The NCAA’s Power Grab Just Failed. Time to Pass the Bill That Actually Fixes College Sports

Written By Lexi Panepinto

OPENING STATEMENTS

Two things happened this week that confirm what we’ve been saying in this space for months: college athletics doesn’t need another layer of NCAA-adjacent bureaucracy. It needs to be torn down and rebuilt.

First, the SCORE Act barely survived a procedural vote Monday, passing 210-209 after nearly an hour of arm-twisting, then got pulled from the floor entirely by Wednesday when Republican leadership couldn’t secure enough votes. Second, seven state attorneys general sent a blistering letter urging schools not to sign the College Sports Commission’s participation agreement, calling it “legally unsound, structurally indefensible and ultimately inconsistent with the obligations universities owe to their states, their governing boards, and their student-athletes.”

Everywhere you look, the system is crumbling. Ross Dellenger from Yahoo summed this up well. 

These developments point to the same conclusion: the NCAA is the problem, and you don’t fix a systemically broken system by adding more of the same.

The NCAA is an outdated cartel trying to govern a multi-billion-dollar industry while pretending the people generating that money are amateurs. For decades, it enriched administrators and coaches while courts had to force them, kicking and screaming, to let athletes benefit from their own names. Now, facing the reality that its monopoly is crumbling, the NCAA is running to Congress to preserve institutional control under the guise of stability.

The SCORE Act was that strategy in legislative form. Sweeping antitrust immunity for the NCAA and conferences, effectively reversing NCAA v. Alston. Preemption of stronger state NIL laws. No private right of action for athletes. No enforceable Title IX safeguards, no distribution formula, nothing to prevent schools from funneling every dollar into football while cutting other sports. As we detailed in previous newsletters, more than 40 programs have been eliminated since the House settlement, with hundreds more athletes losing roster spots.

The College Athletics Reform Act (CARA), introduced by Rep. Lori Trahan the same week SCORE collapsed, takes the opposite approach.

CARA doesn’t prop up the broken system. It dismantles it and seeks to rebuild it with approaches and policies relevant to today’s landscape and the sweeping legal changes that have fundamentally altered college athletics.

The centerpiece is a bipartisan commission with a two-year deadline to develop new governance recommendations, not an open-ended handoff to a self-interested industry body like the CSC. That commission is tasked with examining revenue distribution, Title IX compliance, athlete employment status, and protections for non-revenue sports. It’s a structural reset with an actual timeline and accountability, not a perpetual stall tactic.

This matters because the current model is designed to benefit everyone except athletes. Athletic directors pull down seven-figure salaries while justifying program cuts. Coaches sign $10 million buyouts while telling swimmers there’s no money. Conference commissioners negotiate billion-dollar media deals while preaching amateurism. As we’ve covered repeatedly, the people running college sports have proven, over decades, that they cannot be trusted to regulate themselves.

CARA recognizes that reality and acts accordingly. It creates real enforcement mechanisms, including a private right of action so athletes themselves, not just schools or the NCAA, can sue when rules are broken. It mandates federal NIL standards while preserving state protections that go further, rather than wiping them out like SCORE does. It closes the international athlete loophole, ensuring athletes on F-1 visas have the same NIL rights as their American teammates, a fix SCORE doesn’t even attempt. And it amends the Sports Broadcasting Act to allow schools to pool media rights, which could funnel resources to mid-majors, HBCUs, and Olympic programs instead of concentrating wealth at the top.

Most importantly, CARA treats the governance structure itself as the problem, not a minor inconvenience to be papered over. You don’t fix systemic failure by layering on more bureaucracy controlled by the same people who created the mess. You fix it by breaking it apart and rebuilding with athletes, those whose labor sustains the entire enterprise, actually in the room.

Look at who’s backing which bill. The NCAA, Power Five conferences, and USOPC support SCORE. The AFL-CIO, American Association for Justice, National College Players Association, Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, and dozens of athlete advocacy groups, like The Drake Group, back CARA. When the people who built the broken system push one bill, and the people fighting it for years push another, the choice is obvious.

College sports need regulation. But it needs regulation that serves athletes, not the institutions that have spent a century exploiting them. CARA offers a path to genuine reform—with a deadline, enforcement teeth, and recognition that the current leadership cannot fix what it deliberately broke.

EXHIBIT A

College sports isn’t the only entity struggling with modernization. The WNBA and NWSL are dealing with their own structural crises. The WNBA extended CBA negotiations to January 9 after reaching an impasse, with a lockout still looming despite record viewership and surging interest. Players want revenue sharing tied to league growth; the league’s offers haven’t moved the needle. Meanwhile, the NWSL just rejected Trinity Rodman’s multi-million dollar contract offer from the Spirit, while another star, Sophia Smith, has reportedly received a significant offer from the USL Super League. Both leagues are seeing well-capitalized competitors threaten their models, and survival will depend upon structural changes. Sound familiar?

EXHIBIT B

Sports Business Journal had a good read this week about how and why a number of schools are creating LLCs to restructure their commercial operations, from multimedia rights and NIL operations to sponsorships and revenue-generating business functions. The rationale often varies: some want better asset commercialization, others need pay structures that allow performance bonuses, and many seek greater ownership of intellectual property. Clemson Ventures doubled its gross and net revenue in just 15 months. Kentucky’s Champions Blue LLC focuses on faster procurement and operational efficiency. Texas Tech bundled its Learfield partnership into an LLC alongside elite sponsor tiers. As college sports races toward revenue sharing and above-the-cap NIL strategies, these structural shifts are important to understand - for institutions, athletes, sponsors, and anyone trying to navigate what comes next.

ON THE DOCKET

Michigan State just announced a $1 billion capital campaign for athletics. New facilities. Premium donor spaces. Stadium upgrades. All while the university faces the same revenue-sharing mandates and Title IX compliance pressures as everyone else. Here’s what I’m watching: how much of that billion goes to football infrastructure versus equitable athlete support: training tables, academic services, health care, compensation structures that benefit all 500+ Spartan athletes, not just the 85 on scholarship in one sport. Billion-dollar campaigns sound impressive. And expect more of these. But if the result is a renovated luxury suite while women’s rowing gets cut and Olympic sports lose roster spots, it’s just more of the same broken model dressed up in capital campaign language.

FOOTNOTES

6.8 million and 6.5 million.

Thanksgiving Day ratings for the Duke-Arkansas and North Carolina-Michigan State basketball games. The first was the most-watched regular-season game in more than 30 years. The second was the most-watched college basketball game in FOX history.

Lexi Panepinto
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