Congress has spent six years and more than forty separate bills trying to write federal rules for how college athletes get paid, and it still hasn’t passed a single one, zero, since the fight started back in 2021.
That’s the tally according to sports law scholar Michael McCann, who’s testified on this exact topic more than once. The House tried three separate times this year alone to pass its version, a bill called the SCORE Act, and pulled it off the floor each time rather than risk a bad vote. The Senate has its own attempt, the Protect College Sports Act, now penciled in for a vote sometime between September 15th and 23rd, after getting punted from the calendar at least twice already this summer. Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz says it’ll be “one of our first orders of business” when the chamber gets back. We’ll see.
Here’s what’s actually stalling it: the Congressional Black Caucus and the AFL-CIO oppose it, a few Republicans want language about transgender athletes tacked on, and the vote count is sitting right on the edge of the 60 it needs to survive. The SEC and the Big Ten, the two conferences with the most money riding on this, still hadn’t signed off as of the last check either. Six years of hearings, and the leagues who’d actually have to live under this thing are shrugging.
McCann said it better than I could. “The big crisis for college sports is not what the rules are per se, but actually following the rules.” Nobody needed a new rulebook. They needed someone to enforce the one that already exists.
Now put that pace next to something Congress actually let slide. The extra ACA subsidies that kept health insurance affordable for tens of millions of people expired at the end of last year. Premiums for this year came in running close to double for a lot of families, and enrollment has already dropped by something like a fifth as people get priced out. The House passed a fix months ago. The Senate hasn’t touched it. Nobody’s cutting a recess short for that one.
So a nineteen-year-old getting paid to hold up a Gatorade bottle gets six years and forty bills of Congress’s undivided attention. A family watching their health insurance bill double gets a shrug. That’s not a coincidence hiding inside a sports story. That’s the whole story.
I don’t even think the NIL bill is a bad idea, for what it’s worth. College sports could use real rules. I just think it’s telling which problems get six years of careful, bipartisan craftsmanship, and which ones get left on read.
My two cents: when Congress moves fast, it’s protecting something. When it moves slow, it’s protecting itself.