Ted Cruz

WASHINGTON — A major legislative play in the future of college sports is driving down the field. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s revised college sports bill is gaining momentum after getting support from the country’s biggest college conferences. The full Senate could move to vote on the bill as soon as this week.

After weeks of negotiations, Cruz, a Republican, and Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, unveiled revised legislation that aims to bring more structure to college athletics, replacing a patchwork of state laws, NCAA rules and court rulings.

“I’m very confident it’s going to pass. There is a very broad coalition behind it,” Cruz told Spectrum News. “It’s been endorsed by 27 conferences. It’s been endorsed by over 360 schools, and it’s critical. We’ve got to save college sports, and I’m very encouraged by the momentum ahead.”

The Southeastern Conference and Big Ten’s approval gives Cruz’s bill a major boost.

“The Big Ten has 18 schools. The SEC has 16 schools. That’s a lot of states that have Senators in them, so their support as the two most powerful conferences was pretty much vital,” said Chris Vannini, a Dallas-based senior writer for The Athletic.

Vannini said the conferences got on board after receiving concessions that include a harder cap on how much schools can spend on athletes.

“There’s a distance within those conferences. Purdue is not spending the same amount of money as Ohio State. Texas is spending a lot more than Mississippi State, so there’s an attempt to at least bring that cap down a little bit to somewhat level the playing field,” Vannini said. “This is one of the most important provisions to keep some level of parity and level playing field is how much they’re able to cap that.”

The college sports bill would also give undergraduate players just one unrestricted transfer over the course of their college careers, add rules to coaching changes, limit conference expansion to 19 teams and give the NCAA a limited antitrust exemption.

While President Donald Trump backs the bill, a coalition of labor unions, players associations and civil rights groups sent a letter to Senate leaders stating their opposition. One corporate accountability group said the antitrust exemption was “unprecedented.”

“It is a massive concession to the monied interests in college sports, particularly the Big Ten and SEC,” said Katherine Van Dyck, senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project. “And it is especially egregious given the NCAA’s long history of antitrust violations that range from restricting universities’ ability to negotiate television contracts, to artificially capping coaches’ salaries at near poverty levels, to suppressing the earnings of college athletes while head coaches and administrators made millions. Taking away the only tool that can rein in the NCAA’s lawlessness is a tragedy.”

Others believe that in order to maintain leverage, student athletes should have the right to collectively negotiate the terms deciding what they can earn and where they can play.

“They basically don’t like putting any restrictions on the players that is not collectively bargained, like it is in pro sports. They don’t like there being a cap on what athletes can make. They don’t like there being a limit on the transfers that they can do. They believe that that should be collectively bargained,” Vannini said.

Cruz hopes the Senate passes the bill before leaving for the August recess at the end of the week. It then heads to the House, where it faces an uncertain future.