The Protect College Sports Act, sponsored by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and passed by the Senate this week, is ostensibly an effort to bring common-sense reform to an NCAA that, in pursuit of the almighty dollar, has abandoned all pretense of developing college athletes academically and personally. It’s hard to pinpoint when the cries to fix college sports got so loud, but one especially hears it everywhere NCAA Division I football teams compete on Saturdays.

But no matter how it looks on its face, the bill is a deeply flawed attempt at reforming college sports “because its framework confers consequential legal and economic benefits on institutions that already exercise enormous power,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson wrote to Senate leaders in August. Johnson argued that the bill could be catastrophic for Black student-athletes, who make up the majority of FBS football and Division I men’s basketball rosters and have already suffered decades of economic harm under the NCAA’s former rules.

Among other things, the Congressional Research Service’s summary of Cruz’s bill notes that it would require agents representing college athletes to register with at least one state and caps their compensation for negotiating Name, Image, and Likeness deals at 5% of a contract’s value. It bans the NCAA and its member institutions from limiting what student-athletes can make from such deals and establishes a reporting requirement for any deal worth more than $600.

The bill would also bar colleges and NIL collectives from paying athletes in ways that undermine the revenue-sharing rules established by a 2025 federal court ruling in House v. NCAA. That groundbreaking case challenged the NCAA’s ban on direct athlete compensation on antitrust grounds and cleared the way for some former college athletes to share in up to $2.8 billion in back pay. The Athletic reported that NCAA institutions paid out more than $1.77 billion to athletes in the first year of that arrangement.

And that’s where much of the conflict arises. Many critics of college athletics, including supporters of Cruz’s bill, point to the money flowing to college athletes and their ability to use the transfer portal to secure better financial deals as primary evidence that the NCAA has gone off the rails. But athletes’ newfound mobility and the agency that comes with it are long overdue, especially considering the way coaches and athletic directors have managed their careers to maximize their compensation.

According to the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database, total compensation to coaches in the NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision, the highest level of college football, was $1.6 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars in 2014, the year a judge ruled that college athletes could receive compensation for the use of their names, images and likenesses. Those payments have climbed in the years since.

Then or now, hardly anyone has begrudged college coaches for leveraging the rules and their own success to fatten their pockets by leaving one school to sign with the highest bidder. When it was only coaches and administrators who benefited, nobody in Congress thought a law limiting them to switching jobs only once was a good idea. But Cruz’s bill would do exactly that to college athletes and limit them to only one transfer. That provision alone — an attempt to limit athletes from maximizing their value in an emerging marketplace — should have been enough to make anyone who’s ever expressed praise for “free markets” in the halls of Congress to walk away. Instead, 77 senators voted for it. It’s not expected to fare as well in the House.

“Public institutions cannot depend upon Black athletes to fill their stadiums, secure television contracts, attract donations, and build nationally recognized brands, then claim neutrality when the political rights of those athletes, their families, and their communities are under attack,” Johnson wrote.

Rather than view Cruz’s bill as a good-faith reform effort, the more cynical among us may see it as a midterm gift from politicians eager to help wealthy institutions and their benefactors bring college athletes to heel after those athletes finally won a modicum of control over their bodies and labor. Congress didn’t express concern with the size of checks, employee retention and mobility in college sports when coaches and athletic directors were exclusively benefiting. But they see a problem after athletes start cashing in big and moving.

The measure reportedly faces significant hurdles in the House, and lawmakers there who have signaled opposition to it are right. Rather than sending it to the president’s desk, they should rip it to shreds and burn it to ashes.

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