Senate College Sports

Former University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban testifies before Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing to examine college sports, supporting student athletes, and fair competition on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, June 3, 2026, in Washington. Seated to his left is Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua.

 Associated Press Photo by Jose Luis Magana

WASHINGTON – The push in Congress to revamp college athletics — including a “Lane Kiffin rule” to keep coaches from switching schools midseason — now involves two bills, with one championed by House Majority Leader Steve Scalise competing against another out of the Senate.

Both would rein in college sports spending and restrict unlimited use of the transfer portal – trends that have upended century-old traditions of amateur student athletes playing for their schools on scholarships.

President Donald Trump has weighed in, urging lawmakers to reach a compromise, which would fall heavily on the Louisiana-dominated Republican House leadership.

“President Trump wants the House and Senate to work through this to fix the problem,” said Scalise.

In charge of the effort in the House is Speaker Mike Johnson.

“We got to work it out. It’s so important for college athletics,” Johnson said Wednesday while visiting announcers at a Congressional charity baseball game.

At issue are college payments to student athletes — which often range in hundreds of thousands of dollars — and the advent of lucrative “name, image and likeness” deals between players and sponsors. Critics of the new system say those developments, coupled with the ability for athletes and coaches to switch schools as often as they want, have undermined college sports.

Former football coach Nick Saban — who won a college championship for Ĵý before going on to be its longtime nemesis at Alabama — was a star witness at a Senate hearing on the issue earlier this month.

He warned that the changes have created a spending frenzy that favors wealthier schools fielding football and basketball teams at the expense of smaller colleges with tighter budgets and sports programs that generate little revenue but fill the ranks of America’s Olympians.

“Congress does need to fix the mess,” Saban said.

The effort is down two competing bills.

The House has the — officially the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements Act. SCORE is supported by the Southeastern Conference and the Big Ten Athletic Conference, though it hasn’t found backing from enough House representatives to pass.

Opposed by the SEC and Big 10 but supported by other athletic conferences, the Senate is rallying around the or PCSA, sponsored by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Washington. That bill includes a rule that would forbid football and basketball coaches from switching programs during the season, as Kiffin did to become Ĵý’s new football coach.

Trump last week praised Scalise’s measure but endorsed the Cruz-Cantwell instrument.

He demanded the Senate and House reach an agreement and pass a bill he can sign into law before the year ends. A new Congress will be elected in November and take office in January. At that point work on all legislation will have to begin again.

The president has said he wants consistent guidelines on who is eligible to be a student athlete and limits on how long they can compete at the college level. He also wants to restrict athletes to one transfer to another university.

Cruz contends court rulings forced changes that are unsustainable.

“I get why coaches are frustrated. They have to reset their roster every single year,” Cruz said. “Everything that has happened here in the last five years in terms of not just players being allowed to be paid, but players being allowed to transfer freely, has been the result of an unfavorable court decision against the NCAA.”

Though approaching the issues differently, both bills would relax anti-trust laws to allow a single governing body like the NCAA, acting as a monopoly, to set rules for recruiting and handling college athletes that could be enforced nationally. That would shield universities from being sued in state courts on challenges to NCAA rules – lawsuits that have created a state-by-state mishmash of standards.

Both measures would allow players to take NIL money but change how it is distributed as well as limit the number of times an athlete could transfer. Both bills provide health care coverage and scholarship protections for the student athletes.

A key difference between the two revolves around classifying student-athletes as university employees, which would give them the right to unionize and bargain collectively as well as provide legal protections under federal labor laws.

Scalise said keeping student athletes off university payrolls was important for the universities and college athletic conferences.

“One thing that a lot of schools and student athletes told us is they don't want to be forced into being employees of the school and then ultimately being unionized. And that's one of the big differences between the House and Senate bill that's got to get fixed,” Scalise said on , a syndicated conservative talk radio program.

But Cruz notes the provision is one of the key objections to the SCORE bill out of the House. The Senate bill remains neutral on the question.

Scalise says the SEC and Big 10, as the largest and richest college athletic conferences, need to be on board with the legislation. He was ready last month to put the SCORE bill to a vote by full the House.

Then the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Callais v Louisiana voting rights case. That decision allowed a number of Republican-run states – mostly in the SEC – to rush to redraw district maps in a way that creates more Republican seats in the House by reconfiguring the districts whose voters had favored Black Democrats.

As part of their response to those moves, the Congressional Black Caucus withdrew its support of SCORE, requiring Scalise to postpone a floor vote.

The Black Caucus joined the NAACP’s call for Black athletes to avoid schools in states whose top officials have not spoken publicly against gerrymandering congressional districts.

“We cannot celebrate Black athletes on Saturday and stay silent on Monday when their voting rights are being stripped away,” said U.S. Rep. Cleo Fields, the Baton Rouge Democrat whose seat was at the center of the Callais decision.

“For generations Black athletes have helped build college athletics into one of the most powerful and profitable industries in America,” he said. “Yet at the very same moment the same communities many of these athletes call home face coordinated attacks on their democratic representation, too many leaders have chosen silence. Institutions that significantly profit from Black talent have a responsibility to stand with Black communities when their fundamental rights are under attack.”

Notre Dame Athletic Director Pete Bevacqua has argued another reason to quickly act on legislation, saying having thousands of male and female players “bounce around to three, four schools” will hurt many of them in the long run.

“You’re going to have a generation of student athletes, thousands of cases that are finishing their college journey without a college degree with money that is fleeting,” he said. “So that by the time they’re 25, they’ve torn through that money and it’s kind of a ‘good luck with the rest of your life.’”

Email Mark Ballard at mballard@theadvocate.com.

Tags