★ The Sports Examiner: Chronicling the key competitive, economic and political forces shaping elite sport and the Olympic Movement.★
★ To get the daily Sports Examiner Recap by e-mail: sign up here! ★
≡ “SAFE” ACT TO BE INTRODUCED ≡
The newest idea to bring some sanity to collegiate sports and try to maintain national participation in non-revenue Olympic sports such as swimming, track & field and wrestling was announced by Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) on Monday.
The Student Athlete Fairness and Enforcement (SAFE) Act, co-sponsored with Democratic Senators Cory Booker (New Jersey) and Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut) would crucially amend the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961:
● “Allows colleges and universities to lawfully negotiate their media rights as a group to increase their value – just like the NFL, NBA and NHL are able to do, without violating antitrust laws. The bill accomplishes this by amending the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 to include college sports.”
● “The Act creates a Committee within the NCAA to help maximize revenue for all schools and conferences.
“It charges the Committee with determining fair distribution of media rights to ensure that schools can maintain scholarship and roster slots at 2023-2024 levels for women’s and Olympic sports. Each school shall receive more media rights revenue than they received in the 2024-2025 academic year.”
● “The Committee will represent Division 1 schools broadly and will not be controlled by the biggest conferences. Members of the Committee will be chosen by university presidents and include members across the college sports ecosystem. It will not be subject to NCAA’s weighted voting rules.”
The bill (which has not yet been posted on the Congressional legislative site), would also regulate media distribution of football, basketball and other sports:
● “The legislation requires, just like the NFL, that content be made available for each college athletic competition for football and basketball on a non-exclusive basis for not less than one local outlet” and that “[l]ocal content is not behind a pay wall.”
● For all other sports, the bill would require “broadcast networks, streaming media platforms, or other distributors who control streaming media rights to reconvey those rights back to schools if the entity does not use or materially underutilizes the streaming media rights,” with the idea to allow schools to stream all of their events.
The proposal also includes a raft of regulations for players and on name-image-likeness payments, including a 10-year scholarship guarantee, five years of post-playing career medical coverage, NIL contract requirements, a cap on agent fees at five percent, a “valid business purpose” for NIL deals, and leaves the House vs. NCAA revenue-sharing program in place.
Transfers without sitting out for a year are limited to a career total of two.
The bill is a Democrat attempt at regulating the ongoing collegiate sports turmoil, as the Republican-led H.R. 4312, the “Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements Act” (SCORE Act), has floundered. But with Republicans in control of the Senate as well as the House, the future of Cantwell’s program is questionable.
¶
Observed: The SCORE Act in the House and this new bill coming in the Senate still do not bring true stability to football, basketball or other sports. Cantwell’s bill still has two immediate transfers, so a football player could go to Auburn as a freshman, Baylor as a sophomore and Clemson as a junior, but would have to stay there for a fourth year … or could sit out for a year and head to Oregon for a final, fifth year.
The other problem for the schools is that the terms of engagement with their own players is still not settled since there is no comprehensive contractual relationship with the players. At the end of the day, there will have to be some sort of agreement between players and teams via collective bargaining. The SCORE Act and the Cantwell bill still do not solve the problem.
There is also the underlying belief that television-video rights will continue to go up and by significant margins. In fact, the four large conferences already have long-term deals in place:
● 2029: Big 10 with CBS-NBC-FOX-Big 10 Network
● 2030: Big IX with ABC-ESPN-FOX
● 2033: SEC with ABC-ESPN
● 2035: ACC with ABC-ESPN
So where do the increases come from and when? For now, the assumption is that live sports is so valuable that the rights fees will continue to skyrocket. But as time goes by and the Boomer and Gen X cohorts age, the next-in-line, younger viewers are watching highlights, not whole games. Will collegiate sport go the way of late-night television talk shows, now money-losers for the legacy networks?
Quite possible. Since April 2024, the TSX solution is to treat college football as the professional, U-23 league that it is, form a true league structure governed as an independent business, with the intellectual property and football facilities at the schools licensed to the business entity for collective annual payments of more than $1 billion a year (maybe much more).
That money would then be used for support the other sports, with men’s and women’s basketball the next to break off. Each of these fully-professional leagues – no more student-athletes – would have standard, collectively-bargained agreements with a player organization, supported by dues.
Good for Cantwell for trying. But stop treating college football – at least – as a college sport. It isn’t any more.
Rich Perelman
Editor
¶
★ Receive our exclusive, weekday TSX Recap by e-mail by clicking here.
★ Sign up a friend to receive the TSX Recap by clicking here.
★ Please consider a donation here to keep this site going.
For our updated, 699-event International Sports Calendar for 2025, 2026 and beyond, by date and by sport, click here!
