The Senate passed a sweeping bipartisan college sports overhaul Monday night, setting federal rules for athlete pay and transfers after years of litigation-driven chaos.
By a 77-22 vote Monday night, the U.S. Senate approved the Protect College Sports Act, a bipartisan measure that would put national standards on Name, Image and Likeness deals, athlete compensation, recruiting, eligibility, and the transfer portal. Fox News Digital reported the bill now heads to the House, where timing remains uncertain.
President Donald Trump has already said he will sign the measure if it reaches his desk. The bill’s authors, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., framed the vote as a long-overdue answer to a system left without clear rules.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., put the problem in plain terms ahead of the vote.
Thune said most people acknowledge the current landscape of college sports “is a mess” and “needs to be addressed.”
Cruz did not soft-pedal how the free-for-all started. At a news conference Monday, he argued federal antitrust lawsuits gutted the old rulebook and left schools, athletes, and fans in a scramble.
Cruz said some people ask why Congress should get involved at all.
"Some have asked why should Congress get in the middle of this? The answer is simple: because Congress screwed it up in the first place."
He added that federal antitrust laws, applied in case after case, tore down essentially all the rules. “So right now it is the Wild West.”
Breitbart reported Cruz’s floor pitch in similar terms: college sports cannot magically fix itself because the core problem is federal law, and only Congress can repair it. Trump, for his part, called the bill a “really big deal” that will “not only save college sports, it will save the colleges themselves.”
Trump had pressed lawmakers before the summer recess and repeated the urgency when he hosted Team USA Winter Olympic and Paralympic athletes. He said he was urging the House and Senate to send him a bill, bipartisan if possible, and that it looked as if they had done so.
"I think we have no choice. We have to get that done. If we don’t, we’re very foolish. Nobody knows what will happen. We’re in Never-Never Land."
That warning tracks with the timeline since 2021, when the NCAA allowed student-athletes to benefit financially while still playing college sports. The association later tried to clean up the fallout and asked Congress for help.
The legislation would create a uniform federal framework for NIL compensation, transfer rules, and eligibility, while giving the collegiate governing body greater antitrust legal protections. It would also add restrictions to the transfer portal, set a five-year eligibility framework, and establish recruiting and tampering guardrails with defined windows for schools or agents to contact athletes.
The New York Post reported the measure would raise the direct athlete pay limit to about $49 million from a prior $21.5 million settlement cap, while granting the NCAA and schools a limited antitrust exemption for eligibility and transfer rules. Cruz described college sports as “at a breaking point” and said the bill aims to “restore order to a system being torn apart by too few rules and too much litigation.”
The Washington Examiner noted the package builds on the 2025 House v. NCAA settlement that opened the door to revenue sharing. After negotiations involving Cruz, Cantwell, and Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference issued a joint statement backing the bill “as currently drafted.”
Cruz cast the stakes in competitive terms before the vote. He said the bill is about protecting the underdog so that every team still has a shot to develop, compete, and maybe reach the Final Four, stories that only happen if those programs still exist.
Not everyone treated the chaos as a rules failure. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., opposed the bill and argued it would strip athletes of bargaining power while handing schools antitrust exemptions.
Earlier this month on X, Murphy went further.
"The ‘chaos’ is that (mostly Black) athletes now have bargaining power and White coaches and sports industry execs hate it."
That framing turns a governance collapse into a racial morality play. It also sidesteps the practical wreckage schools, mid-major programs, and fans have lived with since the old standards fell. In the same coverage, Murphy claimed the crisis talk itself is overstated and that “the facts don’t back up that characterization of college sports.” Supporters of the bill point to the opposite record: endless litigation, unstable rosters, and a market with no national floor.
Republican concern was not limited to pay and portals. In August, Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., Jim Banks, R-Ind., and Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., filed an amendment aimed at stopping the bill from overriding state laws that bar biological men from competing in women’s sports.
Hawley later said his concern had been addressed and fixed inside the bill to his satisfaction, and he voted to advance the legislation. That matters for states that have already drawn a clear line on sex-based categories in female athletics. A federal sports bill that erased those protections would have traded one form of disorder for another.
Passage in the Senate does not finish the job. The bill still needs the House, which is in recess until after the midterm elections, so any floor vote would have to wait. Trump’s signature promise only becomes relevant if the House sends him enrolled text.
Critics on the left also complained the bill leaves coach and athletic director buyouts largely untouched, pointing to runaway contract costs even as athlete pay gets a federal ceiling. That objection does not erase the core problem the Senate just tried to fix: a post-2021 system in which lawsuits, not elected lawmakers or a coherent national code, set the operating rules.
A June 10, 2026, roundtable in the Russell building, under the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, had already previewed the same fight over NIL, transfers, and whether Congress would finally draft a statute instead of watching courts dismantle the rest of the old order. Monday’s 77-22 result was the first hard proof that a bipartisan majority is willing to do it.
College sports does not need another decade of courtroom improvisation. It needs clear rules, protected women’s categories, and a Congress willing to clean up the mess it helped create, then a House that finishes the job.
