Protect College Football, uhh, Sports Act

Action Alert! Please write or call your senators/representatives and ask them to vote no on S. 4668, if you have my same concerns after reading this (and doing your own research). Not sure how to contact them? Go to this site for contact info.

When Sarah Spain talks, I listen. We all should. I have been a devoted Slice (her Good Game with Sarah Spain followers are orange slices) since she first started her podcast. Sarah is intelligent, extremely knowledgeable on all things women’s sports, and is very skillful at verbalizing her informed, well-reasoned positions on issues.

Last Friday Sarah dedicated her episode to the “Protect College Sports Act,” and she and her panel of guests said this act “would decimate women’s sports.” That got my attention! After listening to the episode, I wanted to learn more about this. It was more challenging than I expected to find specific information about how it affects women’s sports. The reason for this? It’s mostly about the billions of dollars college football brings in. What I was able to find was pretty telling, though.

First, as a Washingtonian, I went to our Senator, Maria Cantwell’s press release about it, since she is one of the bill’s sponsors. That paints a very optimistic, positive picture about this bill. Interestingly, right at the top it says this act is a “historic opportunity to codify athletes’ rights.” However, a lot of what I read suggests that this will not be beneficial to athletes and it conflicts with opinions of the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, and several athlete advocate groups, according to a recent USA Today article. Unfortunately, I think Sen. Cantwell is on the wrong side of this one.

I think everyone should read about this, form their own opinions, and then write to their senators and representatives. Here is my opinion, and warning, it’s a bit of a rant.

The NCAA, its major conferences, and its large sports universities within those conferences are the ones paying millions of dollars to lobby for this bill, according to Politico. Why? It’s a multibillion-dollar industry, and recent court decisions against the NCAA and these other organizations are threatening the bottom line for these non-profit organizations. Yes, they’re non-profits. Don’t even get me started on that.

There is no other organization like the NCAA that would compete against it. In the context of sports, that makes it very similar to all the US’s professional sports leagues – NFL, NBA, WNBA, NWSL. Our federal government has given certain antitrust law exemptions to these professional leagues because their athletes are part of collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) which are in place to protect the rights of the athletes. There are no CBAs between NCAA athletes and the NCAA, but this act would still give the NCAA some antitrust law exemptions. Who does that benefit? The NCAA. Our government shouldn’t be handing out these types of exemptions without mandated protections for the athletes.

I used to hear the argument about college athletes wanting compensation, and I would say a full ride scholarship and college education is worth a lot of money, and that should be sufficient compensation. But the reality is that this huge, multibillion-dollar industry is built on the backs of college athletes, many of whom are minorities. The percentage of this revenue that actually goes to these athletes is still a very small amount, so who’s getting rich? The NCAA, the conferences, the schools (again, all non-profit organizations!), the coaches getting paid many millions – not the athletes. The athletes have only started to get name-image-likeness compensation over the last five years, so this is relatively new as the history of NCAA sports goes. It makes sense that the college athletes should share in what their performance is earning, just like professional athletes do. Let’s just say it - they are professional athletes. They’re no longer amateurs.

How does this affect women’s sports? After 50 years of Title IX, women’s sports have grown tremendously. It has taken time. It required more media exposure, which was, at times, painfully slow to expand. But we are currently seeing a relative explosion in coverage and access to more women’s sports. And the fanbases for many different sports are growing. All of that makes me so excited. There’s still so much potential for more growth. None of that would have happened without Title IX. Schools have not allocated more money to women’s sports because it was the right thing to do. They have done it because their federal funding is threatened if they don’t. There are currently real efforts to undermine Title IX or get rid of it altogether. According to the experts in Sarah Spain’s podcast, the proposed revenue sharing in this act make suggestions to include funds for “non-revenue” women’s sports, but there are many loopholes that schools and the NCAA can use to avoid this.  

Another big issue right now is that athletes are allowed to transfer to a different school every year without any penalty. It ends up being a game of musical chairs for many sports each season. It is likely quite hard for a student-athlete to actually graduate when they transfer several times. But in the big sports programs, I am pretty sure revenue is a higher priority than graduation rates. As a huge sports fan, I don’t love unlimited transfers. I like following a team through the years of their players’ growth, and we don’t get to see that as much anymore. But the ability to transfer has given the athletes more leverage in a system that doesn’t always treat them great. A compromise on number of allowed transfers makes sense, but this act would limit transfers to one. That seems quite extreme.

Bottom line, this bill is about protecting college football and to some extent men’s basketball – the big revenue generators. And I’m talking about protecting the revenue without nearly enough consideration for maintaining Title IX and athlete’s rights and protections.