Senate votes 74-24 to advance Protect College Sports Act — SkimNews
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- The Senate voted 74-24 to halt debate on the Protect College Sports Act, clearing the 60-vote filibuster threshold needed to move the bill toward a final vote.
- Co-sponsors Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) cast the bill as "a bipartisan solution designed to bring order to the chaos"; Cantwell said she was "cautiously optimistic" about House passage, where a different version has repeatedly failed.
- Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) called the bill "a system of exploitation"; all four Black Democrats in the chamber — Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, Lisa Blunt Rochester and Angela Alsobrooks — voted no, and the NAACP strongly opposes it.
- A Cantwell report found a $519.9 million increase in institutional and government support of athletic programs between 2015 and 2025 across the 53 Power Four schools whose data was publicly available.
- The bill would codify a 22% cap on revenue sharing with players (about $21.5 million this year), add a $27.5 million "retention pool," restrict athletes to one "free" transfer, and lock in the NCAA's five-years-of-eligibility rule.
- A provision allowing conferences to pool TV media rights could generate $4 billion to $8 billion in additional revenue, but the SEC and Big Ten said they would not participate — a public split between the bill's architects and the two wealthiest conferences.
- Coaches Nick Saban, Deion Sanders, John Calipari and Mark Few publicly backed the bill; Calipari told reporters it "clears up about 75-80% of our issues."
Why it matters: The 74-24 vote masks a deep fault line: the SEC and Big Ten — the two conferences that dominate college sports revenue — have publicly refused to participate in the bill's marquee media-rights pooling provision, which proponents value at $4-8 billion. With the House having failed repeatedly to pass its own college sports bill, even overwhelming Senate support may not translate into the structural reform coaches like Calipari say the system needs.
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