The Senate's deadline for the Protect College Sports Act has passed, leaving the Big Ten and SEC in limbo as the bill's language remains a mystery.
The White House sent lawyers to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, and the bill's Senate authors were said to be ready to file for cloture Thursday morning. But as the deadline hour came and went, and as the night wore on, the Protect College Sports Act was still not done. Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the negotiations told CBS Sports that congressional staff, White House counsel, and conference representatives were working through Wednesday night on the final language of the sweeping bipartisan legislation.
The bill would reshape college athletics by providing the NCAA and its conferences an antitrust exemption to enforce spending caps, transfer limits, and eligibility rules that courts have systematically gutted. However, the Big Ten and SEC had not delivered their position on the legislation by the 9 a.m. Wednesday deadline set by the bill's co-authors, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), and Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.). Big Ten athletic directors met for nearly four hours Wednesday morning in Chicago, the site of the conference's annual media days.
Their meeting was so long, it started before and ended nearly three hours after the 9 a.m. deadline. Later, the Big Ten canceled an evening call with its presidents scheduled for 7 p.m. Meanwhile, a Senate staff member issued a pointed statement making clear that lawmakers' patience was fraying. "At this point, with every passing minute, odds are slimmer that we can move the bill before the August recess," the Senate staff member said, according to multiple outlets.
The associated entities provision is the specific sticking point, with the conferences yet to see the formal text addressing how associated entity deals would be treated under the new cap structure. That gap — language tied directly to how the House settlement's revenue-share cap would be enforced — made it impossible to formally react, let alone endorse the bill. A separate source in the SEC's orbit confirmed the same problem, with congressional staff having not presented the specific language related to associated entities and how they would interact with the House settlement cap.
When asked on Wednesday, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti was careful with his words about where negotiations stood, but his measured tone carried its own message: exasperation. "I think it's being perceived that way, that on some issues, every issue is just the Big Ten and the SEC," Petitti told CBS Sports. "And that's not accurate." The urgency behind the associated entities' fix is mathematical, with the revised bill creating a retention pool exception of $20 million above the existing revenue-share cap, with up to an additional $5 million available exclusively for women's institutional NIL.
The Big Ten boss then offered a guarded assessment on whether meaningful progress had been made with the bill's sponsors in Washington, D.C. "I mean, there's some," Petitti said. "It could be small changes in our opinion that (senators) think are big. You're talking about an active negotiation on some of these provisions. What seems simple to one side could be more difficult to the other." The question now is whether the Senate can move the bill before the August recess, with Congress leaving for its summer break on August 7.
Source: CBS