The Protect College Sports Act has lost the latest game of beat the clock.
Via Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports, the Senate adjourned for a five-week recess on Saturday morning without voting on the bill that would reshape college sports.
At a time when the proposed legislation had been building momentum, the hiatus could be fatal to the effort to turn the bill into law before the midterm elections.
The question becomes whether the NCAA and the power conferences will wait to see what happens, or whether they will move on to another potential solution. One possibility includes individual conferences leaving the NCAA.
If/when the Protect College Sports Act passes the Senate, it would go to the House. And it’s not an automatic that it would pass the House as drafted. A compromise bill could be required, with the first Tuesday in November serving as the practical drop-dead date for getting something done.
Through it all, those who created the current chaos through decades of antitrust violations will look for a way to restore partial order. While college football continues to generate significant ratings and earn plenty of money.
The fundamental problem continues to be that the players, in the opinion of the schools, are now getting too much of the revenue. And that’s money that used to go only to the schools.
This is what’s driving the exhausting insistence that the sky is falling. The absence of a federal law that allows the schools to pick the pockets of the players implicitly represents the reality that more than enough legislators can see through the grift.
Consider this comment from the Congressional Black Caucus, which issued a statement opposing the bill on Thursday: “Black athletes have transformed college athletics into one of the most successful enterprises in America. Yet the people most affected by this legislation have not been meaningfully included in shaping it.”
Indeed they haven’t. The effort is being crafted by those who long for the days when the players didn’t get paid anything. While it will be impossible to put the toothpaste back in the tube completely, the folks who run college sports hope to gather as much of it as they can.
