Civics lessons from the College Sports Protection Act

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

On Thursday, two members of the Trump administration’s Presidential Roundtable on College Sports, Randy Levine and Cody Campbell, held a lengthy press call on the College Sports Protection Act.

This led to multiple friends and readers texting me a variation of a question I’ve been getting a lot lately: Wait, why do we have to listen to these guys again?

Levine and Campbell two didn’t write the law. They don’t hold federal office. They’re not industry-specific experts. So why are we hearing about them so much?

The answer, as well as much of the debate over the biggest proposed regulatory change to college sports in decades, could potentially serve as a useful civics lesson in how laws actually happen these days. It’s a slightly different lesson from what we might remember from Schoolhouse Rock …

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Randy Levine is not an elected official or a college sports expert. He’s barely been a college sports anything. Prior to becoming the president of the New York Yankees (not a college program), Levine alternated between working for various Republican administrations and for Major League Baseball. He’s got plenty of sports labor law experience, and he’s politically connected, but his most obvious college sports connections are his tenures as a trustee for schools that don’t have college football teams (George Washington, Hofstra).

Cody Campbell isn’t an elected official, either. He’s been a Texas Tech regent since 2021 (and chairman of the board since 2025), but that position in Texas is appointed, not elected. Campbell played college football (and even played for the Indianapolis Colts for a minute), and he’s raised money for college football, but he’s never been a coach, athletic director or formal athletic department employee.

But both Campbell and Levine are (a) politically connected to influential national Republicans (like President Donald Trump) and (b) filthy stinkin’ rich.

And when you have politically important friends and you’re rich enough to buy TV time all over the country, it doesn’t mean lawmakers will always do what you want or voters will automatically accept what you’re selling. (Just look at Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer.) But guess what? Lawmakers have to listen to you. I honestly think it’s overstating things to claim that Campbell wrote the CSPA or that he’s the only figure in the bill’s creation … but it’s quite clear to me that his views were influential in drafting the dang thing.

There are plenty of aspects to the CSPA that are unpopular or could jeopardize the bill’s passage. Provisions around conference realignment and media rights bundling are very unpopular with the Big Ten and SEC and could push enough Republicans to pull their support and kill the bill.

But those aren’t the only groups pushing back. Unless there are additional major revisions — law changes that codify the House settlement, give the NCAA the antitrust protection needed to enforce the terms of that settlement, and limit most athletes to just one transfer — this bill will almost certainly reduce compensation for elite football and basketball players. You won’t have $30 million payrolls for men’s college basketball programs if this bill is implemented and meaningfully enforced.

This is a major reason why every organization specifically advocating for athlete rights, from Athletes.org to the NCPA to the CFBPA and beyond, opposes the bill.

Broadly speaking, I agree with most of the critiques. The legislation does represent a significant cap on athlete earnings without the input of the athletes themselves, especially if pooled media rights actually do generate significant new revenues for schools.

But I don’t think it matters.

If you want to influence potential legislation, you need either money or votes. The folks who hate the CSPA because it takes money away from college athletes … don’t have either.

The biggest reason for that, in my opinion, is that none of these groups can really claim mass, involved membership from current college athletes. They are trying to (I believe Athletes.org has the largest membership list of any of the current groups), but it hasn’t happened yet.

And for what it’s worth, none of the major athletes’ rights groups was involved in the most successful athlete direct action/organizing movement of the last few years, the unionization effort of Dartmouth men’s basketball.

If you don’t have enough members to credibly threaten a work stoppage (or a lawmaker’s election chances) or enough operating budget to buy killer lobbyists, then you’re relying on “elites” (journalists, university employees, ex-athletes, lawyers, economists, etc.) to be sufficiently influential. And I don’t think that is realistic in 2026. Most Republican lawmakers don’t actually care about protecting free-market economics, and there’s no electoral penalty for opposing a labor force that isn’t organized and might not even garner meaningful public sympathy.

I understand why organizing college athletes is so difficult and why it made more practical sense for athletes’ rights organizations to perhaps focus more on winning in the courtroom than in building a mass, player-led movement. After all, the law was (and still is) more on the players’ side than any lawmaker or the general public.

But laws can change, and I don’t think the current athletes’ rights movement, such as it is, is in position to meaningfully prevent those changes. If the CSPA dies (and it absolutely could), it will be because something else killed it.

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Which reminds me:

Last May, I wrote a newsletter that raised a relevant question: Even if the politics of legislation meant to explicitly crawl back the overreaches of the Big Ten and SEC are complicated, are they so far-fetched as to rule out completely? Here’s what I wrote then:

And folks, that’s exactly what’s going on here.

The bulk of Senator Maria Cantwell’s (D-WA) remarks last week weren’t centered on antitrust exemptions or athlete compensation or women’s sports sponsorship. They were aimed at the Big Ten and SEC.

And from a pure politics perspective, I think that makes sense. Few lawmakers would be more highly tuned to the negative impact of recent conference realignment decisions than somebody who represents Washington State (one of the two programs most recently dragged out of the Power Four club) and Washington. And Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) may represent two SEC programs, Texas and Texas A&M, but there are a whole hell of a lot of other Texas schools in the Big 12 and elsewhere.

There are fans of college sports in the United States Senate, and a few lawmakers deeply understand the industry. Some staffers who do as well, although even the best are also tasked with keeping their bosses informed on dozens of other industries and legislative subjects. But the bulk of these lawmakers don’t live and breathe this stuff like you and I do … and neither do their staffers. Which means outsiders (like Campbell, Levine and other non-college sports folks on the president’s roundtable), lobbyists and good ol’ fashioned grudges can all work their way into legislation.

And friends, none of this is unique to college sports labor regulation. What I’ve talked about here applies to how the legislative sausage gets made almost everywhere, from AI to pharmaceuticals to gambling and more.

Is that the best way to craft policy? Nah, probably not. But it’s the way stuff gets passed now. If you read all of that and shudder, well, you now understand why industries typically prefer not to have Congress get all into their business.

But that ship has sailed for big-time college sports. They’ve lost the ability to properly regulate their own affairs … and this is what you get, for good or for ill.