Tangle - The Protect College Sports Act passes the Senate.

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

On Monday, the Senate voted 77–22 to pass the Protect College Sports Act with support from 50 Republicans, 26 Democrats, and one independent. The bill would create a national regulatory framework for collegiate athletics and give the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) antitrust protection, allowing it to establish standards for student-athlete compensation, eligibility, transferring, and other activities. The House is expected to take up the bill after the November midterms. A wide-ranging conversation.In this week’s Suspension of the Rules episode, we start by having some fun with Jack Smith’s congressional testimony. Then, we discuss the government-funded Trump commercials before turning to a much more serious subject: the Cornell sexual assault case. It was a heavy but important segment, and we wrapped up with some gratitude (instead of our usual grievances) to lighten the mood. You can listen here or watch here.Ad-free podcasts are here!Get 20% off your first year of ad-free episodes, exclusive interviews, and deep dives with Tangle’s podcast membership!You can read today's podcast⁠ ⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠ and today’s “Have a nice day” story ⁠here⁠.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Take the survey: What do you think of the bill? Let us know.Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast written by: Ari Weitzman and audio engineered and edited by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Audrey Moorehead, and Carina Pacheco. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place where you get news from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of our take. I'm going to be providing that take today. This is Tango's managing editor, Ari Weitzman, taking on an issue that sits at the intersection of sports and politics. I'm a Pittsburgh, so, you know, I love my sports. Steelers are playing the Browns tonight. I'm running for that. But I'm also here to talk about the college sports, or rather the Save College Sports Act that just passed the Senate. I was a college athlete.

I guess you could say I was a sprinter at the University of Chicago was not very good. I didn't make it out of most of the prelims at the meets that I went to. But I think a lot of college athletes kind of had lives like I had when I was in college. So this is an issue that I feel somewhat close to. My life was basically you go to classes, you hit the gym, you hit the library, you eat when you can, put as much of your own laundries you can in the varsity laundry, that kind of thing. It was a pretty fun lifestyle, to be honest. But it's a little bit of a different lifestyle than the ones that we see as spectators of college sports, which is a huge part of this issue. And we're going to unpack it all when I come back for my take. Before I give you

my take, I'm going to send it over to Will to get us started. Thanks, Ari. Okay, here are today's quick hits. Number one, a pilot on a commercial flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv allegedly attacked his co-pilot and attempted to crash the plane. Passengers and crew subdued the attacker, and another pair of pilots on the flight safely landed the aircraft. Number two, the U.S. military announced that all troops have now withdrawn from Iraq,

officially ending its 12-year mission. Number three, the Federal Reserve's Inspector General reported that mismanagement led to cost overruns in the central bank's renovation of its Washington, D.C. headquarters, but found no grounds for a criminal referral against former chair Jerome Powell. Number four, the Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation into leading AI companies over potential dangers their models posed to consumers. And number five, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee halted the state's execution of Krista Pike after she appeared to survive two rounds of lethal injection.

The U.S. Senate is taking steps to bring new rules to college athletics. I have the so-called Protect College Sports Act passed the U.S. Senate this week with bipartisan support and is now on its way to the House. On Monday, the Senate voted 77 to 22 to pass the Protect, College Sports Act with support from 50 Republicans, 26 Democrats, and one independent. The bill would create a national regulatory framework for collegiate athletics and give the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the NCAA, antitrust protection, allowing it to establish standards for student athlete compensation, eligibility, transfer rules, and other

activities. The House is expected to take up the bill after the November midterms. Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Maria Cantwell of Washington, Eric Schmidt of Missouri, and Chris Coons of Delaware introduced the bill in response to concerns about recent changes in college sports. In 2021, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the NCAA's limits on certain education-related compensation for student athletes violated antitrust law. The NCAA then implemented a name, image, and likeness policy, NIL, that allows student athletes and some high school athletes to earn money without losing their eligibility. Initially, these payments could only come from third parties, such as advertisers. But in 2025, the rules were amended to allow Division I schools to compensate athletes directly.

The policy has enabled some student athletes, primarily in football and basketball, to earn millions in deals and also led to more frequent athlete transfers between schools. The Protect College Sports Act contains several provisions to address these perceived issues. Those include codifying athletes' ability to enter NIL deals, creating reporting requirements for NIL compensation, limiting the amount of money that schools can spend on direct athlete payments, adding antitrust exemptions for the NCAA to implement rules on transfers and years of eligibility, and capping agent endorsement contract fees at 5%. The NCAA, major college athletic conferences, and President Donald Trump have come out in support of the bill, arguing that it will reign in chaos created by current NIL policies

and establish a level playing field for college sports. NCAA President Charlie Baker said, The measure will ensure student-athlet benefits are codified into federal law, and future generations of young people can access those benefits and use college sports as the launching point for their careers. Labor groups, student-athlet organizations, and some Democrats have opposed the effort, saying it will strip athletes of newfound leverage and freedom. Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat of New Jersey, said, quote,

this is a bill not about student athletes, it's about wealthy coaches and wealthy institutions, and an NCAA who have enjoyed unbridled power for decades. Today we'll share views from the right, the left, and sports writers on the bill, and then managing editor Ari Weitzman gives his take. We'll be right back after this quick break. Here's what the right is saying. some on the right praised the bill for addressing problems in a flawed system. Others argue that the law could benefit the colleges more than the players.

The New York Post editorial board called the bill a bipartisan win for protecting college sports. The bill is imperfect, but has real promise to end the nonstop litigation and over-the-top bidding wars launched when the Supreme Court in 2021 tossed key NCAA rules on antitrust grounds. The old system had huge problems, but what followed was ruinous, with stars transferring to the highest bidder multiple times and schools stinting on women's and Olympic sports as they chased talent that would bring in the most revenue. The bill protects a collegian's right to collect from the sale of his or her name, image, and likeness, while setting national standards for transfers, eligibility, tampering, and limits on agents' share of athletes' earnings. Yes, it gives the NCAA a partial antitrust exemption so it can't get sued for enforcing eligibility and transfer limits

and lets it limit coaches job hopping rights too. But keeping college sports different from the pros has to start somewhere. In the Tennessean, Cameron Smith said the Protect College Sports Act favors universities over players. Build as a necessary measure to bring order to the chaotic landscape of name, image, and likeness agreements, the bill is touted as a rescue mission for a beloved American tradition.

In reality, it represents something far more familiar inside the Beltway, powerful institutions using federal authority to secure special treatment. The true engine of this bill is its conditional antitrust exemption. Under the guise of protecting amateurism, Congress is offering the collegiate sports establishment

a legal carve-out to sidesteped the laws of supply and demand to avoid sharing its eye-popping profits with the athletes producing the value on the field. Transforming college athletes into recognized employees who collectively bargain with leagues and universities is not a threat to college sports. It's an equitable solution. Now here's what the left is saying. Some on the left say the proposed law solely protects NCAA interests. Others recognize some benefits, but ultimately see the bill as a loss for athletes. In the New Republic, Matt Ford argued the bill will only protect the NCAA's billions. College athletes were finally able to pursue fair market compensation for their services

over the last few years, and that's thanks to a series of major court rulings. But now the NCAA and its allies are trying to turn back the clock to keep as much of the money that college athletes generate as possible. Every good thing in the Protect College Sports Act is a sweetener designed to make its real purpose easier to swallow. The bill gives the NCAA immunity from federal antitrust laws when it enforces rules on compensation, transfers, broadcast rights, and more among member schools and conferences. Federal antitrust laws have been a powerful tool for college athletes to keep at least some of the wealth that they generate for themselves. With the Protect College Sports, Act, Congress would slam that door shut. The good news is that it may not become law in the 119th Congress.

In the free press, Joe Nossera wrote, last night, college athletes lost. The bill does some good things. It gives players a 10-year window to graduate from the school they played for. It limits players to one transfer, which I concede is necessary. It requires universities to give its athletes comprehensive health care benefits. But it does absolutely nothing to curb coaches pay or the millions spent on fancy facilities or any of the other things that have caused college athletics to become so outrageously expensive. Except one, it sets a cap on the amount of money that an athletic department can spend on its athletes, not just football players, but athletes in every sport. That amount is $21.6 million. And that's not nothing, of course, but it means that, unlike most Americans, college athletes will once again be deprived of their chance to cash in on their prowess.

And finally, here's what sportswriters are saying. Some sportswriters applaud the bill for protecting athletes, and others lament how the proposed law might bail out bad coaches. In Sportico, Jamel J. McMorris suggested student athletes need protection. The agent world around these young athletes is largely unregulated, and too much of it preys on the very kids it claims to serve. The business is not built around the best interests of student athletes, and this bill finally brings order to it. It protects Olympic and non-revenue sports, invests in women's athletics, strengthens health and safety, safeguarded scholarships, and creates real accountability for schools and athletes alike. I do not dismiss the people opposing this bill. bill. One objection is that collective bargaining could fix all of this, but I wish it were that simple.

More than 80% of Division I schools are public institutions and their athletes would be state employees, outside the reach of federal labor law and in many states barred from bargaining at all. Meanwhile, the protections in this bill are real, and they're available now. In USA Today, Blake Topmire wrote, Bad college football coaches have it good with the Protect College Sports Act. Perhaps the biggest winner in the Protect College Sports Act passed by the Senate, losing college football coaches. This bill, which politicians pretend will address the chaos and crisis inside college athletics,

fails to address the soaring salaries for coaches and their bosses, or the $50 million severance checks for fired coaches. There's never been a better time to be a bad football coach. Just ask South Carolina's Shane Beamer. He's making $8.25 million this season, and he's 2 and 11 in his past 13 games against power four opponents. I don't actually believe Congress should regulate coaches' salaries or buyouts either. Instead, force university presidents and chancellors to do their jobs. If schools can't pay the athletics bills, then make them rein in spending and stop the contract stupidity,

instead of awarding them a bailout. All right, that is it for what the right, the left, and sports writers, are saying about this bill. So now I'll hand it over to managing editor Ari Weitzman. As I mentioned at the start of today's edition, I ran track for a year in college. And during that year, balancing school, sports, and work was pretty difficult, but was also pretty fun. And for most students competing in college sports, they were competing at around the level

that I was. And the model for that really isn't broken. However, for the most visible sports, particularly NCAA D1 football and basketball, the operational model is fundamentally flawed. And this is something a little bit outside of politics, so there's a lot of context to go over. We'll go over that context now. First, the collegiate sports landscape is simply chaotic. Decades ago, college conferences were neatly organized by geography.

Today, Texas and Oklahoma play in the southeastern conference, while the Atlantic Coast Conference is home to Stanford in Cal Berkeley. The formerly Midwestern Big Ten stretches from Rutgers to the University of Southern California. Meanwhile, the PAC 10, sorry, Pac-12, was whittled down to two teams and now is limping along with nine. Smaller conferences wither away, while mega-conferences demand cross-country travel for their teams, making a total farce of the idea that athletes are students first. How is anyone supposed to keep up with their classes while flying from Los Angeles to New Jersey for an in-conference game? The obvious reason for this convoluted setup is the second problem in college sports. Money. USC is in the Big Ten simply because the school knows it can make

more money through TV deals if it's in a conference with better teams. Smaller conferences have no leverage for keeping their teams from leaving, and the major schools and major conferences have started concentrating resources at the expense of smaller conferences, smaller schools, and the academic schedules of the players themselves. And speaking of the players, for a long time, the NCAA operated a business model that sounds downright criminal. It sold a billion-dollar product without paying the people who made it.

Not only were student athletes forbidden from taking any kind of compensation, lest it solely the sanctity of their scholarship at their chosen university, but the NCAA already collecting over a billion dollars in television rights, advertising deals, and licensing fees could profit from these athletes' name, image, and likeness, or NIL, without them ever seeing a dime. These rules led to absurdities. Several football players at the University of Oklahoma had to pay $3.83. Not $3.83 million, $3.83 and $83 in fines for having illegally large portions of pasta at a graduation dinner. Former NFL star Arian Foster admitted he colluded with the University of Tennessee's coaches to take illicit tacos from them,

also he could have sufficient caloric intake to perform suitably for Neeland Stadium's 100,000-plus spectators. Thus, problem three was born, which is the current NIL madness. The NCAA allowed athletes to take NIL deals to profit from sponsorships or having their likeness used for promotions. In theory, this is a good thing. Finally, some compensation for the college athletes who are the ones putting their bodies on the line for the product and who have had a scrimp for food to eat, while NCAA executives and for the big teams, their coaches, rake in all. the millions of dollars. But the new NIL rules tilted the balance towards star players, allowing them to transfer out for more lucrative payouts or better playing opportunities elsewhere.

Thus, the people the entire business model of college sports really depends on, the fans, were made to suffer, as they could watch their program develop a special athlete like Mario Taylor at Mississippi State, and then watch that athlete walk away to greener pastures, which, for the record, Taylor says he won't do, but we'll have to see. The degradation of the fan relationship is one of the biggest risks of the current chaos, which I don't think enough people are talking about. College fans are incredibly loyal to their schools, and that loyalty is the base of the intercollegiate sports mega-business.

If the Mississippi states of the world become feeder programs for major schools, but the field tilts more and more against the underdog, if Kansas is forced to play a home game in London, which happened, then that base of support could erode in the whole house of cards that this whole business model is built upon could come crashing down. The intractable problem the Protect College Sports Act faces is the need to provide some stability to this mess, all without infringing on the collective rights of student athletes

and while protecting the athletes in small market sports. The bill takes the problem in parts, and in the collegiate spirit, I'll grade how effective I think the major elements of this potential law will be. Let's start with the antitrust. exception for the NCAA. I would give this an A. Nearly every core rule of the NCAA could be a violation of the Sherman Act, which forbids an organization like the NCAA from limiting whom competing businesses can hire and how much they can pay them. Sports teams composed of students are obviously not the same as most businesses and college sports regulatory body

kind of obviously also needs more ability to regulate its teams. Under this bill, the NCAA can set rules on transfers, eligibility, and recruiting in a way that should provide more structure. Next, athletes' rights. And this, I also give an A. It's the necessary counterpart to giving the NCAA more power to regulate. If this act is passed, athletes will have a federally protected right to receive NIL money, scholarships, and protections for their health and safety. The law would also cap agent fees at 5% and ensure the ability of schools to pay their students directly. No more insiders, fleecing unwitting 18-year-olds, and permanently gone, will be the days of star running backs relying on backdoor tacos.

Third, transfer and eligibility caps, which I give a B-minus to maybe a C-plus. The counterpart to the counterpart, this would create a federal law, not an NCAA regulation, but a federal law that limits college eligibility to five years and student athletes to one transfer, within those five years. Without this in place, star players could be in a constant state of free agency and more prone to pause their eligibility as they wish. If the NCAA gets an antitrust exception, then the government has to give itself some power here. But it's hard not to feel a little queasy about potential government overreach. My biggest concerns are what happens when a student wants to transfer for non-opportunistic reasons. I can easily see this regulation

being overly burdensome to many athletes. Still, the presence of a guardrail is sensible to me, especially given the widespread abuses of the current eligibility system. Fourth, Women's and Olympic Sports Protections, which I give an A. One of the concerns with colleges in Congress getting more authority over regulating sports is that the for-profit model

might shoulder out athletic opportunities for the bus riders like I was in college. This provision requires schools to keep as many non-revenue athletes as they had in the 2024-to-2020-5 academic year, which I think is a tidy and clever way of applying that protection without some burdensome, overly complicated regulation. It also requires schools that pool their media rights to redistribute some of their money to other teams, which is a way of preventing football teams from building palatial facilities like Notre Dame's recent Vatican-esque campus, while other teams have to rely on table scraps. Then fifth and finally,

conference rules, which I give AC. As hinted at in the previous bullet, this provision allows schools to pool and negotiate their meteorites and amendment of the 1961 sports broadcasting act. This would allow conferences to spread their profits to smaller schools and conferences, much in the same way the NFL does now with smaller market teams, which will give these programs similar leverage to the mega conferences, and that's why the SEC and Big Ten oppose this portion of the bill. I'm very supportive of this collective bargaining among teams, but I'm not convinced it's going to meaningfully level playing field that's already been so tilted.

The act tries to address the power agglomeration among the big conferences by capping the number of teams per conference at 20. But that number is frankly far too high. It's well over what the SEC, Big 10, Big 12, ACC are already at right now. The bill prevents the worst case, I guess, of college sports becoming just two conferences but it doesn't really address the problem as it exists today. Though, to be fair, that might not be something Congress really can't address. So at the end of the day, I think this is a good law whose time has come.

It's not perfect, but it'll be an improvement. And in an era where Congress can scarcely be asked to do more than the bare minimum, I'm happy to see lawmakers get together to act to try to tackle a problem in a bipartisan fashion. Now, I'd love it if our lawmakers could bring that same spirit to balancing or budget, but that's a problem for another day. So that's it for my take. I'm going to give it back over to will for the rest of the pod. We'll be right back after this quick break.

Thanks, Ari. And now I'll take us home with our Have a Nice Day story. Vahina, a French cow, recently found herself in a spotty predicament. While grazing in the Pyrenees Mountain Range, the animal became stuck in mud in an area that was unreachable, by vehicle. Fortunately, a rescue crew managed to secure Vahini in a sling and airlifter to safety via helicopter. Olymp Provest, a local who witnessed the extrication, said, quote, we were very surprised, quite impressed, and above all, we had a lot of questions about how the cow was feeling,

why they were transporting her that way, and whether she enjoyed the sensation of flying. The New York Post has the story and a video of the rescue that I recommend you check out So go to the show notes of today's episode and we'll drop a link there. And that is it for today's edition. Thanks as always for being with us. We'll be back on Friday tomorrow with our Friday edition. Stay tuned for that one. We've got a good one cooking for you this week.

Otherwise, I will talk to you again next week when we get back into the flow of the normal news cycle. Until then, be well and peace. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Lull. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman with senior editor Will Kayback and associate editors, Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saul.

Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website at reetangle.com.