The Protect College Sports Act Could Create More Money, But Not Necessarily More Balance

Full credit to Cody Nagel at CBS Sports for the reporting on the latest version of the Protect College Sports Act, and to the AO Team at Athletes.org for laying out the athlete-side critique of the bill. Both are useful reads because together they show exactly where this debate sits right now: everybody agrees college sports needs structure, but there is still a major fight over who gets protected, who gets heard, and where any new money would actually go.  

At a high level, the most interesting part of the amended bill is the media-rights piece. The legislation would amend the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 to let schools or conferences voluntarily pool and jointly negotiate their media rights, in a way proponents say could look more like the NFL model. According to CBS Sports, supporters believe that kind of pooling could generate an additional $4 billion to $8 billion for college athletics. That is the kind of number that could meaningfully reshape the economics of the entire system.  

On paper, you can understand the appeal.

If college sports leaders are serious when they say football is swallowing the ecosystem, and if they are serious when they say women’s sports and Olympic sports need stronger protection, then creating a bigger national media pie is an obvious lever to pull. More money does create more possibility. In theory, pooled rights could help stabilize schools and conferences that are getting lapped in the current marketplace. In theory, it could create room to better support the parts of college athletics that do not drive the biggest TV contracts on their own. In theory, it could help counterbalance the enormous gravitational pull of football.  

But that is where I start to get concerned. This bill may create a path to more revenue, but it does not clearly guarantee that the new money will be used to rebalance the system. That is the key distinction, and it matters.

CBS Sports reports that backers of the bill want this new media-rights money directed toward women’s and Olympic sports. The bill was also revised to strengthen protections for those sports by requiring any Division I school with at least $80 million in annual athletic revenue to maintain scholarship and roster levels for women’s and Olympic sports at or above 2024-25 levels. It is worth acknowledging as a positive feature of the amended bill.  

Still, maintaining scholarship and roster levels is not the same thing as sufficiently funding those sports for long-term health and competitive viability, and that is where I think the bill leaves a major hole.

If the legislation opens the door for a much bigger rights deal, but does not require institutions to meaningfully invest those gains into women’s and Olympic sports, then all we may have done is create a bigger pot of money for the same old arms race. More football spending. More coach salaries. More facility vanity projects. More compensation inflation at the top. More pressure to keep feeding the sports that already dominate the market. That is not balance. That is escalation.  

Athletes.org made that point pretty bluntly in its response, arguing that even the bill’s supposed fixes for women’s and Olympic sports, including media-rights pooling, are optional. Their broader critique is that the PCSA shuts athletes out of the room and sidelines collective bargaining, which they call the only proven long-term solution for a multibillion-dollar sports industry. You do not have to agree with every word of their framing to recognize the core concern: if athletes are not central to the structure, and if the funding mechanisms are not tied to enforceable distribution priorities, then the people already holding power are still the ones deciding where the money goes.

College sports has never really struggled to create money. It has struggled to distribute money in ways that align with the values leaders like to talk about publicly. Everyone says they care about broad-based opportunity. Everyone says they care about Olympic development. Everyone says they care about women’s sports. But when fresh money shows up, the line often bends back toward football first, men’s basketball second, and everyone else after that.

A unified or pooled rights model could help college sports capture value more effectively, especially compared to the fragmented landscape we have now. It could reduce some of the structural disadvantage for conferences outside the current top tier. It could produce real revenue growth at a moment when many schools are desperate for new solutions. And if used wisely, it could absolutely help preserve more of the college sports ecosystem.  

However, If the bill does not do enough to require that new revenues actually support women’s and Olympic sports in a meaningful way, then the “save college sports” rhetoric starts to feel pretty hollow. A bigger media machine without a stronger distribution obligation does not level the field. It just puts more gas in the tank for whoever is already driving fastest.

There is also a political reality underneath all of this. The Big Ten and SEC are still opposed to the bill, and CBS Sports reports that part of their opposition centers on the media-pooling provision itself. The most powerful leagues are not usually eager to sign onto structures that could dilute their advantages. So even if you think pooled rights are a smart and overdue idea, it is going to be a battle to get this fully over the line, and an even bigger battle to ensure the money that follows is used in a way that genuinely broadens opportunity instead of concentrating power.  

The amended Protect College Sports Act asks a good question: can college sports make more money by acting more collectively in the media marketplace? The answer may well be yes, but it still has not fully answered the harder question: if that money arrives, who is it really going to?

Until that answer becomes more concrete, I think skepticism is warranted. College sports needs better priorities.