WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans have spent their final days before the August recess haggling over whether to vote on U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz’s bill that would place sweeping new regulations on college sports, after the measure gained a sudden burst of momentum with support from the Southeastern Conference and Big Ten.
The bipartisan Protect College Sports Act, co-authored by Cruz and U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Washington, has been in limbo for weeks. It advanced out of the Senate Commerce Committee, which Cruz chairs, in June and is now up for a floor vote, which Cruz has emphatically sought before the Senate departs for its annual last-summer break. The chamber was scheduled to adjourn Friday, but President Donald Trump has urged senators to stay until they get through a pile-up of his legislative priorities, including the college sports bill.
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“Without this Bill, millions of young Athletes will be hurt, programs will be canceled, Women’s and Olympic Sports will go away, the fans will be robbed, and Universities will go broke,” Trump posted on social media Friday afternoon, urging the Senate to stop “grandstanding” and pass it before leaving down.
Senators could still pass the bill after their scheduled return to Capitol Hill after Labor Day, though its prospects of making it all the way to Trump’s desk could grow more difficult later in the year as the midterms draw closer.
Last week, Cruz and other lawmakers, along with White House officials, negotiated a package of concessions with Big Ten and SEC leaders, who until then had refused to back the bill.
The newfound support from the two powerhouse conferences revived the measure and set off a scramble to get the revised bill up for a Senate vote before lawmakers left town. With a vote as early as Saturday within reach, however, a handful of senators on Friday publicly objected to the hasty timeline or filed amendments to the bill. The last-minute activity threatened to prolong debate into the weekend or push the vote to September, when senators will return with a jam-packed to-do list.
Cruz’s bill would place a host of new regulations on the free-for-all system that has emerged since the NCAA in 2021 allowed college athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness, followed by a settlement a few years later that required the NCAA and athletic conferences to share revenue with athletes. The bill’s framework for revenue sharing was a big part of why the conferences had withheld their support — and of the revisions that brought them on board last week.
At issue was a provision targeting a loophole that let “associated entities,” including booster-funded “collectives,” pay players through endorsement deals beyond a school’s official salary cap. Those deals have already funneled more than $355 million to athletes, many routed through booster collectives, according to a July report from the College Sports Commission.
A central demand from the conferences was eliminating that workaround by requiring deal money to count toward the same $21.3 million pay cap schools use to pay players directly instead of routing around it. To help sweeten the pot, negotiations produced a new $27.5 million pool — a $22.5 million retention fund to prevent student-athlete transfers plus up to $5 million more if schools match that dollar-for-dollar spending on women’s and Olympic sports — for a nearly $50 million in spending power for schools.
In a joint statement, the Big Ten and SEC’s chancellors and presidents called the negotiations “detailed and productive.”
“We listened to our colleagues, addressed their concerns, and improved an already strong bill,” Cruz said. The avid Texas sports fan made it a priority last year to build out a national framework to stabilize college sports and hand NCAA more enforcement power.
Since its introduction, the bill has sparked nationwide debate over the future of college sports and how the rules governing it should be reshaped. In June, the chairs of the University of Texas and Texas A&M regent boards — the only two programs in Texas that Cruz has said would be “certain to survive” without changes to the system — sent a joint letter to Cruz and fellow U.S. Sen. John Cornyn opposing the bill as it was then written. Although Cruz now has the Big Ten and SEC on his side, and Texas football coach Steve Sarkisian nodding to the support the salary cap could provide, he risks a split with the two richest athletic brands in his home state whose players collectively command tens of millions in NIL revenue.
Texas Tech regent and former lineman Cody Campbell — founder of the nonprofit Saving College Sports and a key White House adviser on the issue — celebrated the Big Ten/SEC reversal on social media, calling it a “better future for college athletes in all sports.”
Other revisions hammered out in the negotiations curbed super-conference realignment, tightened language around legitimate endorsement deals, and clarified when conferences can share media-rights revenue.
As the Power Four’s biggest revenue engine, media‑rights pooling was the Big Ten and SEC’s chief sticking point. The Big 12 and Atlantic Coast Conference form the other half of the collection of top revenue-generating conferences.
Under the Big 12’s current media deal, the conference — home to Baylor University, the University of Houston, Texas Christian University and Texas Tech — distributed roughly $39.5 million per school in the 2024‑25 fiscal year, roughly half what the SEC paid out to most of its members. Industry trackers project that gap will more than double in the SEC’s favor over the next decade fueled by the SEC’s new media contract and College Football Playoff expansion — revenue that Texas and Oklahoma now capture as SEC members. The Big Ten and SEC feared the original bill’s media-rights pooling plan would pressure them into splitting their paydays, so negotiators added language making participation explicitly voluntary.
The bill would also effectively freeze the conference map, a measure aimed squarely at protecting smaller conferences after Texas and other football powers jumped leagues in 2024, upending the Pac-12 and Big 12 conferences.
The bill’s momentum, driven by recent backing from multiple conferences, universities, and pro leagues, positions it as the biggest overhaul of college sports since the arrival of NIL rights — the shorthand for Name, Image and Likeness. That sea change was ushered in by the NCAA’s 2021 policy change allowing student athletes to profit from sponsorship deals, coming the same year the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA could not prevent colleges from offering education-related benefits to its athletes. A 2025 legal settlement then enshrined the revenue-sharing model the NCAA had signed off on the year before.
However, a broad coalition including labor unions, athlete associations and civil rights groups like the NAACP this week urged the Senate to pause the bill until “the legislation more adequately addresses the needs and concerns of college athletes,” without elaborating further.
In a Thursday statement, the Congressional Black Caucus declared that “the legislative process has failed to meaningfully incorporate the perspectives of Black athletes, Black coaches, Black agents, HBCUs, or the Congressional Black Caucus, despite the disproportionate impact this legislation will have on those communities.” The caucus called on Senate Democrats to block the bill until those concerns are met.
The Protect College Sports Act needs a minimum of 60 votes to clear the Senate floor and advance to the House. The two chambers would then need to agree on any changes made in the lower chamber before the bill could head to Trump’s desk. The president has signaled repeated support for the measure.
Disclosure: Baylor University, Texas Christian University and the University of Houston have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Texas Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.