The Protect College Sports Act Isn’t Reform. It’s About Control.

College sports need a serious overhaul. The current setup is chaotic, inconsistent, and often makes no sense. While a national system for name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights, athlete well-being, scholarships, and representation might sound good, and some parts of the proposed Protect College Sports Act offer athletes protections they should have had ages ago, there’s a bigger issue at play: who’s really in charge?

For years, schools, athletic conferences, and the NCAA held all the cards regarding athletes’ financial lives. But court rulings, NIL deals, the transfer portal, and the idea of revenue sharing have shaken things up. This created a power void, and now Congress is stepping in. The Senate recently passed the Protect College Sports Act and sent it to the House. Supporters claim it will bring much-needed stability, establish federal NIL rights, and add protections for scholarships and athlete health. I can see why some of those protections are appealing. However, giving athletes protections isn’t the same as giving them power. Instead of using this moment to create a system where athletes have a real say in the rules that govern their careers, Congress seems more focused on giving that power back to the institutions that just lost it. This isn’t reform; it’s just putting things back the way they were.

Whose stability are we talking about?

Everyone agrees that college sports need some stability. Schools need to know where they stand, conferences need clear rules, and the NCAA needs to enforce them. But stability and fairness aren’t the same thing. The old system was very stable. Athletes couldn’t earn money from their name, image, or likeness. They had very limited options to transfer. Meanwhile, schools and conferences raked in huge TV revenue, and coaches were signing multi-million dollar contracts. The administrators made the rules, and the athletes had to live by them. Then, court decisions, NIL, the transfer portal, and eventually revenue sharing changed everything. Athletes finally gained something they rarely had in college sports: a little bit of bargaining power. Suddenly, the institutions that had enjoyed decades of stability found themselves in what they called chaos. Some of that chaos is real. We definitely need rules.

But the NCAA also brought a lot of this on itself by refusing for decades to acknowledge a simple truth: this massive industry was built on the backs of athletes whose labor generated billions, yet they were prevented from directly benefiting from that revenue. Is stability just a nicer word for control? If reform simply means returning power to the institutions that lost it, then we haven’t really changed the old system at all. We’ve just found a federal way to keep it going.

Seems the Free Market Stops at the Locker Room Door

Nothing illustrates this contradiction better than how compensation is handled. The proposed legislation sets limits on how much schools can pay athletes through revenue sharing. But this idea of control vanishes when you’re talking about people wearing headsets instead of helmets. Coaches negotiate their salaries. Athletic directors negotiate their salaries. Conferences negotiate TV deals. Schools decide ticket prices. The market, it seems, is perfectly capable of handling all of those numbers. Then we get to the athletes – the ones actually playing the games and creating the product we watch. Suddenly, the free market is seen as a threat.

Now, we need cost certainty, spending limits, and federal oversight for athletes. Senators did try to apply some of these ideas elsewhere. Cory Booker and Chris Murphy proposed a $5 million cap on coaching salaries. Other ideas aimed to limit coaching buyouts and endorsement deals. But those restrictions didn’t make it into the bill. An amendment to limit annual ticket price increases to four percent was even voted down. So why is athlete compensation the one part of this supposedly out-of-control economic system that most urgently needs to be restricted?

Saban, Calipari and the Limits of Athlete Empowerment

Nick Saban and John Calipari are two of the most prominent coaching voices supporting the legislation, and both illustrate the contradiction at the heart of this debate. Forbes estimated that Saban earned nearly $150 million during his coaching career, including roughly $124 million at Alabama. He earned it. If Alabama believed Nick Saban was worth that much, it should have been free to pay him that much. That’s precisely the point. Saban participated fully in a market where he could hire representation, negotiate contracts, receive raises and leverage his success against what other elite coaches were earning. Nobody needed to protect Saban from making too much money or Alabama from paying him too much. Meanwhile, for most of his career, the athletes generating much of the revenue that made those salaries possible were prohibited from receiving direct compensation from their schools for playing.

So forgive me if I find it a little rich that someone who made nearly $150 million within that system is now presented as a voice of reason about the economic freedom athletes should have under this one. Saban has said he’s “all for players making money,” but has also argued that players and coaches operate in “totally different markets,” comparing the issue to asking whether a student’s scholarship should equal a professor’s salary. Of course they operated in different markets—that was the problem. Coaches had a functioning market in which they could discover and negotiate their value; athletes largely did not. Now that athletes finally have meaningful economic leverage of their own, we’re being told their market requires federal guardrails because the NCAA and its member institutions couldn’t adequately manage the system that emerged.

Calipari presents a different version of the same contradiction. Few coaches have built their public identity more around being player-first, and to his credit, much of that reputation was earned. He embraced the one-and-done era when others complained about it, encouraged players to leave for the NBA when it was best for them and their families, and supported athletes’ NIL rights. His philosophy was essentially simple: do what’s best for the player and his family.

Now Calipari is one of the prominent coaches supporting legislation that includes transfer restrictions, federal eligibility standards and greater enforcement authority. He has said the bill could address roughly 75 to 80 percent of college sports’ problems and has talked about the need for “guardrails.” Some of his concerns are legitimate. Constant transfers make roster building difficult, additional years of eligibility can squeeze opportunities for younger players, and the current NIL landscape remains confusing. College sports needs rules. But it’s worth noticing where so many of those guardrails are being placed: around how long athletes can play, when and how often they can transfer, how they can be compensated and which payments are considered legitimate.

That’s why I think we’re entitled to ask whether “guardrails” has become a friendlier word for restrictions. There’s a meaningful difference between doing what’s best for the player and his family and doing what’s best for them only within a system that remains manageable for coaches and institutions. You can’t spend decades building a reputation around player empowerment and then become uncomfortable with athlete autonomy once players acquire enough leverage to make the system inconvenient. At the very least, you have to explain where the line changed. Like Saban, Calipari has benefited enormously from a college sports economy that allowed coaches to negotiate their market value freely. It’s reasonable to ask why athletes shouldn’t be afforded as much economic freedom as the people who coach them.

Imagine If the Faces Were Different

Here’s a question I often think about. What if the people in the spotlight were different? What if the face of college sports that brings in big money wasn’t mostly young Black men playing football and basketball? What if the athletes suddenly making a lot of money were mostly white instead? Would Congress see those young people and decide they had too much power, needing federal action? Would people worry so much about athletes going after money? Would changing schools be called chaos?

Would lawmakers consider limiting how much schools could pay athletes while not putting similar limits on the coaches making much more? I can’t prove what would happen. Nobody can. But I have my own thoughts, and I don’t think this discussion would be the same. Considering the history of college sports, I don’t think that’s an unfair guess. Race isn’t some separate issue being brought into a talk about college sports. It’s part of the same question that’s been in this whole debate: who holds the power, and why?

If schools, conferences, coaches, and administrators keep their power, and athletes get protections, then Congress hasn’t really changed the power balance in college sports. It’s just kept it the way it is. And that’s the difference between real change and just keeping things in check. College sports doesn’t need saving from athletes. It needs to finally be built with them both in mind and in the room.