Seven Reasons Why the PCSA Should Stay DOA

Despite an aggressive push to move the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA) to the Senate floor, Congress left for the August recess without voting on it. Cloture was filed. President Trump promoted the bill on social media. Senator Cruz expressed hope that the president would sign it on College GameDay this fall. Still, the Senate did not take the vote.

Then, on Saturday, Senator Cruz appeared on College GameDay to promote the PCSA and argue that Congress must step in to fix problems created by federal law. His remarks were met with sustained, overwhelming boos from the audience, a public response Congress should not ignore.

Paired with the lack of vote in August, these responses should be treated as a warning, not an invitation, to force the same flawed legislation through Congress. The PCSA has fundamental problems that more time will not fix. It is a federal shield for the NCAA, conferences and schools, packaged as long-term stability through another one-size-fits-all solution.

More than 5,300 Athletes.org members agree that college athletics needs clear, enforceable national rules. But lasting stability cannot come from rules imposed on athletes without being negotiated with them.

Here are seven reasons why the PCSA should remain dead on arrival: 

1. The PCSA attempts to “fix” a justice system that isn’t broken.

The NCAA, conferences and schools continue to lose major court cases—not because the justice system is broken or judges are biased against college sports leaders, but because courts at multiple levels have repeatedly found that their restrictions on college athletes violate the law.

In NCAA v. Alston (2021), the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against the NCAA’s compensation restrictions on education expenses, because they violated antitrust law. Justice Kavanaugh wrote separately that the NCAA’s remaining compensation rules raised “serious questions” under federal antitrust law and that the NCAA was not entitled to special treatment. That matters as the Senate considers granting a serial antitrust violator an antitrust exemption.

For decades, the NCAA and its members acted as judge, jury and executioner over rules governing athletes’ health and well being, movement and careers. Those intentionally crafted rules allowed and enabled institutions to generate billions of dollars for the institution while limiting athletes’ rights and freedom as citizens.

The courts became the only place athletes could challenge that system. Now, Section 118 of the bill asks Congress to protect institutions from antitrust scrutiny, returning college sports to an era of unchecked control by the same organizations whose decisions created today’s instability and whose decades of actions are predicated on subjugating athletes. 

That is not reform. It is insulation from accountability.

2. The PCSA does not fix college sports’ spending problem. It protects it.

Schools increasingly claim that athlete compensation has created unprecedented financial pressure. At the same time, football and basketball coaches remain among the country’s highest-paid public employees, joined by highly compensated administrators and university leaders.

The PCSA responds by placing a federally-imposed hard ceiling on athlete compensation while leaving every other major expense uncapped. This includes coaching salaries, coach buyouts, administrative compensation, athletic department staffing, facilities and facilities upgrades

In 2025 alone, buyout obligations for 15 FBS head coaches fired from public universities reportedly totaled more than $228 million. Athletes did not negotiate those contracts, approve those buyouts, expand administrative payrolls or authorize facilities projects. Institutions did.

Athletes are the last major participants in the college sports economy to share in the value they create. They went to court to secure the right to earn money from their own name, image and likeness without losing their eligibility. Plaintiff athletes returned to court in the House settlement litigation and secured a framework allowing schools to compensate athletes directly.

Yet only five years into the NIL era (and roughly one year into direct revenue sharing from institutions), athlete compensation is being blamed for breaking the system. After decades of financial mismanagement, the people paid last are now being blamed first.

The NCAA, conferences and schools are asking Congress to impose a “maximum wage” on athletes while every other expense remains free to grow. That will not solve college sports’ financial problems. It will redirect money to uncapped categories and force the people creating the value to continue subsidizing everyone and everything else around them.

Before Congress caps athletes’ earnings, it should examine the spending decisions of the people who actually control the money.

3. Protections for women’s and Olympic sports expire, while the Institutional antitrust protection does not.

The sponsors of the bill argue that the PCSA is necessary to protect women’s and Olympic sports from extinction. Their proposed solution is to have the federal government insert itself into college sports governance to restrict athlete compensation in revenue sports, in order to “preserve” funding for other, non-revenue generating programs.

Section 125 includes protections for roster spots and grant-in-aid opportunities in these sports, but those protections expire after four or nine years, depending on an athletic department’s total revenue. However, the federal antitrust protection does not expire.

The bill uses the potential elimination of women’s and Olympic sports to justify extraordinary federal intervention, then allows those protections to disappear while the NCAA, conferences and schools retain their legal shield in perpetuity.

If protecting these sports is truly a central purpose of the PCSA, their protections should not have an expiration date while institutional immunity lasts indefinitely.

4. The NCAA’s record does not justify handing over more control.

Before Congress gives an institution greater authority over a group of Americans, lawmakers should examine how that institution has used the power it already possesses.

The current eligibility dispute involving athletes who entered college in 2022 is one recent example. The NCAA adopted a new framework that can provide athletes with up to five years of eligibility while excluding the 2022 class, even though the 2026 season would be its fifth year.

The NCAA could have created a reasonable transition for that class, absorbed the short-term roster effects and moved forward gracefully. Instead, it turned an avoidable policy dispute into another courtroom battle, then presented itself as the victim of the resulting litigation.

The same concern applies to the NCAA’s lack of leadership in implementing health and safety protocols. Alabama A&M linebacker Medrick Burnett Jr. died the day before Thanksgiving in 2024 after suffering a severe head injury during a kickoff return in the Magic City Classic.

Before that season began, the NFL redesigned its kickoff to reduce the high-speed collisions associated with what it had identified as the most dangerous play in football. NFL data later showed meaningful injury reductions. The NCAA kept its existing kickoff rules.

The NFL recognized the danger and acted. The NCAA did not.

The decisions of NCAA, conference and school leaders helped bring college sports to Congress’ doorstep. Yet their strategy too often appears to be: impose an unlawful restriction, defend it through relentless litigation, lose and then use that loss to argue that the system needs protection simultaneously from—and for—athletes.

Negligent leadership should not be rewarded with extraordinary federal power.

5. The ombudsman is not independent oversight.

Section 108 creates an ombudsman to explain athletes’ rights, provide confidential guidance and help resolve disputes involving the NCAA, conferences and schools. Those services could be useful, but the office would be hired and funded by the same intercollegiate athletics system whose rules and institutions athletes may need help challenging to protect themselves.

The bill shields the ombudsman’s notes, work product and case files from discovery, subpoena and other legal compulsion. Meanwhile, the ombudsman lacks independent subpoena power and could not compel corrective action, impose sanctions or award damages.

The ombudsman also could not represent athletes or create enforceable protections in the way a regulator, independent arbitrator or formally recognized players association could. That structure risks containing serious complaints inside the system without producing usable evidence, binding precedent, public transparency or institutional accountability.

Confidential support is not independent oversight. Athletes deserve both.

The NCAA has a history of creating perfunctory structures such as the ombudsman to misdirect. The Student Athlete Advisory Committee creates the illusion of college athletes having meaningful influence in governance, but with no real power. The underlying structure and practice perfectly illustrates that college athletes have no influence over their outcomes. 

6. HBCU investment is authorized, but not guaranteed.

Section 307 creates the potential for a grant program supporting broadband, technology, journalism and sports-media infrastructure at historically Black colleges and universities. Those are meaningful goals, but the bill’s sponsors and supporters should describe the promise accurately.

The provision authorizes up to $180 million annually from fiscal years 2027 through 2032, for a potential total of $1.08 billion. It does not actually appropriate a single dollar. The bill itself acknowledges that uncertainty by conditioning implementation on whether funds “have been appropriated.”

For HBCUs to receive funding, a future Congress would need to appropriate the money, federal agencies would need to establish the program and individual institutions would need to win competitive grants lasting two to five years.

The bill guarantees no annual appropriation, no minimum funding level and no award for any particular HBCU.

Potential HBCU funding should not be used as a bargaining chip to make an unrelated, permanent antitrust exemption more politically acceptable.

7. The NCAA wants all the benefits of professional sports, but without collective bargaining.

During the Sorsby v. NCAA case in May, the NCAA warned that it could become “the first major American sports league to allow an athlete who bet on their own games to continue to compete.” That description exposes the contradiction Congress must confront.

The NCAA generates more annual revenue than the NBA and MLB, pays coaches, administrators and executives as much as, and sometimes more than, their professional counterparts and seeks the legal protections enjoyed by professional leagues. Yet it continues to defend an amateurism model that disappeared decades ago.

Section 118 says enforcement of numerous PCSA provisions “shall not be unlawful under the antitrust laws” and would give the NCAA, conferences and schools protection from antitrust liability and legal protections comparable to those enjoyed by professional sports leagues. Athletes would not receive the collective bargaining rights of professional players.

The NCAA, conferences and schools want compensation limits, player-movement restrictions, agent regulations, eligibility rules and antitrust protection. What they resist is the process that makes comparable restrictions lawful in professional sports: collective bargaining.

Professional leagues negotiate these rules with players through independently selected representative bodies, players associations. The resulting collective bargaining agreements bind both sides and provide clear grievance, mediation and arbitration processes when either side breaks the rules.

The PCSA offers no comparable power or accountability.

Input is not negotiation. Consultation is not accountability. Athletes need independent representation and an enforceable voice over the rules governing their health, safety, education, movement, compensation and careers.

If college sports wants to call itself a “major American sports league” and receive the legal protections professional leagues rely on, it should follow the same path: negotiate with athletes through their independent players association and create an agreement that binds both sides.

Conclusion: There is a better path.

A decade ago, prison-labor precedent and the “slavery exemption” from the Thirteenth Amendment were cited to argue that college athletes were not entitled to basic employee protections. The Third Circuit rejected that comparison.

College athletes are not prisoners, inventory or products. They are young American citizens whose talents power a multibillion-dollar industry.

Congress should not give more protected power to the system governing them without first requiring meaningful, independent athlete representation.

If Congress wants lasting stability, the proven framework is collective bargaining: athletes and institutions sitting across the table, independently represented, negotiating enforceable rules together. Compensation, eligibility, the right to transfer, health and safety standards, agent regulations, medical coverage, academic protections, discipline and enforcement can all be negotiated.

Athletes.org stands ready to do that work as the players association for college athletes. AO represents more than 5,300 college athletes who have chosen AO as their players association. We have published a collective bargaining framework and continue to work with athletes and college sports leaders to build a system in which athletes can negotiate the terms of their collegiate athletic experience.

The solution is not to give one side more federally protected power. It is to require both sides to share in it by equitably negotiating the rules that govern the system they both play a critical role in. 

Until then, we hope that you remember: the PCSA should be DOA.