Make New York Post a Preferred Source Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) speaking about the Protect College Sports Act with college student-athletes and coaches outside of the Capitol building on Sept. 29, 2026. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via ZUMA Press Kudos to Sens. Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell for getting their bipartisan Protect College Sports bill through the Senate on Monday — and cheers, too, to Yankees prez Randy Levine and the rest of Saving College Sports Roundtable, a presidential committee set up to help establish a workable national framework for college athletics.
The bill still needs to pass the House, and of course it’s imperfect, but it has real promise to end the nonstop litigation and over-the-top bidding wars launched when the Supreme Court in 2021 tossed key NCAA rules on antitrust grounds.
The old system had huge problems — not least, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted then, “the NCAA’s business model of using unpaid student athletes to generate billions of dollars in revenue for the colleges.”
But what followed was ruinous, with stars transferring to the highest bidder multiple times and schools stinting on women’s and Olympic sports as they chased talent that would bring in the most revenue.
The bill protects a collegian’s right to collect from the sale of his or her Name, Image and Likeness while setting national standards for transfers, eligibility, tampering and so on, including limits on agents’ share of an athletes’ earnings.
Yes, it gives the NCAA a partial antitrust exemption so it can’t get sued for enforcing eligibility and transfer limits and lets it limit coaches’ job-hopping rights, too — but keeping college sports different from the pros has to start somewhere.
Levine and his colleagues did crucial work in building centrist support for this legislation; let’s hope it can become law before a new Congress takes over and forces reform efforts back to the starting line.
