
Who the "Protect College Sports Act" Actually Protects
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Why the NAACP spoke out against the “Protect College Sports Act,” which was just passed by the US Senate—and why the bill is unlikely to get a vote in the House anytime soon.
Guest: Alex Kirshner, Slate contributing writer and co-host of the college football podcast Split Zone Duo.
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What Next | Daily News and Analysis — Who the "Protect College Sports Act" Actually Protects. Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.
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So the URL, sleight.com slash what next plus, the checkout code what next 5 0. Show some love to the people who make this work possible. Join us. Okay, onto the show. Alex Kirschner, I have a question for you. I have an answer. We're heading into a midterm election. Americans are anxious about the cost of living, artificial intelligence. And the Senate has been in session, passing legislation. Does there any legislation address any of this? No, but I heard from the waitress of my local diner that the thing that was most important to her was stopping college football players from making too much money. You did not. No, I did. I heard it from my postman the other day. The garbage collector came and said this to me.
Yeah, I'm having these very organic reactions, you know, with all kinds of pillars of the community. This is what they want. They're saying, I want college football players to make less money. Please help me, US Senate. Alex Kirschner is Slates Sports Guy. So when I heard that a whopping 77 senators had voted to pass the Protect College Sports Act on Monday, I thought Alex will be able to tell me who this bill protects and why, right? Who does this bill help? This bill absolutely helps university presidents, college athletic directors, head coaches of football teams, people who have made a really good living in college sports, and it helps them keep a cap, a real strict cap on the earnings of the athletes so that that money can in theory be distributed elsewhere in the college sports ecosystem,
certainly including the salaries of coaches and athletic directors and university administrators. This sounds like the rich getting richer. It sounds like the rich consolidating power and trying to prevent any sort of redistribution of wealth in college sports towards the people fundamentally creating that wealth. For the last five years, college sports have been living in a new era. First, one in which college athletes could make money off their name, image, and likeness. And now, one in which schools can pay players directly. Surprise, surprise, the schools are not so hot on all that. I mean, the bill purports to fix chaos in college sports, but I guess that leads me to a couple of questions, which is, first of all, is there chaos in college sports? Yes, but I would call it managed chaos. And does this bill fix the chaos? No, no it does.
Today on the show, politicians got behind the very important work of rescuing college sports. Are the right people being rescued? I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to What Next? Stick around. Today's episode of Slates What Next is brought to you by Olympic hospitality. The Olympic Games are coming to Los Angeles in 2028. This is a once in a generation event that you're not gonna wanna miss. It's more than a ticket. It's a story you share with your family and friends, and the ultimate way to get closer to the action is within Olympic hospitality package. Ticket-inclusive packages offer a range of prime seating and lounge access options, venue-dependent priority entry, food and beverage selections from LA's diverse dining scene, and elevated service and continuous support, making your day at the Olympic Games one to remember for a lifetime. Get ahead of the curve with an LA-28 hospitality package. Discover more at hospitality.la28.org slash what next.
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Okay, I'm trying to figure out the urgency behind this bill. And I wonder if you can help me do that. Like, what is going on in college sports that the US federal government needed to swoop in and fix? Like you said, there is some chaos. What is it? Yeah, Mary, where are you from? Or where did you go to college? Better question. Mary, where did you go to college? I went to Penn. I'm from Maryland. So as a Penn Quaker, you're actually a bit set aside from this because the Ivy League schools really don't roll this way. But say that you, like me, went to the University of Maryland. If you had been a college student or a college football fan, 20 years ago, or anytime before that. And you showed up to watch your team play. And there was a really talented freshman quarterback on your team. And you enjoyed watching him throw a touchdown. And you thought, wow, this guy's great. You'd be very excited because you would get to watch that player develop into something big over three, minimum four, five years sometimes.
And really follow this player's growth. And you could dream about a better tomorrow for your team because sure we're not very good right now. But look at these young guys that we have. And we have time to develop them. I feel like a good example. This is like Michael Jordan who went to UNC. And he came very associated with UNC. And like he grew and developed there. Absolutely. If you are a college football fan today, and your team has a great freshman quarterback or a great sophomore quarterback, this is in fact happening right now at Mississippi State University. They've got this guy with a golden arm, Kamario Taylor. You'll be hearing about him in the National Football League for a decade. But Mississippi State is one of the poorest programs revenue wise in the Southeast and Conference. And everyone just assumes not without reason that another team in college football, now that players can be paid directly by the schools and by outside booster groups. And that players can transfer from school to school freely, which they couldn't do before until about eight years ago without having to sit out a season.
People just assume if you have that player, he's gone. It's like a like we got lucky. That guy's out of here. He's going to like follow the money to wherever he needs to be. And frankly, that is happening in some respects in college sports right now. If you're a fan of one of the athletic departments in a smaller conference, so the Mac, for example, or like even the Ivy League, or the Mountain West, what have you? What we have seen the last handful of years is a real drain of talent from those leagues to the much more moneyed SEC and Big Ten and the like. And to some extent, the ACC and the Big 12, it's all food chain and there's always going to be someone below you and someone above you. Unless you're the SEC or the Big Ten and you're at the top. And I do think that it is worth chewing on whether that system poses problems for the overall health of the sports, such as you can even evaluate that.
Not sure I'd say this is a problem that the US Congress should step in and solve, but sure a problem to solve. Right. I think that if you are a fan of a team that feels like it's been left behind, you feel motivated to go and do something about it. And there's a lot of people who think that Maria can't well, the senator from Washington State, who is giving this the veneer of legitimacy on the Democratic side, not just the veneer, but the very real legitimacy on the Democratic side. She's sponsoring it, yeah. Is doing it because she wants justice for Washington State University, which is a really fun, unique program in college football history that for many years was a member of the PAC-12. When the PAC-12 had USC and UCLA and Oregon and Stanford and all of these big brands in college sports. But a few years ago, because of the economic forces of television money, the PAC-12 essentially died. It still exists kind of as a husk. It's been reborn. And all of the teams in the PAC-12 went to other conferences.
The big 12 or the big 10 except for two. One of them was Washington State, which was just stranded. And now they can't afford the same players as the University of Washington, their rival in the Apple Cup. And this really does feel like an injustice. The question that I would ask is, what caused that injustice? Was it college football players finally having a chance to make a little bit of money for what they do? Or was it the almighty television dollar and university's decisions to chase that at all costs? Yeah, I do feel like we should say that it feels like all kinds of colleges are feeling this pressure. Even if they are within the SEC or the big 10 or whatever, like every college is feeling, like people can leave it anytime. That is chaotic. I think we could see this fall in the last couple months with all of the chatter about what was happening in LSU where they were talking about like, oh, maybe we'll have people who have trained with the pros come back and play for LSU football.
And it got everyone like, oh, can we do that? But you could see in that idea, the fact that these coaches are feeling this pressure to find talent, retain talent wherever they can get it, even if it's kind of like an edge case of can we do this? Yeah, and another key part of the scaffolding that's allowed that to happen is that in the last handful of years, the NCAA has taken some pretty embarrassing sweeping legal defeats, including one at the Supreme Court a handful of years ago that have basically chiseled away one by one at the NCAA's attempts to enforce the longstanding rules of amateurism that have governed college sports. And so in what case of LSU that you mentioned, these players signed NFL contracts, they left college sports, they became not just quasi professionals like all college athletes or all college football players at major schools are, but literally were NFL professionals. They were a professional. They signed contracts to become NFL players, but in fact, according to these plaintiffs' attorneys,
and in some cases judges via the granting of injuctions that have at least given temporary relief to these plaintiffs, even those rules just can't fly. And coaches who you're exactly right are desperate for every advantage they can find, have been happy to take advantage of this and to complain about it when it is other teams doing it. I mean, you've kind of said this, but there is a bit of a justice here, which is like all of this chaos that you're laying out here. It's because suddenly athletes can be fairly compensated, right? And for years, they have been part of this system where their labor as college athletes paid everyone at the college except for themselves. School presidents were compensated more and coaches were compensated more, but not the athletes themselves. Can you just lay out for me this bill? How does it tweak the situation in theory?
The most important thing that the bill does is it puts the force of the federal government behind what is basically a salary cap, even though it's not really salary because the players are not considered employees, which I think is a key thing. Yeah, it punts on the question of whether they're employees, right? That is something that this bill explicitly punts on. I am a proud member along with a lot of a slate staff of the writer's school of America East. I'm a believer in collective bargaining. It's a way not just frankly to address worker problems, but to make workplaces run better and to be structurally more buttoned up and simple. And it's just extremely obvious to me and to many other people that the ultimate thing that needs to happen in college sports is for at least some athletes like football players at big schools to just be employees of their schools. Sign employment contracts that would limit, by the way, your ability to just transfer whenever you want
and go to another school. That would provide the stability that schools crave, but instead, because universities and their conferences that represent them and the NCAA are so petrified of some sort of worker organization and of being subject to the employment laws of this country, we just have this weird structure where it's essentially a contractor relationship between the athletes and the schools. Student athletes, not the stuff though. That's the word they like to talk about. So the term kind of hanging off like a little nub that was initially created, by the way, by the NCAA, to get around workers' compensation concerns decades ago. That's the history of the word student athlete. And so this bill has not technically a salary cap but they'll call it a revenue sharing cap that takes a specific amount of money that is about $50 million a year and says, you cannot spend more than this on your players. Sounds like that protects the people paying the players, the universities. It certainly does. And it's important to these schools
because just the last handful of years we have really seen massive exponential growth in the player compensation market. Right now, the richest teams in college football are just giving their football players something on the order of $45 to $50 million or so a year, two or three years ago, 20 was a lot. And so what you're seeing right now is university administrators, U.S. senators and Ted Cruz's case, just don't like labor, don't like workers have allied themselves with plenty of people who don't like black workers, which is a key consideration with college football and basketball. Don't like these workers, these kinds of workers making as much money as they're making and having the uncapped potential to make more. And so there are a lot of things in this bill. We wouldn't have time to get to them on a three hour podcast. But the most important one, the thing that is driving it unquestionably is Ted Cruz and his allies in the Senate
of whom there are about 76, this thing got a lot of votes, including some Democrats. Yeah. Wanting to stop the growth in the largely non-white player base of college athletes earning money. Well, they come back. There are some good things in this bill, even Alex says so. But quick reminder before we head to break, you are listening to this show in the heat of pledge season here. And you're only hearing Alex's hottest takes because he and I and everyone else who helped make this conversation come to life, we work at slate. So if you can, become a member and support us. The way to do it is to go to slate.com slash whatnext+. At checkout, you put in the code whatnext50. That's whatnext50. You get 50% off your first year on the team. We would love to have you. Thanks for helping us out. Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day.
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Explore more than 200 online courses that transfer into 2,000 colleges. Study.com lets you take college courses on your phone or computer whenever it fits into your life. Go to Study.com slash podcast and get 10% off your first month. That's Study.com slash podcast. I feel like we should say there are some things here that I think some observers have said are good things, like medical coverage, injury, protections. Those things or things athletes would want, right? Yes, I think there are some interesting things in this bill. I'm still working on a story for a site about this that might be out by the time the subject is being listed to. But I think that this bill is in some ways a legitimately thoughtful effort where different senators have made efforts to subject coaches to the same economic constraints that the bill is trying to subject players to. And there is some language in here that deals
with the realignment of conferences that could prevent more of the instability that I was talking about with a school like Washington State. But what's happened as this bill has gone through the legislative rigmarole is that those provisions in many cases have just been watered down by university administrators who will whisper in the ear of their senators. You have administrators at say the university of Miami who might have an eye toward leaving their conference, the ACC in the next years, going to their senators and saying, hey, Senator, can you water this down a bit so that actually it wouldn't be quite so restrictive on us if we wanted to do the thing that the bill seeks to prevent. And I think that's what's happened. Yikes. I mean, what I noticed is like, for instance, college players in this bill, I was reading they can only transfer once as student athletes, college coaches, they can move around, I mean, not during the season, but they can move around. And to me, it's just like,
one group here is clearly getting a better deal. They can move around during the season. Lane Kiffin left the university of Mississippi. He's LSU coach now. To go to LSU in the middle of a run to the national championship last year, left his team right before the playoffs started. There's a provision that is in this bill, which is somewhat disaffectionately called the Lane Kiffin rule. And I find that to be probably the most appealing part of this bill that didn't get watered down, there's a provision that would. What does it do? It would provide very real punishments in the form of suspension and monetary damages if coaches, head coaches were to leave their teams during the competition season. As Lane Kiffin just did to leave all Miss Frelacy, but there's still a problem even with this, which is that enterprising agents and headhunter firms
that work in the coaching carousel in college sports are going to find technical ways around this. You can spot the ways in which it would be pretty straightforward to do so. Whenever they have the opportunity to place a motivated coach with a motivated school that wants to hire them. You're putting your finger on something, which is like, I just feel a lot of people don't trust this bill because there's so much money sloshing around back and forth that the motivations of like anyone person talking about it are questionable at best. Like I think a lot of people started paying attention to this bill, like the spot they really came when Ted Cruz, Senator, he brought up before, Ted Cruz goes on college game day on ESPN and kind of is able to talk about this bill and how great it is, he gets very little pushback. And of course, people have lots of opinions about Ted Cruz. But when I read some analysis of this appearance, like the writer was basically like, well, the thing you have to keep in mind is that ESPN
is like in the hole for having, you know, a broadcast deal with the SEC, the SEC's not doing well. So ESPN has its own reasons for having Ted Cruz on, like saying this bill should move forward. Like everyone involved has some kind of connection to a little pot of money that makes their motivations sus. Sure, the national spokesman for this bill to the extent that it is not Ted Cruz is Nick Saban, the greatest coach of all time who retired a couple of years from Alabama. And Nick Saban in so many words has admitted that he got out of the game because as players started to be paid, that wasn't the college football that he had come up in or was interested in continuing to sort of lord over as the best coach in the sport. What does that mean? Like I just don't want to pay these guys. It means a number of things. I think the biggest thing that it means is that the University of Alabama, well, it has plenty of money went from being the biggest funder of football expenses in the country
to a more middle of the pack, upper middle of the pack, roster spender when they could actually start paying players because they're just frankly aren't that many rich people in the state of Alabama, even those who would be motivated to give to the tide to make sure that they're good. And so Nick Saban has spent his retirement doing two things. Number one, being a panelist on college game day and going around the country, sort of on this barn storming college football show that has been very beloved over the years and in some corner still is, and advocating for this bill that would in his view prevent more of the transformation of college football away from the system that he enjoyed so much where Nick Saban, no doubt, was the best to ever do it. And frankly, it was the very rare coach who I would argue was underpaid, even if he made 10 million bucks a year or whatever it was because of the amount of money that he made for Alabama by building that football program. But Nick Saban has devoted his career, his retirement, to trying to keep money out of the hands
of college football players in service of stability of the enterprise. I mean, I do feel like we have to talk about race which you have touched on in your comments already. The NAACP has come out against this bill, Cory Booker who was a college athlete at Stanford, definitely not in favor of this bill, and basically saying that so many college athletes are black, their labor is under compensated historically. And what people actually need is the right to collectively bargain, which is not what this bill is doing. It sounds like you say that's a fair critique. The key thing to understand about college sports economics is that football makes the money. There are some exceptions to this. There are some schools where other sports are a really big deal. But football makes the money. Football is certainly what is responsible for the multi-billion dollar television deals that keep the money flowing for big 10,
for SEC schools, et cetera. The coaches in college football, according to NCAA demographic data that the Association collects, are about 80% white. The player population in college football in the NCAA is about 42% white, about 40% black, and about 18% classified as other. It is a majority non-white sport where there's pretty much parity between black athletes and white athletes. People call this wokeness, people call this virtue signaling, people call this all kinds of things to avoid dealing with the obvious thing here, which is that when you prevent college football players from earning money, that they are by rights generating with the product that they put on the field for millions of people to watch every Saturday, you are moving that money somewhere. And I think it's pretty clear that you are moving that money
to the salaries of largely white coaches who make anywhere from a million or so a year at the lower end of the head coaching level to well over 10 million dollars a year, as well as hundreds of thousands or low millions for assistance. You're moving it to university administrators and you're also moving it to athletes in other sports who just objectively are number one, not as black, not as non-white as college football players, but are likely to come from better socio-economic backgrounds where frankly, they might not need the scholarship as a ticket for upward mobility in the way that many football players do, also many basketball players do. That system is fundamentally redistributive away from a largely non-white player base towards largely wealthy and white groups elsewhere in college sports. To not acknowledge that is just to not acknowledge reality. And I have no patience for it when people pretend to be dumb and not see that that is happening
when maneuvers like this are made in the economy of college sports. I think it's willfully dishonest. Can I tell you what I think when I think about this bill and where it's at and the fact that it was just put through? I really wonder about everyone else in college? I feel like there's this wistful nostalgia for like, oh, college sports used to be this and now I don't have that. What I look at when I see this bill is I'm like these universities have set themselves up so that they really love this money that comes in from college sports. But college sports is not actually what they're supposed to be doing. They are colleges, like there are tons of other people in these places who are just students and are not elite athletes. They're not even like part of this picture. You don't even like, it's just a really weird setup. To be like the thing we're gonna talk about college right now is like the athletes
and this structure we've built for the sports programs when it seems like the tail wagging the dog. It does often feel like that. I am somewhat of an optimist about what sports can be and sometimes are for a university but where the thing you're talking about becomes really obvious and a problem is in things like student fees where every student who goes to a given university pays hundreds of dollars a year to subsidize the athletic department. This is a massive source of funding for pretty much all of the athletic departments outside of the power conferences and for some of them, even within them which I think is particularly indefensible when you're making 50 million bucks a year or more from television and you still feel like you need to turn your students into a piggy bank for sports whether they care about sports or not. So I think you make a very reasonable point and it's one of about 50 real problems right now in American higher education but where do you put it on the list? There are so many choices.
So what happens with this bill next? I mean, it's past the Senate. It needs to go to the house. My understanding is like the house is not really open for business because as soon as they open their doors they're gonna have to vote about impeaching Pete Heggseth and Mike Johnson doesn't want them to do that. So what do you think is gonna happen when this gets to the lower chamber? Well, it's gonna get to the house in theory in the lame duck session after the midterm elections and at that point I turn it over to Jim Nuel and all of the congressional reporters and correspondent Muscle, let's explain what is likely to happen once it gets there. But I think the fact that if it's gonna get done at all gets done in the lame duck session speaks to the point that you brought up to me at the beginning of this interview which is that this is not an electoral needle mover. Nobody really even pretends that it is like despite all those fictional community members that I made up when you asked me who was asking for this. Is this the thing college that Congress should be spending its time on?
This is not a thing that any body of political science suggests is gonna change votes or even could given that it's not gonna come down until after the midterms. But Donald Trump really wants it to pass because he loves sports and he would feel like the big special guy who got it done even though I am quite certain that he does not know even three or four paragraphs of what is in this bill. It's very long, right? It's like more than a hundred pages. It's very long and I don't think Trump's a big reader. Trump has been told by Randy Levine of the New York Yankees and by Ted Cruz and by Nick Saban. Sir, you'll save college sports if you do this and just like anything that you could probably get Donald Trump to support if you told him that he would be seen as a hero for doing it and he would get to sign it in a big splashy ceremony on TV and hang out with athletes. You're damn right, Donald Trump really wants to spill the past, which means house Republicans might be pretty motivated. Alex, I'm so grateful for your time.
Thanks for coming on the show. Always fun. Alex Kirschner is a contributing writer for Slate. He also co-hosts the SplitZone Duo podcast and that's our show. What Next is produced by Evan Campbell, Madeline Tumsdew-Sharm and Patrick Fort. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next TBD. Mio L'Obel is the executive producer of podcast here at Slate. Ben Richmond is the senior director of podcast operations and I'm Mary Harris. Go track me down blue sky say, hey, I'm at Mary Harris. Thanks for listening. Catch you back here next time. You As a fitness coach, my act of psoriatic arthritis can slow me down. With SkyRizzy, risen chiseled, I'm treating my skin and joint symptoms so I can keep moving. SkyRizzy, a prescription only injection
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