The Protect College Sports Act is a bad bill, and I hope it doesn't become law

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

It might happen later today, or in a day or two. But the industry expectation right now is that sometime soon, the Protect College Sports Act will get a final floor vote in the United States Senate and will pass with a comfortable margin, probably more than 70 votes.

What will happen next is unclear. As of this second, the House is not scheduled to vote on anything until after the midterm elections in November. Some proponents of the PCSA are cautiously optimistic they can get the House to come back and get the things passed sometime next month. Whether the large Senate margin will be enough to shepherd a controversial bill through a deeply divided House is an unsettled question.

My best and most educated guess is that the bill won’t get a House vote until after the midterms, and a litany of factors that have nothing to do with college sports will ultimately determine how and when a vote finally happens.

So I can’t tell you, on September 22, whether I think the PCSA actually will become federal law.

But I can tell you I don’t think it should.

I think some parts of the bill are positive ideas. And unlike many of my peers, I’m not against the idea of Congress stepping in and providing clarity on some of the major issues in college sports governance. I don’t believe current college sports leadership has the legal authority to “fix things themselves.”

But even though lawmakers and staffers I respect from both parties were involved with this bill, and even though I think it was largely crafted with good intentions … I can’t get behind it now. It doesn’t do the things its supporters say it will do. It doesn’t address the biggest long-term problems facing the industry’s infrastructure. And it takes away potential economic opportunities from a group of folks who had no real say in the matter, a trend that should concern anybody who believes in capitalism.

I understand that many of my readers may disagree with those conclusions. Here’s where I’m coming from:

Earlier this month, Sen. Maria Cantwell’s (D-Washington) staff compiled a report on trends in college sports spending, titled “UNSUSTAINABLE GROWTH IN SPENDING FOR SPORTS AMPLIFIES BROADER FINANCIAL PRESSURE ON COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES.” It showed examples of countless schools spending more money than they were taking in, and the pressures to continue to spend threatened not only other Olympic sports on campus, but also academic programming and the interests of taxpayers.

We can quibble with some of the methodology if we want, but I do think this report is at least directionally accurate. Across Division I, spending is going up, more schools are relying on student fees to pay for athletic department spending, and debt is reaching troubling levels. I believe all of that in the report is true.

The fact that athletic departments can pay athletes directly via the House settlement terms is often brought up as a major reason for the spending spikes. After all, at a Power 4 institution, House payments represent a $20 million-plus line item that did not exist in 2022. That money has to come from somewhere.

But is that the only source of spending increases? Or even the most important? Of course not. From the report:

None of that has anything to do with paying athletes directly! Those cost increases predate House, Alston, COVID, NIL and all other industry-shaking events of the past several years. The college sports spending problem clearly exists independently of directly paying athletes.