What a relief. There’s a big Congressional hearing Wednesday on the “Protect College Sports Act of 2026.”
“Supporting Student-Athletes, Restoring Fair Competition and Saving the Games Fans Love” is the stated mission of Senator Ted Cruz and colleagues.
“We cannot allow college athletics to morph int o a mini-NFL or NBA,” said Cruz in an official statement announcing the hearing.
Senator, you’re late. By decades.
Some of it is fine by me. Absolutely if coaches are raking in mega-million dollar salaries, as they have been on the top shelf of the NCAA for this century, then the players ought to be cut in on the pie.
These seven-figure NIL deals we hear recruits and transfers are getting are no more excessive than the eight-figure contracts that are going to head coaches. Neither should exist, but …
We’re never going back to college sports as we thought they were. That will happen right alongside peace in the Middle East and admitting a messy CIA-Mafia conspiracy took out JFK.
You’ll get a lot more clarity June 12 when Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” hits movie screens and we find out Bigfoot uses UFOs to get away from prying eyes.
Ridiculous? So is the idea that Congress can solve this mess. We know the high level university presidents and conference commissioners can’t. Their first priorities are their own bottom lines. And it’s their second and third priorities, too.
The presidents punted on this long ago. It’s great that the former Ohio State president testifying Wednesday, Gordon Gee, is the same bold leader who offered these gems discussing an NCAA scandal staining the Buckeyes’ football program:
- “Let me just be very clear: I just hope the coach doesn’t fire me.”
- “They run the athletic department and I run the university., and I should have stayed out of there.”
He will no doubt show up at the hearing in his trademark bow tie. Looks academic. Here’s the clown Congress will hear from Wednesday: he ran up thousand-dollar luxury hotel bills on university expense accounts, got Ohio State to pay for $500 shower curtains for his university-provided house, and his marketing aces spent over $64,000 on bow ties, bow tie cookies and bow tie lapel pins for Gee and others to distribute over four years, according to reporting by the Dayton Daily News.
Surely he knows what’s good for the future of college sports.
Nick Saban will testify. He DOES know what’s good for the future of college sports.
He’s been telling anybody who will listen since the day he called it a coaching career, in part because their NIL package was the first and primary topic raised by practically every one of the first 20 or so players who he met with to discuss their futures with the following season’s Crimson Tide.
Listening to sages like Saban, and doing something about what you’ve heard, is where the disconnect exists with the presidents who make up the NCAA hierarchy and lead the Power 4 conference schools.
They are hoping Congress will impose its will where they would not. The Hatfields and McCoys have been sniping at each other across conference lines for decades instead of collaborating for the common good.
Now a group of presidents, board members and donors calling itself “Saving College Sports” – there’s even a snazzy letterhead – has presented Cruz and pals with a letter of support signed by dozens. New LSU president Wade Rousse’s name is on the letter. He told Ross Dellenger of Yahoo Sports he didn’t authorize his name to be included. Now that’s a reform-minded group, randomly claiming converts to its cause.
Know what’s missing from Wednesday’s festivities? Anyone not at the top tier. There are more than 360 NCAA Division I athletic programs. The issues discussed under the Capitol Dome tomorrow are so far out of scale for almost 300 of them that the eventual outcome for the non-Gucci schools is painfully predictable.
We saw it last month when the NCAA basketball postseasons, men and women, were padded to 76 teams – strictly a money grab for the biggies to get more teams in March Madness.
It doesn’t matter what’s good for the masses. It just comes down to what’s best for the masters of the college sports universe.
And they’re counting on a blow-hard heavy Congress, dripping in money from PACs and lobbyists that dwarf their actual salaries, to make it better?
Odds on that rank right up there with Jimmy Kimmel playing a round of golf with President Trump.
The ultimate solution to this mess will be when it crashes, drained of cash from disillusioned donors. Then we can hope that with nearly divine intervention, or desperation, university leadership from across the far-reaching landscape gets real and sorts it out into authentic tiers of economically-sound competition with real oversight and rules that get enforced.
As likely as Fox News and CNN merging.
Contact Doug at sbjdoug@gmail.com