{"id":400933,"date":"2026-08-08T05:30:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T05:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/400933\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T05:30:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T05:30:12","slug":"ted-cruzs-college-sports-bill-on-brink-of-u-s-senate-vote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/400933\/","title":{"rendered":"Ted Cruz\u2019s college sports bill on brink of U.S. Senate vote"},"content":{"rendered":"

Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy<\/a>, and give us feedback<\/a>.<\/p>\n

WASHINGTON \u2014 Senate Republicans have spent their final days before the August recess haggling over whether to vote on U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz<\/a>\u2019s bill that would place sweeping new regulations on college sports, after the measure gained a sudden burst of momentum with support from the Southeastern Conference and Big Ten.<\/p>\n

The bipartisan Protect College Sports Act<\/a>, co-authored by Cruz and U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Washington, has been in limbo for weeks. It advanced<\/a> out of the Senate Commerce Committee, which Cruz chairs, in June and is now up for a floor vote, which Cruz has emphatically sought before the Senate departs for its annual last-summer break. The chamber was scheduled to adjourn Friday, but President Donald Trump has urged senators to stay until they get through a pile-up of his legislative priorities, including the college sports bill.<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout this Bill, millions of young Athletes will be hurt, programs will be canceled, Women\u2019s and Olympic Sports will go away, the fans will be robbed, and Universities will go broke,\u201d Trump posted on social media Friday afternoon, urging the Senate to stop \u201cgrandstanding\u201d and pass it before leaving down.<\/p>\n

Senators could still pass the bill after their scheduled return to Capitol Hill after Labor Day, though its prospects of making it all the way to Trump\u2019s desk could grow more difficult later in the year as the midterms draw closer.<\/p>\n

Last week, Cruz and other lawmakers, along with White House officials, negotiated a package of concessions with Big Ten and SEC leaders, who until then had refused to back the bill. <\/p>\n

The newfound support from the two powerhouse conferences revived the measure and set off a scramble to get the revised bill up for a Senate vote before lawmakers left town. With a vote as early as Saturday within reach, however, a handful of senators on Friday publicly objected to the hasty timeline or filed amendments to the bill. The last-minute activity threatened to prolong debate into the weekend or push the vote to September, when senators will return with a jam-packed to-do list.<\/p>\n

Cruz\u2019s bill would place a host of new regulations on the free-for-all system that has emerged since the NCAA in 2021 allowed college athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness, followed by a settlement a few years later that required the NCAA and athletic conferences to share revenue with athletes. The bill\u2019s framework for revenue sharing was a big part of why the conferences had withheld their support \u2014 and of the revisions that brought them on board last week.<\/p>\n

At issue was a provision targeting a loophole that let \u201cassociated entities,\u201d including booster-funded \u201ccollectives,\u201d pay players through endorsement deals beyond a school\u2019s official salary cap. Those deals have already funneled more than $355 million to athletes, many routed through booster collectives, according to a July report from the College Sports Commission<\/a>. <\/p>\n

A central demand from the conferences was eliminating that workaround by requiring deal money to count toward the same $21.3 million pay cap schools use to pay players directly instead of routing around it. To help sweeten the pot, negotiations produced a new $27.5 million pool \u2014 a $22.5 million retention fund to prevent student-athlete transfers plus up to $5 million more if schools match that dollar-for-dollar spending on women\u2019s and Olympic sports \u2014 for a nearly $50 million in spending power for schools.<\/p>\n

In a joint statement<\/a>, the Big Ten and SEC\u2019s chancellors and presidents called the negotiations \u201cdetailed and productive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe listened to our colleagues, addressed their concerns, and improved an already strong bill,\u201d Cruz said. The avid Texas sports fan made it a priority last year<\/a> to build out a national framework to stabilize college sports and hand NCAA more enforcement power.<\/p>\n

Since its introduction, the bill has sparked nationwide debate over the future of college sports and how the rules governing it should be reshaped. In June, the chairs of the University of Texas and Texas A&M regent boards \u2014 the only two programs in Texas that Cruz has said would be \u201ccertain to survive\u201d without changes to the system \u2014 sent a joint letter<\/a> to Cruz and fellow U.S. Sen. John Cornyn<\/a> opposing the bill as it was then written. Although Cruz now has the Big Ten and SEC on his side, and Texas football coach Steve Sarkisian nodding<\/a> to the support the salary cap could provide, he risks a split with the two richest athletic brands in his home state whose players collectively command<\/a> tens of millions in NIL revenue.<\/p>\n

Texas Tech regent and former lineman Cody Campbell \u2014 founder of the nonprofit Saving College Sports and a key White House adviser on the issue \u2014 celebrated the Big Ten\/SEC reversal on social media, calling it a \u201cbetter future for college athletes in all sports.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other revisions hammered out in the negotiations curbed super-conference realignment, tightened language around legitimate endorsement deals, and clarified when conferences can share media-rights revenue.<\/p>\n

As the Power\u202fFour\u2019s biggest revenue engine, media\u2011rights pooling was the Big Ten and SEC\u2019s chief sticking point. The Big 12 and Atlantic Coast Conference form the other half of the collection of top revenue-generating conferences.<\/p>\n

Under the Big 12\u2019s current media deal<\/a>, the conference \u2014 home to Baylor University, the University of Houston, Texas Christian University and Texas Tech \u2014 distributed roughly $39.5\u202fmillion per school in the 2024\u201125 fiscal year, roughly half what the SEC paid out to most of its members. Industry trackers project<\/a> that gap will more than double in the SEC\u2019s favor over the next decade fueled by the SEC\u2019s new media contract and College Football Playoff expansion \u2014 revenue that Texas and Oklahoma now capture as SEC members. The Big Ten and SEC feared the original bill\u2019s media-rights pooling plan would pressure them into splitting their paydays, so negotiators added language making participation explicitly voluntary.<\/p>\n

The bill would also effectively freeze the conference map, a measure aimed squarely at protecting smaller conferences after Texas and other football powers jumped leagues in 2024, upending the Pac-12 and Big 12 conferences.<\/p>\n

The bill\u2019s momentum, driven by recent backing from multiple conferences, universities, and pro leagues<\/a>, positions it as the biggest overhaul of college sports since the arrival of NIL rights \u2014 the shorthand for Name, Image and Likeness. That sea change was ushered in by the NCAA\u2019s 2021 policy change allowing student athletes to profit from sponsorship deals, coming the same year the Supreme Court ruled that the NCAA could not prevent colleges from offering education-related benefits to its athletes. A 2025 legal settlement then enshrined the revenue-sharing model the NCAA had signed off on the year before.<\/p>\n

However, a broad coalition including labor unions, athlete associations and civil rights groups like the NAACP this week urged<\/a> the Senate to pause the bill until \u201cthe legislation more adequately addresses the needs and concerns of college athletes,\u201d without elaborating further. <\/p>\n

In a Thursday statement<\/a>, the Congressional Black Caucus declared that \u201cthe legislative process has failed to meaningfully incorporate the perspectives of Black athletes, Black coaches, Black agents, HBCUs, or the Congressional Black Caucus, despite the disproportionate impact this legislation will have on those communities.\u201d The caucus called on Senate Democrats to block the bill until those concerns are met.<\/p>\n

The Protect College Sports Act needs a minimum of 60 votes to clear the Senate floor and advance to the House. The two chambers would then need to agree on any changes made in the lower chamber before the bill could head to Trump\u2019s desk. The president has signaled repeated support for the measure.<\/p>\n

Disclosure: Baylor University, Texas Christian University and the University of Houston have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in The Texas Tribune\u2019s journalism. Find a complete\u00a0list of them here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy, and give…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":400934,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[416,2671,289,7883,27,29,114097,28,6588],"class_list":["post-400933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-college-sports","tag-congress","tag-higher-education","tag-ted-cruz","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-higher-education","tag-texas-news","tag-well-c-homepage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400933\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/400934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}