Who Gets to Write College Sports’ New Rulebook?

Strategic Analysis | September 14, 2026

For most of modern college sports, the NCAA wrote the rulebook.

Then the courts started editing it.

Now Congress may become the publisher.

That is the larger story behind the Protect College Sports Act of 2026—and it is easy to miss if the debate is reduced to whether Congress should “fix NIL,” preserve Olympic sports or give the NCAA an antitrust exemption.

The proposed legislation is much more ambitious. It would establish federal rules governing compensation, transfers, eligibility, recruiting and other aspects of college athletics; protect certain enforcement decisions from antitrust attack; authorize a new framework for collective media-rights sales; restrict some conference consolidation; preserve a role for the College Sports Commission; and give athletes statutory protections and formal representation within athletic-association governance.

Taken together, those provisions point toward a fundamental change in college-sports governance.

The emerging system would no longer be purely private governance, because Congress would write substantial parts of the rulebook.

It would not be purely government regulation, because the NCAA, conferences, schools and the College Sports Commission would continue administering and enforcing much of it.

And it would not be collective bargaining, because athletes would receive rights and representation without necessarily negotiating the principal economic rules across the table from the institutions subject to them.

It would be something new: a federally structured private sports system.

The question, then, is not merely whether college sports needs rules.

Every sports league needs rules.

The more important question is: who gets to write them?

The reason Congress is in this position begins with antitrust law.

In NCAA v. Alston, the Supreme Court rejected the idea that college sports deserved a special judicial exemption from ordinary antitrust principles. The Court held that NCAA compensation restrictions were subject to traditional rule-of-reason analysis—the same framework courts use to determine whether agreements among economic competitors improperly restrain competition.

That mattered far beyond the specific education-related benefits at issue in Alston.

The NCAA is an association of schools that compete for athletes. When those schools collectively agree to limit what they may offer those athletes, antitrust law sees competitors coordinating in a labor market. The Supreme Court emphasized that some coordination is obviously necessary to produce sports—teams need common rules about fields, eligibility for competition and how games are played—but that necessity does not automatically immunize every economic restriction the association adopts.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh's concurrence made the structural problem especially clear: absent federal legislation or a negotiated agreement between the NCAA and athletes, compensation restraints remain exposed to ordinary antitrust scrutiny.

That is essentially the fork in the road college sports has been approaching ever since.

One path is negotiation: recognize some form of athlete representation capable of bargaining over compensation, mobility and working conditions.

The other is legislation: ask Congress to determine which restrictions are permissible.

The Protect College Sports Act largely pursues the second model.

And that changes the nature of the fight.

For years, the NCAA's problem was that it would adopt a rule, an athlete would challenge it, and a federal judge would ask whether the restriction survived antitrust scrutiny.

Under the PCSA, Congress itself would decide that some categories of coordination are lawful.

That is a very different form of power.

It is important to be precise here.

The PCSA does not simply declare, “The NCAA is exempt from antitrust law.”

Section 118 instead creates targeted protection for schools, conferences and intercollegiate athletic associations enforcing specified portions of the statute. The official Senate summary describes those protections as covering rules relating to compensation, eligibility, transfers, recruitment and tampering, agent oversight and related matters.

That distinction matters.

The bill effectively says that if Congress itself establishes or authorizes a particular restraint, an athlete generally should not be able to attack compliance with that rule as an unlawful agreement among competitors.

For example, the legislation would establish federal transfer protections, a five-year eligibility framework for Division I and II athletes and rules concerning recruiting and tampering. It also incorporates the House settlement's revenue-sharing cap while creating a separate retention fund allowing schools to spend up to $22.5 million annually above that cap to retain existing athletes, with an additional mechanism of up to $5 million tied to compensation in non-revenue sports.

The legislation then protects qualifying enforcement of those rules from antitrust liability.

That is not deregulation.

It is Congress choosing which restraints receive legal protection.

And the bill does the inverse elsewhere.

Section 205 would use antitrust law affirmatively to prohibit certain mergers, acquisitions and media-rights combinations involving conferences with more than $700 million in annual revenue. Covered transactions would be unlawful, and the statutory text says certain prohibited combinations could not be defended by invoking efficiencies or other ordinary antitrust justifications.

That is one of the most revealing features of the entire bill.

Congress would be saying, in substance:

This coordination among competitors is permitted. That coordination among competitors is prohibited.

College sports would still operate in an antitrust world.

But Congress would be drawing more of the lines.

Nothing illustrates the stakes better than conference realignment.

The revised Section 205 targets conferences that reported more than $700 million in annual revenue. Broadly speaking, it restricts those leagues from merging with another covered conference or acquiring the assets or media rights of institutions that have participated in a covered high-revenue conference within the previous five years. The bill also permits certain additions of schools outside that category, subject to a 19-member limitation.

Supporters describe the provision as protection against further consolidation and the creation of a breakaway “super league.” The Senate's revision summary expressly characterizes Section 205 as an effort to prevent the largest conferences—or outside capital—from assembling a new system out of the media rights and assets of major programs.

But whatever one's view of that objective, the provision also has competitive consequences for existing conferences and their member schools.

A school considering departure from one major conference does not care about “realignment” in the abstract. It cares about where it can go, when it can go there, how valuable its media rights are, what exit costs it must absorb and how much leverage it possesses against its current league.

That is why the newly released ACC records matter.

Records obtained from North Carolina and Virginia show ACC officials communicating frequently with Senate offices, forwarding draft language, collecting technical questions from member schools, coordinating lobbying activity and supplying feedback while lawmakers negotiated the bill. Commissioner Jim Phillips told conference presidents in July that ACC staff were interacting with the Cruz and Cantwell teams daily and would use member feedback in those conversations.

The documents do not prove that the ACC authored Section 205, dictated its final language or caused Congress to adopt the realignment provision. The ACC has said it did not control particular statutory language and that institutions were free to communicate their own positions independently. Senate staff also circulated a late-July conference-movement proposal without publicly identifying which stakeholder had supplied the framework.

Those caveats are important.

But the larger lesson does not depend on proving authorship.

Once federal legislation begins governing conference membership, lobbying over statutory language becomes a form of competitive strategy.

A media-rights negotiation lasts years.

A grant of rights may last a decade.

A federal statute can shape the market even longer.

For an incumbent conference, influencing the rules governing member departures may be just as strategically significant as negotiating the conference's next television agreement.

This exposes a basic asymmetry in college sports.

The institutional side comes to Washington already organized.

The NCAA represents hundreds of schools.

Conferences represent groups of institutions.

Universities have government-relations offices.

The major conferences retain outside lobbying firms.

The ACC records show conference officials coordinating congressional outreach and outside counsel. The Big Ten and SEC publicly acknowledged that they spent months negotiating with congressional staff and initially withheld support while seeking revisions they considered necessary. By August 1, after additional negotiations, the two conferences announced support for the revised draft.

That is not unusual behavior. Regulated industries routinely participate heavily in legislation affecting them.

But college athletes are not organized in the same way.

There is no single college-athlete union representing Division I athletes across sports. There is no leaguewide collective bargaining agreement. Athlete advocacy organizations exist, and individual athletes have supported or opposed various federal proposals, but the athlete side remains structurally fragmented.

The distinction becomes particularly important when legislation addresses not just health insurance or agent regulation, but economic rules governing athlete compensation and mobility.

The institutions negotiate continuously because they are permanent.

A quarterback gets four or five years.

A conference office gets a century.

That difference matters.

It would be inaccurate to say the PCSA gives athletes no voice.

The bill contains substantial athlete protections.

It would protect NIL earning rights, regulate athlete agents, establish scholarship protections, require certain medical coverage, create an Office of the Student Athlete Ombudsman and authorize private lawsuits for specified statutory violations.

It also goes further on governance.

Section 111 requires at least one-third of the membership and voting power on certain athletic-association governing boards and rulemaking committees to consist of current athletes or recent former athletes.

That is meaningful.

But representation and collective bargaining perform different functions.

A representative on a board participates in governance.

A bargaining representative negotiates against the other side.

That distinction becomes especially important when the subject is a compensation limit.

An athlete member sitting on an NCAA governing committee can vote, advocate and influence policy. But that is not equivalent to athletes collectively negotiating the revenue-share cap, transfer restrictions or eligibility rules with the schools that compete for their services.

That is the central objection raised by groups such as Athletes.org and the AFL-CIO Sports Council. They argue that the PCSA would protect institution-created rules from antitrust challenge without requiring those rules to be collectively bargained with athletes.

Supporters respond that the legislation supplies protections athletes do not currently possess uniformly—including medical benefits, scholarship guarantees, NIL rights and governance participation—and that a national statutory framework can provide stability that state-by-state legislation and recurring litigation cannot. The bill has received support from hundreds of universities and conferences as well as major professional leagues, the NFLPA, NBPA and Olympic organizations.

Both points can be true.

The bill can materially increase statutory rights for athletes and leave institutional stakeholders with greater influence over the initial design of the economic system.

That is precisely why the governance question matters.

The House settlement already transformed college sports.

Approved in June 2025, it resolved major antitrust claims challenging NCAA compensation restrictions and created the framework under which participating Division I schools may make direct payments to athletes subject to an annual benefits-pool limit.

It also produced the College Sports Commission, which administers and enforces portions of the settlement framework, including compensation limits and third-party NIL rules.

But a court settlement has an unavoidable weakness as a long-term constitution for an industry.

It exists because litigants agreed to resolve particular claims before a particular court.

It does not possess the same permanence, democratic legitimacy or nationwide regulatory reach as a federal statute.

The PCSA would effectively take significant pieces of that settlement architecture and place federal law around them.

The proposed statute expressly defines its revenue-share cap by reference to the House settlement. It allows the College Sports Commission or a similar settlement-created enforcement entity to play a continuing role. And Section 115 establishes a congressional mechanism for deciding whether the revenue-sharing cap and retention system should continue after the underlying settlement expires or terminates.

That is a remarkable transition.

A private antitrust settlement could become the foundation for federal sports regulation.

The courtroom would not disappear.

But the center of gravity would move.

That is the point conventional descriptions of the legislation often miss.

The PCSA does not federalize college sports in the sense of creating a Department of College Athletics that runs transfer portals and determines eligibility.

Nor does it simply restore the old NCAA.

Instead, it would change why certain NCAA-type rules are enforceable.

Historically, the NCAA's authority flowed from contractual association: schools voluntarily joined and agreed to follow common rules.

That model became vulnerable when those common rules restricted economic competition.

Under the proposed framework, important restrictions would derive additional authority from Congress itself.

The NCAA could still write bylaws.

The College Sports Commission could still enforce settlement rules.

Conferences could still regulate competition.

Schools could still make local decisions.

But for selected issues, federal law would define the boundaries within which those institutions operate and shield compliance from particular legal attacks.

That is a much more durable form of governance.

It is also harder to change.

A bylaw can be amended at an NCAA convention.

A settlement can sometimes be modified with judicial approval.

A collectively bargained term can be renegotiated when the agreement expires.

A federal statute requires Congress.

Stability has a price: flexibility.

Supporters of federal legislation have a compelling structural argument.

College sports is national.

Recruiting is national.

Media rights are national.

Athletes transfer across state lines.

NIL businesses operate across state lines.

Yet the system has been governed through some combination of NCAA rules, state statutes, federal antitrust cases, injunctions issued by different courts and a major class-action settlement.

That is not an elegant governance model.

The Big Ten and SEC themselves initially criticized the PCSA because they believed it did not provide enough nationwide uniformity and legal protection. Their eventual support followed additional negotiations and revisions.

A federal framework could substantially reduce some of that fragmentation.

But the strongest argument for national uniformity is also the reason the drafting process deserves scrutiny.

If Congress creates one national rulebook, then mistakes in that rulebook become national mistakes.

If a transfer restriction proves too rigid, every athlete operates under it.

If a compensation structure creates an unintended loophole, every school confronts it.

If Section 205 freezes conference competition in an unforeseen way, there is no rival state's law to experiment with a different approach.

And if one stakeholder group had significantly more access during drafting than another, the resulting imbalance becomes much harder to unwind.

The stakes rise as uniformity rises.

For years, the central college-sports battle was over whether athletes could be paid.

That question is largely settled.

They can receive NIL compensation. Schools can directly share revenue. The House settlement built a payment framework. The PCSA would codify and modify pieces of that system rather than return college sports to amateurism.

The next fights are more complicated.

Who defines a legitimate NIL deal?

Who decides how many times an athlete may transfer?

Who determines whether prior professional activity destroys eligibility?

Who decides when recruiting may occur?

Who controls the compensation ceiling?

Who gets to change it?

Who decides whether conferences can expand?

And who gets legal protection when somebody challenges those decisions?

Those are governance questions.

The revised PCSA tries to answer many of them at once.

That explains why conference commissioners, university presidents, the NCAA, professional leagues, athlete groups, unions and Congress all care so much about language that can look technical on first read.

They are not simply negotiating rules.

They are negotiating who will possess rulemaking power after the current era of litigation ends.

The bill is still proposed legislation, not law.

The Senate Commerce Committee advanced S. 4668 by a 19–9 vote in June. The Senate subsequently established a procedural agreement under which the cloture vote on the motion to proceed must occur no earlier than September 15 and no later than September 23, 2026. Supporters are holding a Capitol press conference on September 14 as the Senate returns.

If the Senate ultimately takes up the legislation, amendments will matter as much as the headline vote.

Watch Section 118's antitrust protections.

Watch Section 114's compensation structure.

Watch the treatment of the College Sports Commission.

Watch athlete-governance provisions.

And especially watch Section 205.

Realignment rules reveal the underlying truth better than almost anything else in the legislation: once Congress begins writing the competitive architecture of college sports, every stakeholder has an incentive to make sure the federal rulebook reflects its interests before the ink dries.

The most important change in college sports may not be NIL, revenue sharing or even athlete employment.

It may be where the rules come from.

The NCAA's old model depended on private association authority.

The litigation era subjected that authority to antitrust review.

The Protect College Sports Act points toward a third model: Congress establishes the boundaries, private institutions administer much of the system, and courts enforce whatever room remains between them.

That could deliver something college sports has spent years seeking: national stability.

But stability does not eliminate power.

It relocates it.

And as the ACC's newly released records illustrate, sophisticated participants already understand the consequence.

If Washington is going to write college sports' next rulebook, everyone with something to lose wants a hand on the pen.