{"id":359689,"date":"2026-09-29T12:02:08","date_gmt":"2026-09-29T12:02:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/359689\/"},"modified":"2026-09-29T12:02:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-29T12:02:08","slug":"news-12-bronx-senate-passes-college-sports-bill-that-would-rein-in-athlete-payments-and-transfers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/359689\/","title":{"rendered":"News 12 | Bronx | Senate Passes College Sports Bill That Would Rein In Athlete Payments And Transfers"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Senate passed a sweeping bipartisan bill on Monday that would regulate college sports<\/a>, an attempt to end \u201cchaos\u201d in an industry that has been upended by skyrocketing athlete payments and near-unrestricted transfers between schools.<\/p>\n

The overwhelming 77-22 vote to pass the legislation is the strongest effort yet by Congress<\/a> to set national regulations governing payments to college athletes for their name, image and likeness and how often they can transfer. It would give the NCAA new authority over those rules and limited antitrust protections to enforce them.<\/p>\n

The bill is the product of years of Senate negotiations that intensified after a 2025 lawsuit settlement uprooted the college sports landscape by allowing colleges to pay their players. The legislation, which would still have to pass the House, would codify the settlement into law but also establish new guardrails around the system in an attempt to rein in the runaway costs for colleges.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would be nice if college sports could somehow magically fix itself, but this is a matter of law, federal law, and only Congress can fix it,\u201d said Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who negotiated the bill<\/a> with the top Democrat on the panel, Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell.<\/p>\n

President Donald Trump praised the bill in a social media post after the late night passage. \u201cThis is a really big deal,\u201d he said. \u201cIt will not only save college sports, it will save the colleges themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bill’s backers \u2014 more than 70 senators from both parties<\/a> \u2014 say it aims to curtail constant litigation and uncertainty across college sports for athletes, schools and fans. It would also give hundreds of thousands of athletes new health and labor protections.<\/p>\n

But critics say the bill doesn’t do enough to protect athletes<\/a> or curtail the enormous sums of money flowing to coaches, colleges and conferences.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a bill that essentially ensconces a system of exploitation, and it doesn\u2019t fix the broader problems,\u201d said Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat who has worked with labor and civil rights groups to rally opposition to the bill.<\/p>\n

The bill\u2019s future is still unclear. It could face an uphill battle in the House, which failed repeatedly<\/a> over the last year to get a different version to the floor and is in recess until after the November elections.<\/p>\n

Lawmakers will have to start over in the next Congress if the bill doesn’t pass both chambers by the end of the year.<\/p>\n

Bill addresses skyrocketing spending, unlimited transfers<\/p>\n

College sports have been reeling in the wake of the 2025 court settlement allowing colleges to directly pay players for their name, image and likeness. The fallout has reshaped the industry and led to football roster payrolls that can exceed $40 million<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The bill would codify the court settlement, including a revenue cap that allows schools to share up to $21.5 million in revenue with their players. The legislation would more than double that amount for some schools, allowing up to an additional $27.5 million in payments through a retention fund<\/a> \u2014 a change that helped win the support of the two largest conferences, the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference.<\/p>\n

To help schools raise more revenue, the bill would give schools and conferences the option of pooling their TV media rights.<\/p>\n

The legislation also aims to stabilize the NCAA transfer portal that has led to players constantly switching teams. It would restrict player transfers to one \u201cfree\u201d move over five years without sitting out a year, with some exceptions, and also would restrict players to five years of total eligibility.<\/p>\n

The proposed eligibility limit comes amid backlash to schools that have increasingly pushed boundaries, including LSU’s now-canceled plans to place players on the roster who had participated in NFL training camps.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was probably like a big lamp for some people who saw it and said, \u2018Oh my God, this is so out of control,\u2019\u201d Cantwell said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.<\/p>\n

The bill also would restrict coaches from leaving their schools during the season<\/a>, force schools that want to switch conferences to spend three years as an independent and prevent conferences from growing larger than 20 programs \u2014 an effort to prevent so-called \u201csuperleagues\u201d from taking over sports. A last-minute amendment proposed by Florida Sen. Ashley Moody raised that cap from 19 in the original legislation.<\/p>\n

The vote was delayed several hours on Monday as senators negotiated Moody\u2019s amendment and others that were eventually adopted, including a provision to make it easier for athletes to sue over sexual assault and a requirement to disclose foreign financing.<\/p>\n

The Senate rejected an amendment by Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., that would have put limits on ticket prices for fans and two by Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., that would have capped coaches\u2019 salaries at $5 million a year and increased compensation for athletes who have catastrophic injuries.<\/p>\n

Critics say it wouldn\u2019t do enough to help athletes<\/p>\n

The legislation includes new protections for athletes, including caps on agent fees and guarantees for health insurance and scholarships. It would also require schools to maintain a minimum number of sports and roster spots \u2014 an effort to ensure that women’s and Olympic sports are not cut in favor of football, basketball and other sports that generate more revenue.<\/p>\n

Still, some Democrats say it wouldn’t do enough to limit the big money in college sports.<\/p>\n

The legislation \u201cplaces a cap on the students\u2019 cut of the revenues, but there are no caps on coaches\u2019 salaries or on the size of donations to athletic programs,\u201d Murphy said last week.<\/p>\n

Groups like the NAACP, Congressional Black Caucus and AFL-CIO have also opposed the bill, in part, because it leaves unresolved whether athletes should be considered employees with the ability to collectively bargain.<\/p>\n

All four Black Democrats in the Senate \u2014 Booker, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland \u2014 have opposed the bill.<\/p>\n

Booker, who played football at Stanford in the late 1980s on a scholarship, noted the \u201coutsized role\u201d that Black athletes play in college sports. He said it wasn’t until college athletes were able to begin to win cases in court that the power started to shift, \u201cand now the NCAA is coming here to the United States Senate, asking for sweeping powers” to exempt antitrust laws.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know who this bill is protecting,\u201d Booker said.<\/p>\n

House passage is uncertain<\/p>\n

Despite strong bipartisan support in the Senate, the bill faces a murky path in the House.<\/p>\n

House lawmakers won’t return to Washington until mid-November, after the elections. And it’s unclear what will be on Republican leaders’ agenda in the chaotic last few weeks of the session.<\/p>\n

Pressure from Trump could help push the bill to passage. But some House Republicans have insisted on language explicitly stating that athletes are not employees, which the Senate bill does not have \u2014 a key concession to Cantwell to win enough Democratic support.<\/p>\n

After the bill’s passage, Cruz said it is his hope \u201cthat we see in the House the same thing we saw in the Senate: a big bipartisan vote.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Senate passed a sweeping bipartisan bill on Monday that would regulate college sports, an attempt to end…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":359690,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[128,9,24,63,129,131,130],"class_list":["post-359689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-bronx","tag-bronx","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-bronx-headlines","tag-the-bronx-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/359690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}