During my 40-year coaching career, I saw how college sports can shape young people’s lives. Athletics instill discipline, teamwork and resilience: values that stick with you long after the whistle blows. College athletics are a patriotic tradition that brings all Americans together, no matter their politics.
Yet those programs, especially football, have become a wild west ever since the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision allowing players to be paid for the use of their name, image and likeness (“The College Sports Crisis” by William McGurn, Main Street, Nov. 25). In the absence of national standards for contracts, we’re left with a patchwork of state laws that have created an unequal playing field among universities. We now have multimillion-dollar bidding wars for recruits that start in middle school. The transfer portal has become a revolving door with student-athletes jumping from school to school in pursuit of more money with little emphasis on education.
Since the court’s decision, universities, student-athletes, parents and fans have been begging Congress to do something. In July 2023, I introduced a bipartisan bill, the Protecting Athletes, Schools, and Sports Act, which would’ve established national standards for NIL by creating a uniform contract. The bill would also have required universities to honor the original scholarship commitment they made to a student-athlete, even if he got an NIL deal. Unfortunately, Democrats refused to bring it to the floor unless we added a provision allowing student-athletes to unionize—a recipe for disaster.
President Trump in May signed the executive order “Saving College Sports,” which will help protect women’s sports and prevent pay-for-play payments to college athletes from unauthorized sources. It’s a welcome start, but we can’t risk a Democratic president taking office, reversing the order and allowing student-athletes to unionize. I am all for student-athletes making money. But Congress must step up and create national NIL standards before college sports as we know it are destroyed.
