholarship athletes who just want to play sports in college help cover team costs.

Athletics programs are better marketing than any commercial or mailer. We all wish students were picking their schools based on academics, but many are picking based on how much fun it looked to storm the field against Alabama. Saying that schools lose money on athletics is like saying a business lost money on marketing—that's probably only true if you don't count the money you made because of the marketing.

Still, in some places, the drive to compete has squeezed taxpayers (Cantwell's office found six states that "earmarked state tax dollars, raised taxes, or created significant tax breaks to benefit college athletics") and students (a majority of Division I colleges use mandatory student fees to help fund athletics—over $2,500 a year at a couple of schools). Politicians and universities should not do this! Between wealthy boosters, sponsorships, and even those much-hated private equity funds, there are many better ways to fund college sports.

 

2. Unlimited transfers are getting out of control!

If players weren't getting paid, this would be hard to control. Thankfully, players are signing name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals. NIL deals are contracts, and contracts are (in theory) easily enforced. Want to lock down a five-star recruit? Sign them to a multiyear NIL deal.

Courts are still working out some of the issues here. But the best example of this is actually a one-year contract: After the 2025 season, Washington quarterback Demond Williams Jr. signed a lucrative revenue-share agreement with the school. Days later, he tried to enter the transfer portal (rumor has it Lane Kiffin was trying to get him to LSU). But contracts have consequences, and this one clearly stated that Williams could not enter the portal. Two days after trying to transfer, Williams said he'd stay put after all. (He later blamed the saga on "really bad advice.")

You'd think athletic directors and coaches would want to keep recruits from leaving, and recruits might want the protection of a multiyear contract if they get hurt or cut for performance. Or it's possible coaches like the flexibility of building through the portal every year, and players like that they can move on to better NIL deals if they have a great season—if that's the case, fans might not like it, but the market finds a way.

3. We can't let professional athletes back into college sports!

I've got good news: It's taken care of! The Southeastern Conference (SEC) successfully shamed and threatened LSU into dropping its plan to roster two players who had previously been in NFL training camps. It goes to show that college sports can self-regulate without needing Congress to fix everything.

The specific problem that popped up this fall—players getting drafted in late rounds and then trying to reenter college sports—is unlikely to be an ongoing issue. The chaos was caused by the NCAA, really. It announced a new, expanded five-year eligibility rule this summer. It was not supposed to apply to student-athletes who started college in 2022 (probably because the NCAA wanted to avoid the pros-returning-to-college chaos that ended up happening), but lawsuits opened it up to that class anyway. If the NCAA had announced the change in January instead of June, and included the class of 2022, student-athletes could have decided to stay in school without entering the draft causing the chaos.

 

There will still be edge cases, such as whether a player can join a college basketball team after getting paid to play in Europe, and questions about how much a player in an individual sport is allowed to earn in prize winnings. For example, the NCAA spent years banning teenagers who had played in the junior, amateur Canadian Hockey League, even though they earned only a small monthly stipend. The NCAA voted to change this policy in 2024.

Frankly, with so many student-athletes now getting NIL deals and revenue-sharing deals from schools, it's a bit rich to say athletes aren't allowed to play if a non-NCAA entity paid them.

4. Conference realignment is out of control!

The horse is out of the barn on this one, and even the PCSA won't undo what's already been done. As of now, the bill would limit power conferences to 19 members. It would also discourage realignment by forcing schools to play as independents for three years before joining a new conference (in the bill, this requirement expires sometime in 2032). But this cap locks in advantages for the schools already in the Big Ten and SEC and keeps out worthy contenders and programs on the rise. This isn't just a competitive advantage—it affects enrollment too.

In short, the bill protects the schools you're already mad at (the ones that switched conferences) and locks out the ones trying to catch up.

What I would love to see is more sport-specific conferences. Look at Division I men's hockey, for example: There are six conferences and a bunch of independents. Other than the Big 10 (which includes Notre Dame!) all of the conferences are hockey-specific. This should be more common. Rather than letting the high-revenue interests of football decide conference alignment, other sports should set their own conferences. That way, sports played almost daily, such as baseball and softball, don't have to involve cross-country travel for conference opponents. Thankfully, the bill doesn't seem to ban or discourage this option—it's just a flexibility that schools (and more likely, the conferences) don't seem interested in.

5. We've got to save smaller sports!

Great news: Even outside of football and men's and women's basketball, most college sports are thriving, and the number of total NCAA student-athletes keeps rising.

The 2026 Women's College World Series (softball) had 2.5 million viewers for its final game, and 1.6 million viewers across the event's combined 16 games. Women's College World Series viewership was up 20 percent from last year, and the entire softball tournament was up 28 percent.

In 2023, about 92,000 fans packed Nebraska's Memorial Stadium to watch women's volleyball. It wasn't a one-off. In August, roughly 40,000 people watched volleyball at AT&T Stadium in Dallas. They plan to do the event again next year, possibly at a different stadium. Then, in September, 43,000 fans packed into Wrigley Field to watch two volleyball matches (although the marquee match was marred by a wet court). That's a lot of people, considering Chicago isn't very close to the participating teams (Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, and Penn State).

I'll now borrow heavily from Sports Media Watch, which recapped the academic year in college sports TV ratings: "The women's gymnastics national championship delivered its largest audience since 2007…drawing 1.1 million on ABC. The men's hockey national championship…scored its largest audience since 2009 as 901,000 watched Denver defeat Wisconsin. The…men's lacrosse title game (778K) was the most-watched since 2007 and its women's counterpart…(470K) the most-watched on record. Penn State's win in the wrestling championship was the most-watched since 2017 with 712,000, and the full championship the most-watched since 2013. Both beach and men's volleyball set new records in May, while women's volleyball fell just short with its second-most watched national championship on record last December. The men's gymnastics national title game could set no records in only its second year on Nielsen-rated television, but its audience of 152,000 still constituted a 42 percent gain."

And so on. Higher TV ratings means better media rights deals, which means more money to athletic departments for all of the above.

Some smaller sports programs have been cut by both big and small schools, but we have not gotten to the point where America's best Olympic athletes are struggling to find a scholarship. It's good for schools to have to get creative about their funding. Arkansas planned to cut men's and women's tennis, but donors stepped in to save them—why weren't the donors asked to support the teams earlier?

6. We've got to protect smaller schools!

NIL spending is actually what's shaking up the sport and allowing previously mediocre schools to challenge the traditional powerhouses. Without NIL, you don't get an undefeated Indiana football team in 2025 (granted, they're still in the Big 10).

In any case, the NIL and transfer system has been helpful for schools in the Group of Five (now six) conferences. In the old system, schools just attracted prospects with prestige, famous coaches, and fancy facilities (and perhaps, allegedly, a brown bag of cash). Smaller schools didn't have much of any of that. But now they can simplify their pitch and just say, "Here's what we can give you in revenue-sharing money."

Let's say you're a high schooler who's a three-star prospect, and maybe coming off an injury. In the old system, you'd probably go to a power conference school and have to wait your turn for the starting job for two or three years. Now you can go to a school in a Group of Five conference, get immediate playing time, get paid for your NIL, and prove yourself worthy of a power conference roster.

Lest we forget, Trinidad Chambliss, the Ole Miss quarterback and Heisman candidate, transferred from Division II. Cam Ward went from an FCS school to No. 1 overall draft pick. Travis Hunter was at an FCS school before winning the Heisman at Colorado. College football is better off for having had these players develop at smaller schools before turning into household names at bigger schools.

Their original schools are all better off for having had these athletes at the start of their college careers, too. In the old system, a Group of Five school might not have gotten the athlete at all. Now they at least get the athlete for a season or two—and they get a chance to upset the powerhouses with an athlete who otherwise would have been sitting on a power conference bench.

7. Lane Kiffin sucks!

He sure does! (I guess this one's not really a myth, then.) Thankfully, Ole Miss dispensed justice against Kiffin on Saturday. No need for Congress to ban coaches from leaving in the middle of the season, then. Yet the so-called Lane Kiffin Rule remains in the bill to do just that (weirdly, it seems to only apply to FBS football).

We all know how this ends: School A fires its coach in October after a woeful start. Its athletic department backchannels with the agent for the coach from School B. The coach says he'll sign the deal as soon as he's legally allowed to. In the meantime, he's mentally checked out of coaching School B, even though they could make the playoffs. His agent leaks the story to some ESPN insider to start hyping the coach up to School A's boosters and raise the salary number higher. The coach may even quietly start reaching out to players about transferring to School A once the portal opens.

In short, despite the law, nothing changes.

Yep, nothing will change.  Another lame attempt by Congress.