June 5, 2026 • 32 mins
1. Unregulated NIL (Name, Image, Likeness)
- Athletes can now earn money, but:
- It has turned into a “financial arms race”.
- Boosters allegedly use fake NIL deals to pay players.
- The system is described as unsustainable and out of control.
2. Transfer Portal Abuse
- Athletes frequently transfer schools (sometimes annually).
- Teams lose cohesion:
- Entire rosters can change year-to-year.
- Compared to professional free agency behavior.
3. Competitive and Financial Imbalance
- Football (and to a lesser extent basketball) drives nearly all revenue.
- Other sports (e.g., tennis, track, women’s sports) depend on that revenue.
- Schools are:
- Cutting non-revenue sports.
- Losing millions trying to compete.
4. Athlete Exploitation & Instability
- Historically:
- Athletes earned nothing (described as unfair).
- Now:
- Some players exploit loopholes for extended eligibility or repeated transfers.
- Education suffers when athletes change schools repeatedly.
🏛️ Proposed Legislation (Key Elements)
The bill—introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz (R) and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D)—aims to create a national framework. Major provisions include:
✅ 1. Protect Athlete Compensation
- Athletes can:
- Earn money from legitimate NIL deals.
- Participate in revenue sharing from schools.
- But:
- Fake NIL deals (pay-for-play via boosters) would be restricted.
🔄 2. Transfer Portal Reform
- Athletes get:
- ✅ One unrestricted transfer
- ✅ Additional transfers allowed only if:
- Coach leaves
- Program is cut
- Athlete faces sexual misconduct issues
- Otherwise:
- Additional transfers require sitting out (redshirt year)
🎓 3. Eligibility Limits
- Maximum:
- 5 years of eligibility
- Age cap of 24 (with exceptions like military service)
- Prevents:
- Older or professional-level players competing against younger athletes
🏥 4. Health & Safety Protections
- Expanded athlete protections:
- Mandatory health standards (e.g., concussion protocols)
- 5 years of medical coverage after playing
- $60 million trust fund for smaller schools
- Addresses long-term injury costs previously borne by athletes.
🏫 5. Protect Non-Revenue Sports
- Schools must maintain:
- Scholarships
- Rosters for Olympic and women’s sports
- Especially if benefiting from increased sports revenue.
🚫 6. Ban “Super League”
- Prevents:
- Major conferences (SEC + Big Ten) from forming a dominant league.
- Goal:
- Protect competitive balance across schools.
💰 7. Media Rights Reform
- Allows schools/conferences to:
- Collaboratively negotiate TV/media deals
- Intended to:
- Increase total revenue
- Sustain smaller programs
🏈 8. “Lane Kiffin Rule”
- Coaches cannot leave teams mid-season or during playoffs.
- Inspired by real-world coaching departures.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
There aren't many issues in Washington these days that can
bring Republicans and Democrats together, but one of them may
be the future of saving college athletics, and frankly, it's
about time. For years, we've watched the nil air spiral
further and further out of control. And this is coming
from a former college athlete. The transfer portal has become
(00:23):
free agency. Coaches are struggling to build teams and other
coaches can just bail for bigger paydays even when they're
headed to the national championships. Rivalries are disappearing, Athletes are
bouncing from school to school chasing the next big paycheck,
and many athletic directors are warning that women's sports, Olympic sports,
(00:43):
and smaller programs like tennis and golf, well they could
be on the chopping block if something doesn't change fast. Now,
for the first time, here's the good news. There actually
appears to be a serious bipartisan effort to restore some
or to protect college sports. Act that's been led by
(01:04):
Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Maria Cantwell is now gaining
momentum in Washington, and today it got a major boost
from President Donald Trump himself. The legislation would create national
nil standards, brings stability to transfers and eligibility rules, and yes,
there's even the Lane Kiffen rule. After he screwed the
(01:26):
University of Mississippi aka Mi alma Mater ole Miss as
we headed to a national championship run. This is exactly
why the bill is definitely needed. It gives college sports
a much needed framework to prevent complete chaos and a
total collapse of so many sports that aren't quote revenue making.
(01:47):
President Trump made it clear that he believes Congress must
act his endorsement of the legislation, he called it a
strong foundation to not only save college sports, but he
argued that executive action alone are not enough. He said
that after meeting with university leaders, coaches, and athletic officials,
it became clear that a legislative solution is needed to
(02:08):
preserve the future of college athletics. And this isn't a
new issue for President Trump either. Earlier this year, he
warned that college sports could be lost forever without major
reforms and described the current environment as an out of
control financial arms race that threatened scholarships, competitive balance, and
opportunities for so many future athletes. The reality is simple,
(02:32):
Nil isn't going away. And by the way, as a
former college athlete, I think college athletes should be able
to make money. Athletes deserve the opportunity to profit from
their name, their image, and their likeness.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
But what we've.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Created is also well unsustainable. College football wasn't supposed to
become the NFL free agency with dorm rooms, and coaches
were supposed to actually coach their team to the end
of the season, not leave them behind like Lane Kiffin did.
This may be one of the rare moments where Republicans, Democrats, coaches,
athletic directors, and even the White House all agree on something.
(03:08):
If we don't fix college sports now, we may not
recognize it in five years from today. Which brings me
to the conversation that Senator Cruz and I were able
to have about this legislation. It's an incredibly important bill,
and I want you to hear the framework behind it
and how it actually works. Take a listen to our
conversation center. I gotta say I have never felt like
(03:32):
you had my back more than watching you do sports
talk radio s shows over the last twenty four hours,
and you did something that desperately needed to be done.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
If you care about sports, if you love sports, and.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
You did something that dealt with Lane Kiffin in his name,
the guy who used to be at my alma mater,
Ole Miss and then screwed us and went down to LSU.
I have lots of animasi there, but the Dame Kiffenrolle
is now going to become an actual thing.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Hopefully.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Let's break down the nil, explain why this matters. And
this is really I truly believe about saving college sports.
I played in college. It was broken system for a
long time. The pendulum swung a law far far the
other way, and now we're trying to find a happy
medium here.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
Well, listen, you're right. I spent much of this week
doing sports radio, sports TV, doing interviews with Sports Illustrated
ESPN stephen A. Smith and talking about college sports. And
this week, I believe was a really consequential week for
college sports. I introduced a major bipartisan bill that I
rode alongside Maria Cantwell. Maria Cantwell is a Democrat from
(04:46):
Washington State. I'm the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.
Maria is the ranking member, the senior Democrat on the
Senate Commerce Committee. And this is a bill that I've
spent three years working on and thousands of hours trying
to bring Republicans and Democrats together, and we introduced it
this week. I got to say, most observers thought there
was no way Republicans and Democrats could find common ground
(05:09):
on saving college sports. We managed to do it. And
so I want to break it down, and on this pod,
we're going to go into a little bit of depth
because I think this topic really matters. But let's start
with Look, sports is an amazing in College sports is
an amazing institution in America. It's something that no other
country has the equivalent of college sports in their nation.
(05:33):
You know today that there are more than five hundred
thousand college athletes right now competing, and you look at that,
and college athletics and sports generally is something that brings
us together. In an era where we're so divided, we're
so angry, you can go and root for your team
and we come together. It doesn't matter. You can be
(05:55):
from different parties, you can be different races, you can
be different religions, it doesn't matter. You are all cheering
for the home team. That is an awesome thing. And
over the years. College sports has been an avenue for
millions of young men and women to get a college education,
many of whom might never have had a chance to
(06:15):
do that before. And right now, I believe college sports
is an absolute crisis. Right now, we have chaos in
college sports. So we've got the transfer portal. You've got
athletes that are transferring two, three, four, five times, going
every year to a different school. You've got at the
end of the season, your school's team can be blown
(06:39):
up as all the star players are recruited to other schools.
The kids who are doing that end end up not
getting a very good education. You've got kids challenging every
eligibility rule. So you have players playing seven years, you
have players playing college sports when they're twenty seven, twenty
eight years old. You have pros going back to college sports.
(07:01):
It is messed up and what is happening? Then every
week a different college program across the country announces they're
cutting a sport. They're cutting women's sports, they're cutting track
and field, they're cutting Olympic sports that they're cutting tennis.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
They're cutting non money making sports, which, by the way,
to be clear, is the overwhelming majority of college sports
just so people understand that the economics of this.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
In most schools, they make money off football.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
If it's Division one, it's they make money off basketball.
And then the scale is just nose diving after that,
and there's so many sports that don't make money.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
And that's my Arkansas.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
This year they decided to get rid of the tennis
team and then luckily somebody came in last moment said
we'll fund it for you. But they had shut down
men and women's tennis, and it was just like, sorry,
it is what it is.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
Yeah, that was just a few weeks ago. Arkansas canceled
both men's and women's tennis. I texted that to you,
and as a former SEC VAR tennis player, you shed
a tear. Thankfully, a booster came in and saved tennis
for them. But it gives a sense of what's going on.
And if anything, you understated where the revenue comes from.
(08:13):
The overwhelming majority, the vast majority, is men's football, that
that is the driver of revenue. Second place is basketball,
but it is it is basketball makes a little bit
of money. It is football that feeds the entire beast,
and virtually no other sport is a money maker across
(08:34):
college athletics. All of the other supports are sports are
surviving on the revenue from football. And what is happening
is we're in a NonStop spending war where the budgets
are going up and up and up. And I believe
if Congress doesn't act in three to five years, we
will see thirty to fifty colleges across America that will
(08:58):
still have football teams and it'll basically be a mini NFL.
It will be a Pro Football league kind of the
G League for the NFL and the rest of.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
The Many of the athletes make more money playing in
college now than they do if they get drafted. If
they're not a top draft pick, you actually can make
more money. And that's part of what people understand is
a lot of these athletes, they are staying around, as
you mentioned it, like till they're twenty seven to twenty
eight and playing five, six seven years in transfer all
the time, they're making more money than going pro because
(09:29):
the cash is so big to play in college now
that they're like, why would I go to the pros
unless I'm a top ten draft pick. After that, the
economics of it say, stay in college longer.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
And listen I don't begrudge the athletes making money, and
I think it's important. I think it's fair that they
make money, that they be fairly compensated, and this bill
that we drafted does that. But the system is broken.
What is happening is there's a bidding war where the
vast majority of schools right now are losing millions and
in some cases tens of million, millions of dollars on sports,
(10:01):
and it's why they're canceling all the other programs because
they're just pouring money into football, trying to stay competitive.
And you've got these schools that are very rich institutions
that have big alumni donor bases that can fund that
constant arms race, but everyone else is losing. So, for example,
let's take here in my home state of Texas. If
(10:22):
the system continues on the path it's on, there are
only two schools that I am certain would survive, University
of Texas and Texas A and M. They have a
big enough donor base that no matter what happens, those
two survive. But if we're sitting here three five years
from now, in the other schools University of Houston, Baylor, TCU, SMU,
Texas Tech Rice. If the other college programs in Texas
(10:44):
go under, that's terrible for Texas. It's terrible for athletes,
it's terrible for the sport. But let me be clear,
this is not a done deal by any means. We
still have a long road to go. We introduced the
bill this week, which shocked people. They didn't think we
could get a by part bill, and we introduced it
with two Republican senators two Democrat senators. So Maria Cantwell
(11:05):
and I introduced it. We were joined by Eric Schmidt,
Republican from Missouri, and Chris Coon's Democrat from Delaware, so
four of us introduced it. We're going to have next week.
I'm going to share a hearing on the bill and
we're going to hear from witnesses about what's happening in
college sports. And then my intention is is very shortly
thereafter that to mark up the bill, hopefully to vot
it out of committee. But for this bill to pass,
(11:27):
we've got to get at least seven Democrats. We got
to get to sixty senators, and my goal is to
get a lot more than sixty to have a big
bipartisan vote. But we got to get it out of
the Senate and then move it over to the House
and have the House pass it. And so the bill
is designed to number one, to find common ground and
build a broad coalition. So what does it do. It
(11:48):
starts out by protecting athletes and their right to be compensated.
And listen, the old system that was around for a
long long time, athletes could not get any compensation and
it was really unfair. It didn't make sense. Lots of
people were getting rich off college athletics, everyone except the athletes.
And I think, as a conservative, I think you ought
to have a right to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
(12:09):
That if you work hard, you develop a skill, you
ought to be able to benefit from it.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
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Speaker 2 (13:46):
And I've said this on the show.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Before student athletes were before we had in io, they
were modern day slaves that you could be lied to
by a coach. You signed with that university, they owned you,
and if you wanted to transfer, and they didn't give
you a release if they then made you sit out
for a year, which made you completely irrelevant because a
younger person would come along and they've been playing and
they had stats and you were on the sidelines.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
You had to fix that.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
And that's what the NIL did is that it was like, Okay,
we're gonna give some freedom. But then, as you mentioned,
should you be able to as a student athlete transfer every
single year you lose the team aspect of sports as well.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Well. So what this bill does It protects number one,
the right of every athlete to get compensated for real
nil for name, image, and likeness. So if a quarterback
is selling tennis shoes, and if that quarterback can sell
millions of tennis shoes, that quarterback should be compensated millions
of dollars. If you're producing that value, those contracts should
be fully honored. This bill protects that. It also protects
(14:47):
the rights of athletes to participate in revenue sharing. And
there was a big litigation over college sports and a
settlement that agreed to a revenue sharing agreement so that
universities now can pass on significant portions of the revenue
that is being earned to the athletes. And so that's protected.
But what it doesn't allow is fake nil deals. What
(15:09):
it doesn't allow is a booster handing a bag of
cash to an athlete in a dark alley just to
get that athlete to pay at their play at their school.
And so it draws a line between real nil and
just fake boosters trying to game the system. What else
does it do? You you mentioned transfers.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
By the way, to be clear, what you just described,
there's a lot of that happening. And yeah, that's that's
the dark world of sports that I don't think people
understand until they actually see it.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
I tell the story.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
I had a buddy of mine who played football and
his mom traveled every game and his brothers came to
every game, and I knew their financial situation. I just
asked him, and we were friends, like how does it work?
He was like, you want to see how it works? Like, yeah,
he goes watch, he goes after the game Saturday, walk
with me afterwards, meet me at the lockers, and I'll
show you how it works. And I don't blame him.
(16:02):
I want to be clear. This is how it worked
at every se school in the country. You had a bag,
he hit his bag and it was his locker room bag,
and it was about you know this big and you
throw your sneakers stuff in there. He would walk into
a booster's tent, put that bag down the corner, we'd
eat a little food, we'd leave. He'd picked the bag
up and there was cash in the bag. He was
then knew which booster to go to next. They were
(16:24):
told the boosters to go to and they would go
to the next booster. They'd put a little cash in
that bag, same thing and work it. And then we
went back to the dorm room and we're counting cash.
He's like, Yeah, this is going to get my mom's
plane ticket, my brother's playing ticket, my grandmother's playing ticket.
Otherwise they'll never see me play a game. It covers
their hotels and their meals, and that's how the system works.
So like, cleaning that up is great, but it's still
(16:48):
happening as you described it. There's still bags of money
coming in dark alleys.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
And by the way, one of the things this bill
protects explicitly is the ability of programs to cover travel
expenses for the family of players. So that's something that
is explicitly allowed under the bill and and carved out
as legitimate. This bill also ratchets up health and safety
standards for student athletes, and it puts in place rules
that you can't you can't just ignore a concussion. You
(17:13):
got to have health and safety standards. It requires far
more extensive health insurance for student athletes than you have
right now, including five years of health insurance after playing
for injuries or disease from things that occurred while playing.
And and so that is.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Because the day you leave, I say this because I
witnessed it. The day you leave, I blew out my shoulder.
It would have been within the five years. It was
clearly damaged, done during my time playing. All of that
is on me, all the deductible, all the rehab. If
you don't have great insurance, it's on you. My buddies
that played that had herniated discs, they had back surgeries afterwards,
(17:52):
they miss work, they I mean, and then you talk
about that, the brain injuries of athletes and the concussion
that they knew. And then there was a clear decision
made in COWED sports that we can use up your body,
conduct tape it to success. And as soon as you
either graduated or were off scholarship or walked out of
that locker room. For the last time we had zero liability.
(18:15):
So I mean this when I say it, thank you,
because that may be the most important thing you guys
put in there. Five years is adequate because I know
my shoulder surgery, the rehab and everything else out of
my own pocket. That was on me, and there's a
lot of players that have to deal with that.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
It's unfair.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
Yeah, and look something like your shoulder injury. This mandates
zero out of pocket expense for the athlete for those
five years that it has to be covered by the
insurance with no out of pocket expense. It also creates
a sixty million dollar medical trust fund so that institutions
that don't have the resources to provide that that that
insurance institutions like historically black colleges and universities. That trust
(18:53):
fund is there paid for by the giant schools that
are generating a lot of money, and so it improves
the standards and and it also has protections for scholarships,
academic protection, so a coach can't say to a player,
you can't take that course. A coach can't make a
player not be able to go to class. There are
lots of protections that are written in for the athletes.
(19:14):
But then the system you mentioned, the transfer portal. What
the bill provides is that every athlete is entitled to
one free transfer, so you can transfer any time, no
questions asked for a second transfer. It lays out specific reasons.
So number one, off your coach quits. If your coach quits,
you can transfer somewhere else. Number two if your program
is canceled. Well, if your program's canceled, you can transfer
(19:35):
somewhere else if you want to play at another school.
Or number three, if you're a victim of a sexual
assault or sexual harassment. Those exceptions are carved out, you
can have a second transfer. But other than those exception,
if you transfer a second time, you're required a red
shirt for a year. You're required to sit out for
a year. Because look, my approach focusing on this bill
(19:57):
is I didn't spend a lot of time worrying about
the souper for stars. I didn't spend a lot of
time worrying about the Michael Jordan's or or very few
of them that the arch mannings. You know, they're people
who are gonna make millions in the NBA of the NFL,
and they're gonna be fine, But ninety nine percent of
college athletes are like you Ben that they're folks who
played in college but never played in the NFL, the NBA.
(20:19):
Ninety nine percent of the athletes in college are never
going to play pro ball of any kind. And my
focus was on those guys that I want them to
be able to get an opportunity to get an education.
And for millions of low income kids, many African American
or Hispanic, without athletics, they would not have the chance,
they wouldn't be able to afford college and to get
(20:40):
an education, to get a degree, but also to learn
everything you get from sports, hard work, discipline, teamwork, sportsmanship,
all of that can can help set them up for
success in life, even if they don't earn a paycheck
as a professional athlete. And so look for an athlete.
If you end up going to four or five schools
(21:01):
and in four or five years, you're not getting a
good education, You're just going from one school to the
other and playing and playing and playing. At the end
of your time, you're done stop anymore.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
You're an athright yourent's getting traded from one team to another.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
So the transfer portal reform is really important. And eligibility.
We put in clear rules that every athlete's entitled to
five years of eligibility and a hard cap of age
twenty four as the oldest you can be.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
And so we love that rule.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
You know, we're not gonna have eight year old matter.
It's it's not fair for a twenty eight year old
guy to play against an eighteen year old guy. There's
just differences that make it not fair.
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brain's going insane right now. I have a question, what
(23:11):
if you serve in the military.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
Is there are a yes, there is that there is
an exception for the military explicitly.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Okay, so if you're over twenty four, you go serve,
you come back, you can play again, all right?
Speaker 2 (23:22):
I have another question, you said, and.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
It also specifies pros can't go go in and play
college sports. I gotta admit I was joking with with
Charlie Baker, who's the head of the NC double A.
I said, I said, Charlie, I for one am really
looking forward to seeing Lebron James's college career because right now,
in the current college he never played in college. He
could go back. Could you imagine being a seventeen year
(23:46):
old can of freshman in college and discover that you're
you're guarding Lebron James, Senator.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
I want to get back into this. You mentioned something
I want to I want to clarify. You said that
you get two transfers. It's the first time in my
life I've ever wanted to be a witness in anything
in government, in the Senate of the House. As a witness,
I would ask this question to the body. So I'll
ask it to you. If I go to a school
freshman year, and the coach recruits me, he quits, disappears,
(24:12):
leaves whatever.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
I get to transfer.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
What if I go to another school and then that
coach takes another job, do I get another transfer? Yes?
Speaker 3 (24:19):
Okay, anytime your coach quits, it's not fair to you
to punish you if you were recruited.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
For the coach just a minimum of one.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
It's unlimited there right right in that exception, because that's
a legitimate reason to leave, and that's not going to
happen as a widespread matter. That's not going to lead
to you know, you know, every starting basketball player being
recruited away at the end of every season from a team,
which is what we're seeing sometimes now.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Yeah, oh no, I mean I laugh. There's football teams
now where there was like zero members from the prayer
year on the football team, and that's a football team,
which is huge. So who is against this legislation and
where's the pushback coming from?
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Well, I have to say so. We introduced it this
week and there's been surprisingly little push It has been
very well received. As I said, people were astonished that
we could get their things are so broken down and
partisan that they just believed there was no way Democrats
and Republicans could come together. And I got to say,
you're a.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Pretty liberal guy like you and him, don't y'all are
not usually one in one like this.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
Well, actually, Chris and I work on a number of
things together. Maria Cantwell is my lead partner on this.
She's the ranking member on Commerce, and we literally have
been negotiating for the last month. We've been spending six
to eight hours a day in a room negotiating directly
provision by provision. It has been painstaking and we had
to reach middle grounds where there are provisions in there
(25:38):
that don't go as far as I would like, but
don't go as far as she would like, and that's
how you have to get there. But our opposition is
coming from two places. Number one, the extreme far left,
and number two, big money. And let me break that
down the extreme far left. To date, only one senator
out of one hundred has publicly criticized that. That's Chris Murphy,
(25:58):
the very liberal senator from Cannet Kid who's blasted this, says,
this doesn't do enough for athletes and it just helps millionaires.
And it's look, the far left is listening to union
bosses and trial lawyers that want a system where number one,
their constant lawsuits. Every university is being sued NonStop, Every
(26:20):
conference being sued NonStop, every league is being sued NonStop.
And number two, every student athlete is an employee. They're unionized,
their union members, they're paying union dues. Those union dues
are going to fund Democrat candidates. Both of those are
terrible outcomes for college sports and a whole lot of
the programs the historically black colleges and universities who said
(26:42):
if that happens, they'll shut down their entire athletic department.
I mean, that's the consequence that would end up taking
away athletic opportunity for over time, millions of kids. So
that's a terrible outcome. But that's one area of pushback
is the very far left. The other area of pushback
is is big money. And you know I mentioned that
(27:02):
we're on a path to consolidation in thirty to fifty schools.
In college football, there are two conferences that account for
more than two thirds of the revenue, and that is
the SEC and the Big Ten. That's where the eyeballs are.
They generate massive revenue because look, that's where most of
the best football in America is being played. Is the
SEC in Big Ten, not exclusively, but very heavily those
(27:24):
two conferences. There has been a lot of talk in
those two conferences about merging and forming a super league.
Now I think that would be a terrible outcome. You'd
end up with the rich getting richer, but all of
the rest of college sports would be left behind. It
would basically transform the other schools into Vision.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Hirid Describer's Division two.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
You wouldn't be able to compete at the same level,
you wouldn't have the same quality players. Anybody that cared
about football and wanted to play at the highest level
and play for national championship would go to the Super Conference,
right like, right now, you want to go to the SEC,
and if you're from the North Northeast you may want
to go in and other schools, but in general, that's
the holy grail. You do what you just describe and
have them two come together. Every other school in America
(28:06):
is a loser now.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
And by the way, it's even worse than that because
they lose essentially all of their TV revenue, which funds
the rest of their athletic department. So the other schools
cancel all the non revenue starts, they slash athletics all together,
they eliminate scholarships, so you end up with millions of
kids over time not being able to go to school
to play sports. And it's not just those kids, because
(28:30):
an awful lot of eyeballs people learn about a school
by watching March Madness, by watching sports, and they end
up applying to the school and you know, a Gonzaga,
you know I mean, and they end up It drives.
When your school does well in athletics, your applications sow,
your your donations from alumni sore, and so you end
up badly damaging a bunch of schools, not just in sports,
(28:53):
but all together and hurting universities. So what does this
bill do? Number one, it explicitly prohibits a super league.
It prohibits the Big Ten and the SEC from combining.
It just says, no, that's bad for sports, it's bad
for athletes, it's bad for football. That is prohibited. Now,
you know what, the leadership of the SEC in particular
is not happy about prohibiting a super league. But secondly,
(29:17):
so the way I looked at this problem, there are
two elements. There's a cost element and a revenue element.
On the cost side, you want to slow down the
out of control spiraling that is bankrupting most of the
programs so that the programs can stay vibrant and kids
can keep having these opportunities. But on the revenue side,
we looked hard for how do we grow the revenue
that is available to fund college sports. And what we
(29:39):
do is we allow colleges to join together and negotiate
for media rights jointly. That I believe will significantly increase
the revenue. So, for example, the number one source of
eyeballs and revenue in TV is the NFL.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
It's massive.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
The number two is college football. And yet amazingly, even
though a lot, a lot more people watch college football
than the NBA. The NBA makes billions more in its
media contracts, and there's a reason the NBA negotiates as
one unit. You don't have the Houston Rockets negotiating against
the Knicks and fighting each other, and yet in college
conferences that's what you have. So this allows conferences to
(30:19):
come together. It's voluntary, so no one's forced to come together. Yeah,
but it lets them come together and negotiate jointly for
media rights. I believe that would expand by billions of
dollars the money coming in, which means that there's more
money for the other sports. And we write in that
if you do this, if you get joint media rights,
you must maintain every single roster spot and every single
(30:42):
scholarship spot for women's and men's sports, for Olympic sports,
for track and field, for tennis, for all the non
revenue sports. You got to maintain them if you're getting
a lot more money through football. And so it's designed
to be a win win for everyone. But look, the
leadership of the SEC has said that they're not interested.
And I'm look Greg Sank, I know, well, Tony Petiti,
(31:04):
who leads the Big Ten. I know him well. I've
talked to both of them and I've said, listen, this
is voluntary. It only works if you guys choose to participate.
That means the other schools have to offer you a
good enough deal that y'all are making a lot more
money and so are they. That is a win win
for everyone. That's the outcome I hope we see because
I want to see college sports continue to be an
(31:27):
amazing thing for athletes, for students to continue to be
an amazing thing for universities, and a great thing for fans. Look,
it is an awesome thing to cheer on your school.
And you asked about the Lane Kiffin rule. It provides
that coaches cannot be hired away during the season or
during the playoffs. We adopt the same rule as the NFL,
which is you got to wait till the off season,
(31:48):
because it's not fair to do what happened to the
fans of Ole Miss to take their coach right going
into the playoffs. That's just wrong.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
Well, keep following this story.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
I can promise you that we've got a lot more
that's going to happen in the days ahead. So make
sure you don't forget grab our podcast, The Ben Ferguson
Podcasts wherever you get your podcasts as well. Hit that
subscriber auto download button so you don't miss any of
the breaking news
There aren't many issues in Washington these days that can
bring Republicans and Democrats together, but one of them may
be the future of saving college athletics, and frankly, it's
about time. For years, we've watched the nil air spiral
further and further out of control. And this is coming
from a former college athlete. The transfer portal has become
(00:23):
free agency. Coaches are struggling to build teams and other
coaches can just bail for bigger paydays even when they're
headed to the national championships. Rivalries are disappearing, Athletes are
bouncing from school to school chasing the next big paycheck,
and many athletic directors are warning that women's sports, Olympic sports,
(00:43):
and smaller programs like tennis and golf, well they could
be on the chopping block if something doesn't change fast. Now,
for the first time, here's the good news. There actually
appears to be a serious bipartisan effort to restore some
or to protect college sports. Act that's been led by
(01:04):
Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Maria Cantwell is now gaining
momentum in Washington, and today it got a major boost
from President Donald Trump himself. The legislation would create national
nil standards, brings stability to transfers and eligibility rules, and yes,
there's even the Lane Kiffen rule. After he screwed the
(01:26):
University of Mississippi aka Mi alma Mater ole Miss as
we headed to a national championship run. This is exactly
why the bill is definitely needed. It gives college sports
a much needed framework to prevent complete chaos and a
total collapse of so many sports that aren't quote revenue making.
(01:47):
President Trump made it clear that he believes Congress must
act his endorsement of the legislation, he called it a
strong foundation to not only save college sports, but he
argued that executive action alone are not enough. He said
that after meeting with university leaders, coaches, and athletic officials,
it became clear that a legislative solution is needed to
(02:08):
preserve the future of college athletics. And this isn't a
new issue for President Trump either. Earlier this year, he
warned that college sports could be lost forever without major
reforms and described the current environment as an out of
control financial arms race that threatened scholarships, competitive balance, and
opportunities for so many future athletes. The reality is simple,
(02:32):
Nil isn't going away. And by the way, as a
former college athlete, I think college athletes should be able
to make money. Athletes deserve the opportunity to profit from
their name, their image, and their likeness.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
But what we've.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Created is also well unsustainable. College football wasn't supposed to
become the NFL free agency with dorm rooms, and coaches
were supposed to actually coach their team to the end
of the season, not leave them behind like Lane Kiffin did.
This may be one of the rare moments where Republicans, Democrats, coaches,
athletic directors, and even the White House all agree on something.
(03:08):
If we don't fix college sports now, we may not
recognize it in five years from today. Which brings me
to the conversation that Senator Cruz and I were able
to have about this legislation. It's an incredibly important bill,
and I want you to hear the framework behind it
and how it actually works. Take a listen to our
conversation center. I gotta say I have never felt like
(03:32):
you had my back more than watching you do sports
talk radio s shows over the last twenty four hours,
and you did something that desperately needed to be done.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
If you care about sports, if you love sports, and.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
You did something that dealt with Lane Kiffin in his name,
the guy who used to be at my alma mater,
Ole Miss and then screwed us and went down to LSU.
I have lots of animasi there, but the Dame Kiffenrolle
is now going to become an actual thing.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Hopefully.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Let's break down the nil, explain why this matters. And
this is really I truly believe about saving college sports.
I played in college. It was broken system for a
long time. The pendulum swung a law far far the
other way, and now we're trying to find a happy
medium here.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
Well, listen, you're right. I spent much of this week
doing sports radio, sports TV, doing interviews with Sports Illustrated
ESPN stephen A. Smith and talking about college sports. And
this week, I believe was a really consequential week for
college sports. I introduced a major bipartisan bill that I
rode alongside Maria Cantwell. Maria Cantwell is a Democrat from
(04:46):
Washington State. I'm the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.
Maria is the ranking member, the senior Democrat on the
Senate Commerce Committee. And this is a bill that I've
spent three years working on and thousands of hours trying
to bring Republicans and Democrats together, and we introduced it
this week. I got to say, most observers thought there
was no way Republicans and Democrats could find common ground
(05:09):
on saving college sports. We managed to do it. And
so I want to break it down, and on this pod,
we're going to go into a little bit of depth
because I think this topic really matters. But let's start
with Look, sports is an amazing in College sports is
an amazing institution in America. It's something that no other
country has the equivalent of college sports in their nation.
(05:33):
You know today that there are more than five hundred
thousand college athletes right now competing, and you look at that,
and college athletics and sports generally is something that brings
us together. In an era where we're so divided, we're
so angry, you can go and root for your team
and we come together. It doesn't matter. You can be
(05:55):
from different parties, you can be different races, you can
be different religions, it doesn't matter. You are all cheering
for the home team. That is an awesome thing. And
over the years. College sports has been an avenue for
millions of young men and women to get a college education,
many of whom might never have had a chance to
(06:15):
do that before. And right now, I believe college sports
is an absolute crisis. Right now, we have chaos in
college sports. So we've got the transfer portal. You've got
athletes that are transferring two, three, four, five times, going
every year to a different school. You've got at the
end of the season, your school's team can be blown
(06:39):
up as all the star players are recruited to other schools.
The kids who are doing that end end up not
getting a very good education. You've got kids challenging every
eligibility rule. So you have players playing seven years, you
have players playing college sports when they're twenty seven, twenty
eight years old. You have pros going back to college sports.
(07:01):
It is messed up and what is happening? Then every
week a different college program across the country announces they're
cutting a sport. They're cutting women's sports, they're cutting track
and field, they're cutting Olympic sports that they're cutting tennis.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
They're cutting non money making sports, which, by the way,
to be clear, is the overwhelming majority of college sports
just so people understand that the economics of this.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
In most schools, they make money off football.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
If it's Division one, it's they make money off basketball.
And then the scale is just nose diving after that,
and there's so many sports that don't make money.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
And that's my Arkansas.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
This year they decided to get rid of the tennis
team and then luckily somebody came in last moment said
we'll fund it for you. But they had shut down
men and women's tennis, and it was just like, sorry,
it is what it is.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
Yeah, that was just a few weeks ago. Arkansas canceled
both men's and women's tennis. I texted that to you,
and as a former SEC VAR tennis player, you shed
a tear. Thankfully, a booster came in and saved tennis
for them. But it gives a sense of what's going on.
And if anything, you understated where the revenue comes from.
(08:13):
The overwhelming majority, the vast majority, is men's football, that
that is the driver of revenue. Second place is basketball,
but it is it is basketball makes a little bit
of money. It is football that feeds the entire beast,
and virtually no other sport is a money maker across
(08:34):
college athletics. All of the other supports are sports are
surviving on the revenue from football. And what is happening
is we're in a NonStop spending war where the budgets
are going up and up and up. And I believe
if Congress doesn't act in three to five years, we
will see thirty to fifty colleges across America that will
(08:58):
still have football teams and it'll basically be a mini NFL.
It will be a Pro Football league kind of the
G League for the NFL and the rest of.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
The Many of the athletes make more money playing in
college now than they do if they get drafted. If
they're not a top draft pick, you actually can make
more money. And that's part of what people understand is
a lot of these athletes, they are staying around, as
you mentioned it, like till they're twenty seven to twenty
eight and playing five, six seven years in transfer all
the time, they're making more money than going pro because
(09:29):
the cash is so big to play in college now
that they're like, why would I go to the pros
unless I'm a top ten draft pick. After that, the
economics of it say, stay in college longer.
Speaker 3 (09:40):
And listen I don't begrudge the athletes making money, and
I think it's important. I think it's fair that they
make money, that they be fairly compensated, and this bill
that we drafted does that. But the system is broken.
What is happening is there's a bidding war where the
vast majority of schools right now are losing millions and
in some cases tens of million, millions of dollars on sports,
(10:01):
and it's why they're canceling all the other programs because
they're just pouring money into football, trying to stay competitive.
And you've got these schools that are very rich institutions
that have big alumni donor bases that can fund that
constant arms race, but everyone else is losing. So, for example,
let's take here in my home state of Texas. If
(10:22):
the system continues on the path it's on, there are
only two schools that I am certain would survive, University
of Texas and Texas A and M. They have a
big enough donor base that no matter what happens, those
two survive. But if we're sitting here three five years
from now, in the other schools University of Houston, Baylor, TCU, SMU,
Texas Tech Rice. If the other college programs in Texas
(10:44):
go under, that's terrible for Texas. It's terrible for athletes,
it's terrible for the sport. But let me be clear,
this is not a done deal by any means. We
still have a long road to go. We introduced the
bill this week, which shocked people. They didn't think we
could get a by part bill, and we introduced it
with two Republican senators two Democrat senators. So Maria Cantwell
(11:05):
and I introduced it. We were joined by Eric Schmidt,
Republican from Missouri, and Chris Coon's Democrat from Delaware, so
four of us introduced it. We're going to have next week.
I'm going to share a hearing on the bill and
we're going to hear from witnesses about what's happening in
college sports. And then my intention is is very shortly
thereafter that to mark up the bill, hopefully to vot
it out of committee. But for this bill to pass,
(11:27):
we've got to get at least seven Democrats. We got
to get to sixty senators, and my goal is to
get a lot more than sixty to have a big
bipartisan vote. But we got to get it out of
the Senate and then move it over to the House
and have the House pass it. And so the bill
is designed to number one, to find common ground and
build a broad coalition. So what does it do. It
(11:48):
starts out by protecting athletes and their right to be compensated.
And listen, the old system that was around for a
long long time, athletes could not get any compensation and
it was really unfair. It didn't make sense. Lots of
people were getting rich off college athletics, everyone except the athletes.
And I think, as a conservative, I think you ought
to have a right to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
(12:09):
That if you work hard, you develop a skill, you
ought to be able to benefit from it.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
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Speaker 2 (13:46):
And I've said this on the show.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Before student athletes were before we had in io, they
were modern day slaves that you could be lied to
by a coach. You signed with that university, they owned you,
and if you wanted to transfer, and they didn't give
you a release if they then made you sit out
for a year, which made you completely irrelevant because a
younger person would come along and they've been playing and
they had stats and you were on the sidelines.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
You had to fix that.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
And that's what the NIL did is that it was like, Okay,
we're gonna give some freedom. But then, as you mentioned,
should you be able to as a student athlete transfer every
single year you lose the team aspect of sports as well.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Well. So what this bill does It protects number one,
the right of every athlete to get compensated for real
nil for name, image, and likeness. So if a quarterback
is selling tennis shoes, and if that quarterback can sell
millions of tennis shoes, that quarterback should be compensated millions
of dollars. If you're producing that value, those contracts should
be fully honored. This bill protects that. It also protects
(14:47):
the rights of athletes to participate in revenue sharing. And
there was a big litigation over college sports and a
settlement that agreed to a revenue sharing agreement so that
universities now can pass on significant portions of the revenue
that is being earned to the athletes. And so that's protected.
But what it doesn't allow is fake nil deals. What
(15:09):
it doesn't allow is a booster handing a bag of
cash to an athlete in a dark alley just to
get that athlete to pay at their play at their school.
And so it draws a line between real nil and
just fake boosters trying to game the system. What else
does it do? You you mentioned transfers.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
By the way, to be clear, what you just described,
there's a lot of that happening. And yeah, that's that's
the dark world of sports that I don't think people
understand until they actually see it.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
I tell the story.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
I had a buddy of mine who played football and
his mom traveled every game and his brothers came to
every game, and I knew their financial situation. I just
asked him, and we were friends, like how does it work?
He was like, you want to see how it works? Like, yeah,
he goes watch, he goes after the game Saturday, walk
with me afterwards, meet me at the lockers, and I'll
show you how it works. And I don't blame him.
(16:02):
I want to be clear. This is how it worked
at every se school in the country. You had a bag,
he hit his bag and it was his locker room bag,
and it was about you know this big and you
throw your sneakers stuff in there. He would walk into
a booster's tent, put that bag down the corner, we'd
eat a little food, we'd leave. He'd picked the bag
up and there was cash in the bag. He was
then knew which booster to go to next. They were
(16:24):
told the boosters to go to and they would go
to the next booster. They'd put a little cash in
that bag, same thing and work it. And then we
went back to the dorm room and we're counting cash.
He's like, Yeah, this is going to get my mom's
plane ticket, my brother's playing ticket, my grandmother's playing ticket.
Otherwise they'll never see me play a game. It covers
their hotels and their meals, and that's how the system works.
So like, cleaning that up is great, but it's still
(16:48):
happening as you described it. There's still bags of money
coming in dark alleys.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
And by the way, one of the things this bill
protects explicitly is the ability of programs to cover travel
expenses for the family of players. So that's something that
is explicitly allowed under the bill and and carved out
as legitimate. This bill also ratchets up health and safety
standards for student athletes, and it puts in place rules
that you can't you can't just ignore a concussion. You
(17:13):
got to have health and safety standards. It requires far
more extensive health insurance for student athletes than you have
right now, including five years of health insurance after playing
for injuries or disease from things that occurred while playing.
And and so that is.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Because the day you leave, I say this because I
witnessed it. The day you leave, I blew out my shoulder.
It would have been within the five years. It was
clearly damaged, done during my time playing. All of that
is on me, all the deductible, all the rehab. If
you don't have great insurance, it's on you. My buddies
that played that had herniated discs, they had back surgeries afterwards,
(17:52):
they miss work, they I mean, and then you talk
about that, the brain injuries of athletes and the concussion
that they knew. And then there was a clear decision
made in COWED sports that we can use up your body,
conduct tape it to success. And as soon as you
either graduated or were off scholarship or walked out of
that locker room. For the last time we had zero liability.
(18:15):
So I mean this when I say it, thank you,
because that may be the most important thing you guys
put in there. Five years is adequate because I know
my shoulder surgery, the rehab and everything else out of
my own pocket. That was on me, and there's a
lot of players that have to deal with that.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
It's unfair.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
Yeah, and look something like your shoulder injury. This mandates
zero out of pocket expense for the athlete for those
five years that it has to be covered by the
insurance with no out of pocket expense. It also creates
a sixty million dollar medical trust fund so that institutions
that don't have the resources to provide that that that
insurance institutions like historically black colleges and universities. That trust
(18:53):
fund is there paid for by the giant schools that
are generating a lot of money, and so it improves
the standards and and it also has protections for scholarships,
academic protection, so a coach can't say to a player,
you can't take that course. A coach can't make a
player not be able to go to class. There are
lots of protections that are written in for the athletes.
(19:14):
But then the system you mentioned, the transfer portal. What
the bill provides is that every athlete is entitled to
one free transfer, so you can transfer any time, no
questions asked for a second transfer. It lays out specific reasons.
So number one, off your coach quits. If your coach quits,
you can transfer somewhere else. Number two if your program
is canceled. Well, if your program's canceled, you can transfer
(19:35):
somewhere else if you want to play at another school.
Or number three, if you're a victim of a sexual
assault or sexual harassment. Those exceptions are carved out, you
can have a second transfer. But other than those exception,
if you transfer a second time, you're required a red
shirt for a year. You're required to sit out for
a year. Because look, my approach focusing on this bill
(19:57):
is I didn't spend a lot of time worrying about
the souper for stars. I didn't spend a lot of
time worrying about the Michael Jordan's or or very few
of them that the arch mannings. You know, they're people
who are gonna make millions in the NBA of the NFL,
and they're gonna be fine, But ninety nine percent of
college athletes are like you Ben that they're folks who
played in college but never played in the NFL, the NBA.
(20:19):
Ninety nine percent of the athletes in college are never
going to play pro ball of any kind. And my
focus was on those guys that I want them to
be able to get an opportunity to get an education.
And for millions of low income kids, many African American
or Hispanic, without athletics, they would not have the chance,
they wouldn't be able to afford college and to get
(20:40):
an education, to get a degree, but also to learn
everything you get from sports, hard work, discipline, teamwork, sportsmanship,
all of that can can help set them up for
success in life, even if they don't earn a paycheck
as a professional athlete. And so look for an athlete.
If you end up going to four or five schools
(21:01):
and in four or five years, you're not getting a
good education, You're just going from one school to the
other and playing and playing and playing. At the end
of your time, you're done stop anymore.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
You're an athright yourent's getting traded from one team to another.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
So the transfer portal reform is really important. And eligibility.
We put in clear rules that every athlete's entitled to
five years of eligibility and a hard cap of age
twenty four as the oldest you can be.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
And so we love that rule.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
You know, we're not gonna have eight year old matter.
It's it's not fair for a twenty eight year old
guy to play against an eighteen year old guy. There's
just differences that make it not fair.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
I want you to pause what you're doing for just
one minute, and I want you to hear about Alejandra.
She lives in a remote community with very few resources
and little to no healthcare. So when Alejandra gets sick,
her parents have no real options, no doctors in their community,
and no money for real medical care. By the third day,
(22:02):
her body was shutting down. She woke up and just
long enough to tell her mom, I can't take the
pain anymore. I can't keep going. Her parents drove hours
to find a doctor who tried everything, but she needed
a private hospital and that was impossible for her family
to afford. And that is when Compassion International stepped in.
(22:26):
Now through Compassion, Alejandra was treated and against all odds,
she survived. She lived because someone just like you took
action right now. Unfortunately, there are children just like Alejandra
who won't survive unless someone like you steps in. Compassion
International partners with local churches, providing children with the support
(22:49):
that they need, critical medical care, plus food, education and
the hope of the gospel, all in Jesus's name. So
help a child wild just like Alejandra. Today you can
visit Compassion dot com. That's Compassion dot com. My sports
brain's going insane right now. I have a question, what
(23:11):
if you serve in the military.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
Is there are a yes, there is that there is
an exception for the military explicitly.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Okay, so if you're over twenty four, you go serve,
you come back, you can play again, all right?
Speaker 2 (23:22):
I have another question, you said, and.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
It also specifies pros can't go go in and play
college sports. I gotta admit I was joking with with
Charlie Baker, who's the head of the NC double A.
I said, I said, Charlie, I for one am really
looking forward to seeing Lebron James's college career because right now,
in the current college he never played in college. He
could go back. Could you imagine being a seventeen year
(23:46):
old can of freshman in college and discover that you're
you're guarding Lebron James, Senator.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
I want to get back into this. You mentioned something
I want to I want to clarify. You said that
you get two transfers. It's the first time in my
life I've ever wanted to be a witness in anything
in government, in the Senate of the House. As a witness,
I would ask this question to the body. So I'll
ask it to you. If I go to a school
freshman year, and the coach recruits me, he quits, disappears,
(24:12):
leaves whatever.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
I get to transfer.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
What if I go to another school and then that
coach takes another job, do I get another transfer? Yes?
Speaker 3 (24:19):
Okay, anytime your coach quits, it's not fair to you
to punish you if you were recruited.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
For the coach just a minimum of one.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
It's unlimited there right right in that exception, because that's
a legitimate reason to leave, and that's not going to
happen as a widespread matter. That's not going to lead
to you know, you know, every starting basketball player being
recruited away at the end of every season from a team,
which is what we're seeing sometimes now.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Yeah, oh no, I mean I laugh. There's football teams
now where there was like zero members from the prayer
year on the football team, and that's a football team,
which is huge. So who is against this legislation and
where's the pushback coming from?
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Well, I have to say so. We introduced it this
week and there's been surprisingly little push It has been
very well received. As I said, people were astonished that
we could get their things are so broken down and
partisan that they just believed there was no way Democrats
and Republicans could come together. And I got to say,
you're a.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Pretty liberal guy like you and him, don't y'all are
not usually one in one like this.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
Well, actually, Chris and I work on a number of
things together. Maria Cantwell is my lead partner on this.
She's the ranking member on Commerce, and we literally have
been negotiating for the last month. We've been spending six
to eight hours a day in a room negotiating directly
provision by provision. It has been painstaking and we had
to reach middle grounds where there are provisions in there
(25:38):
that don't go as far as I would like, but
don't go as far as she would like, and that's
how you have to get there. But our opposition is
coming from two places. Number one, the extreme far left,
and number two, big money. And let me break that
down the extreme far left. To date, only one senator
out of one hundred has publicly criticized that. That's Chris Murphy,
(25:58):
the very liberal senator from Cannet Kid who's blasted this, says,
this doesn't do enough for athletes and it just helps millionaires.
And it's look, the far left is listening to union
bosses and trial lawyers that want a system where number one,
their constant lawsuits. Every university is being sued NonStop, Every
(26:20):
conference being sued NonStop, every league is being sued NonStop.
And number two, every student athlete is an employee. They're unionized,
their union members, they're paying union dues. Those union dues
are going to fund Democrat candidates. Both of those are
terrible outcomes for college sports and a whole lot of
the programs the historically black colleges and universities who said
(26:42):
if that happens, they'll shut down their entire athletic department.
I mean, that's the consequence that would end up taking
away athletic opportunity for over time, millions of kids. So
that's a terrible outcome. But that's one area of pushback
is the very far left. The other area of pushback
is is big money. And you know I mentioned that
(27:02):
we're on a path to consolidation in thirty to fifty schools.
In college football, there are two conferences that account for
more than two thirds of the revenue, and that is
the SEC and the Big Ten. That's where the eyeballs are.
They generate massive revenue because look, that's where most of
the best football in America is being played. Is the
SEC in Big Ten, not exclusively, but very heavily those
(27:24):
two conferences. There has been a lot of talk in
those two conferences about merging and forming a super league.
Now I think that would be a terrible outcome. You'd
end up with the rich getting richer, but all of
the rest of college sports would be left behind. It
would basically transform the other schools into Vision.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Hirid Describer's Division two.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
You wouldn't be able to compete at the same level,
you wouldn't have the same quality players. Anybody that cared
about football and wanted to play at the highest level
and play for national championship would go to the Super Conference,
right like, right now, you want to go to the SEC,
and if you're from the North Northeast you may want
to go in and other schools, but in general, that's
the holy grail. You do what you just describe and
have them two come together. Every other school in America
(28:06):
is a loser now.
Speaker 3 (28:07):
And by the way, it's even worse than that because
they lose essentially all of their TV revenue, which funds
the rest of their athletic department. So the other schools
cancel all the non revenue starts, they slash athletics all together,
they eliminate scholarships, so you end up with millions of
kids over time not being able to go to school
to play sports. And it's not just those kids, because
(28:30):
an awful lot of eyeballs people learn about a school
by watching March Madness, by watching sports, and they end
up applying to the school and you know, a Gonzaga,
you know I mean, and they end up It drives.
When your school does well in athletics, your applications sow,
your your donations from alumni sore, and so you end
up badly damaging a bunch of schools, not just in sports,
(28:53):
but all together and hurting universities. So what does this
bill do? Number one, it explicitly prohibits a super league.
It prohibits the Big Ten and the SEC from combining.
It just says, no, that's bad for sports, it's bad
for athletes, it's bad for football. That is prohibited. Now,
you know what, the leadership of the SEC in particular
is not happy about prohibiting a super league. But secondly,
(29:17):
so the way I looked at this problem, there are
two elements. There's a cost element and a revenue element.
On the cost side, you want to slow down the
out of control spiraling that is bankrupting most of the
programs so that the programs can stay vibrant and kids
can keep having these opportunities. But on the revenue side,
we looked hard for how do we grow the revenue
that is available to fund college sports. And what we
(29:39):
do is we allow colleges to join together and negotiate
for media rights jointly. That I believe will significantly increase
the revenue. So, for example, the number one source of
eyeballs and revenue in TV is the NFL.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
It's massive.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
The number two is college football. And yet amazingly, even
though a lot, a lot more people watch college football
than the NBA. The NBA makes billions more in its
media contracts, and there's a reason the NBA negotiates as
one unit. You don't have the Houston Rockets negotiating against
the Knicks and fighting each other, and yet in college
conferences that's what you have. So this allows conferences to
(30:19):
come together. It's voluntary, so no one's forced to come together. Yeah,
but it lets them come together and negotiate jointly for
media rights. I believe that would expand by billions of
dollars the money coming in, which means that there's more
money for the other sports. And we write in that
if you do this, if you get joint media rights,
you must maintain every single roster spot and every single
(30:42):
scholarship spot for women's and men's sports, for Olympic sports,
for track and field, for tennis, for all the non
revenue sports. You got to maintain them if you're getting
a lot more money through football. And so it's designed
to be a win win for everyone. But look, the
leadership of the SEC has said that they're not interested.
And I'm look Greg Sank, I know, well, Tony Petiti,
(31:04):
who leads the Big Ten. I know him well. I've
talked to both of them and I've said, listen, this
is voluntary. It only works if you guys choose to participate.
That means the other schools have to offer you a
good enough deal that y'all are making a lot more
money and so are they. That is a win win
for everyone. That's the outcome I hope we see because
I want to see college sports continue to be an
(31:27):
amazing thing for athletes, for students to continue to be
an amazing thing for universities, and a great thing for fans. Look,
it is an awesome thing to cheer on your school.
And you asked about the Lane Kiffin rule. It provides
that coaches cannot be hired away during the season or
during the playoffs. We adopt the same rule as the NFL,
which is you got to wait till the off season,
(31:48):
because it's not fair to do what happened to the
fans of Ole Miss to take their coach right going
into the playoffs. That's just wrong.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
Well, keep following this story.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
I can promise you that we've got a lot more
that's going to happen in the days ahead. So make
sure you don't forget grab our podcast, The Ben Ferguson
Podcasts wherever you get your podcasts as well. Hit that
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