WASHINGTON — With a major college sports reform bill on the brink of a milestone in Congress, some former athletes have a special place in the debate: the handful of U.S. Senators who played college sports themselves.
Supporters of the Protect College Sports Act, which is poised to pass the Senate on Monday, say the bill is needed to fix what they call an era of chaos in Division I athletics, characterized by ballooning pay for athletes, unlimited transfers between schools, constant lawsuits over eligibility rules and runaway athletic department budgets.
At least half a dozen sitting senators were NCAA Division I athletes, and a handful of others played in Division II or in sports governed by other organizations. As the debate over the bill has unfolded over the past year, their experiences have informed their approach to the legislation.
No one in the Senate spent as many years in college sports as Tommy Tuberville, the football coach turned Alabama senator (who is stepping down after this term as he runs for governor in this fall's election in the state).
Tuberville played football at the Division II school Southern State, then went on to be a head coach at Ole Miss, Auburn, Texas Tech and Cincinnati. Tuberville retired in 2016, soon after a federal lawsuit filed by former UCLA basketball player Ed O'Bannon over the use of his name and likeness in a video game began to chip away at the NCAA's longstanding tradition of amateurism.
A decade later, name-image-likeness payments, known as NIL, have transformed college sports, as high-level athletes — especially in the revenue-generating sports of football and basketball — now regularly sign deals worth thousands, or even millions, of dollars per season.
Pay for athletes is here to stay, Tuberville, a conservative Republican, said during a speech on the Senate floor in June.
"For years, everyone around college sports made money — schools, conferences, television networks, sponsors, coaches — while the athletes were told they could not make any money," he said. "That needed to change, and it did."
But other changes, many of them brought about by the flood of litigation that followed O'Bannon, have been harmful, he argued — especially the erosion of NCAA rules about who is eligible to play college sports and the freedom of athletes to transfer between schools without penalty, as thousands of Division I athletes now do each year.
Tuberville initially opposed the Protect College Sports Act because he saw it as government overreach into college sports.
But a primary purpose of the Protect College Sports Act is to grant the NCAA a limited antitrust exemption in order to restore the five-year eligibility rule and the one-time free transfer for athletes (subsequent transfers would require an athlete to sit out from competition for a year, with some exceptions).
So, this month, Tuberville switched his vote to yes.
"When I was coaching, you used to be able to develop a young person over a four- or five-year period and send them out into the real world as a man or woman with a degree, an education. And that's what it's about," Tuberville said in June. "Now you're lucky to keep a player one season."
Though Tuberville may be the Senate's most recognizable name to sports fans, he is far from the only senator with a background in Division I college athletics. Jim Justice of West Virginia played golf at Marshall. Ron Wyden of Oregon went to U.C. Santa Barbara on a basketball scholarship. Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania co-captained the wrestling team at West Point.
And several senators played college football — including Cory Booker, the Democrat from New Jersey, who played tight end at Stanford. He qualified for the academic powerhouse, he jokes, not because of his 4.0 GPA and 1600 SAT but rather his 1,600 reception yards and 4.0 yards per carry.
Booker was on the team from 1987 to 1990, when college football's big money era was just getting started. The modern lucrative television contracts were new then, and the sport was still a few years away from its first million-dollar coach.
Still, Booker said, he soon began to wonder how fair the whole arrangement was, especially for teammates who had come from a lower socioeconomic status than his middle-class family. "I just saw the economic bargain that they were getting — coming hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from family, not having the resources in any way proportionate to what they were doing for the university and for TV contracts and for well-paid coaches," he said.
After he graduated, Booker said, his discomfort grew as he saw friends at other schools have to pay out of pocket to finish their degrees after their playing careers ended. Teammates who had been injured playing football were still feeling the effects years later, but paying for their own medical care, as schools had no obligations to cover those costs.
Meanwhile, college athletic department budgets have ballooned.
Earlier this month, Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, the lead Democrat on the bill, released a report that cited enormous increases in spending from 2005 to 2023: a 200% bump in travel costs, 250% in gameday expenses, more than 300% in recruiting, and the whopper — a 370% boom in pay for coaches.
"That's what frustrates me — we have a bill that's going to protect the wealth and the gravy train for a lot of folks but puts burdens on college athletes," said Booker. "It doesn't even put burdens on the coaches."
Booker has consistently voted against the bill in procedural votes so far. And he has proposed a handful of amendments, including one that would limit coaches' annual salaries to $5 million. According to databases maintained by USA Today, nearly 50 college football coaches earn more than that each year, as do more than a dozen basketball coaches.
The bill has plenty of other provisions. It significantly increases the amount schools are allowed to pay players directly in revenue sharing, from about $21 million this season — an amount established by a landmark legal settlement last year — to $49 million. It attempts to crack down on above-market-value NIL deals and caps agent pay. It gives conferences the option to pool their media rights. It has measures designed to protect roster spots for women's sports and Olympic sports, which generally do not earn revenue for schools.
The bill also aims to prevent the formation of "super conferences" by capping the membership of big-revenue conferences to 19 schools and disincentivizing schools from jumping from one power conference to another, a controversial provision that prompted "no" votes from Florida's two senators on behalf of schools like Florida State and Miami who hope to keep their realignment options open.
The negotiations over the bill have been ongoing for well over a year.
Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Republican from Missouri, is determined to get it passed. Schmitt was a two-sport athlete — football and baseball — at Truman State University, an NCAA Division II school. Juggling both sports and school simultaneously informed his approach to legislating, he says.
"There were moments when I was competing and you'd have to run the extra wind sprint, or you'd be running after a practice or after a game, and you just don't really want to do that. But when you push yourself physically and mentally, you get stronger," he said in an interview with NPR. "There are times in a negotiation or in a legislative process where things are difficult or challenging. So I have taken the position on how I handle things professionally that I'm just not going to quit."
Schmitt is a co-sponsor of the bill. Like his fellow conservative Tuberville, he was initially opposed to the idea of the federal government being so involved in college sports. But over time, he became convinced that Congress had a role to play, and he got to work convincing others, too.
Those negotiations have led to a remarkably bipartisan bill. Now, after more than a year of negotiations, the bill appears poised to pass the Senate with 70 votes (or more) with a mix of Republicans and Democrats.
"You don't get too many opportunities the way things are set up now in the U.S. Senate, where you can truly legislate something, [where] you can navigate in a bipartisan way, talk to people on issues that aren't clearly partisan," he said. "There's no red jersey, blue jersey. It's just how you're making the case."
The final Senate vote is scheduled for 5:30pm Eastern time on Monday. Its approval would be the most significant development yet in the effort to legislate reform to college sports, an effort supported by President Trump. But the bill faces an uncertain future in the House, which is on recess until after the November midterms.
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