Hook: The Protect College Sports Act Is a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ Card for NCAA and Its Members

President Ronald Reagan was fond of saying that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Which is a line of thinking that I’ve found I agree with over the years. Government does acceptably well with most of the big things they’ve taken on as societal benefits: roads, a justice system, defending the country, that sort of thing. 

But when the government starts sticking its nose in places that it traditionally has stayed away from – either by choice or constitutional mandate – that’s when things start getting out of hand. When “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” becomes a sad punchline of a sadder joke.

And the U.S. government is making a huge mess of this latest venture into an area where it definitely does not need to be: college sports. 

The Protect College Sports Act of 2026 is a bill that was just passed last night by the U.S. Senate. That’s right, the United States Senate doesn’t have enough else to do that they have time on their plate to get involved with college sports and spend almost four months looking at the bill since it was introduced on June 2.  

Granted, this bill still needs to get passed by the House of Representatives – which is not expected to return to session until sometime in November – before it could be presented to the president and signed into law. Although, the House could be called back into session if it needed to vote on something direly important to the welfare of the country. Hopefully they don’t consider getting involved with college athletics to be that important.

In either case, all of this attention and uproar is going on because, in layman’s terms, the government wants to sanction illegal activity.

You read correctly. The NCAA and all its member universities (including Penn State) want to do something illegal and get away with it. They want the proverbial “get out of jail free” card. And they want our U.S. Congress to give it to them.  

And that’s exactly what this Senate bill does. 

Buried in Section 118 of the bill is the “LIMITATION ON LIABILITY.” It says, “It shall not be unlawful under the antitrust laws for an intercollegiate athletic association, a conference, or an institution to enforce or comply with…” and then it goes on to list the previous sections that create those rules that restrict student-athletes. 

And there you have it. It shall not be unlawful to do what either the Supreme Court has already decided is an antitrust violation, or has been identified as likely to be an antitrust violation. The NCAA, Penn State and all the other colleges, who in theory like to uphold the law, can now break the law and not get sued. Or even taken to court. 

And how do we know this? Because when the Supreme Court decided the Alston case against the NCAA back in June 2021, Justice Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion where he famously stated, “The NCAA’s business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America.”

But because the Alston case only dealt with a few antitrust violations the NCAA was engaging in, Justice Kavanaugh noted that, “…this case involves only a narrow subset of the NCAA’s compensation rules… The rest of the NCAA’s compensation rules are not at issue here and therefore remain on the books.” He continued later that, “there are serious questions whether the NCAA’s remaining compensation rules can pass muster under ordinary rule of reason scrutiny.”

But he did provide the carrot that the NCAA was looking for when he wrote, “…the Court stresses that the NCAA is not otherwise entitled to an exemption from the antitrust laws… As a result, absent legislation [emphasis mine] or a negotiated agreement between the NCAA and the student athletes, the NCAA’s remaining compensation rules should be subject to ordinary rule of reason scrutiny.”  

In other words, the Supreme Court is going to keep finding the NCAA in violation of antitrust laws unless they negotiate with the student-athletes – which would be the reasonable, morally upright and intelligent way to go – or get the U.S. Congress to pass legislation allowing them to operate illegally. 

Guess which way the NCAA chose?

Justice Kavanaugh then added even harsher words about the NCAA. “Price-fixing labor is price-fixing labor.  And price-fixing labor is ordinarily a textbook antitrust problem because it extinguishes the free market in which individuals can otherwise obtain fair compensation for their work.” 

And went on to say, “The bottom line is that the NCAA and its member colleges are suppressing the pay of student athletes who collectively generate billions of dollars in revenues for colleges every year. Those enormous sums of money flow to seemingly everyone except the student athletes.  College presidents, athletic directors, coaches, conference commissioners, and NCAA executives take in six- and seven-figure salaries. Colleges build lavish new facilities. But the student athletes who generate the revenues, many of whom are African American and from lower-income backgrounds, end up with little or nothing.”  

And that’s it. The Protect College Sports Act is just the NCAA and all their cohorts getting our U.S. Congress to pass a law that lets them break the law. 

Now, to paraphrase Captain Ross’s opening statement to the jury in the movie A Few Good Men: 

The facts of the case are these: In June 2021 the NCAA was found in violation of antitrust laws. However, the NCAA’s attorneys and PR people are going to try to pull off a little magic act. They’re going to try a little misdirection. They’re going to astonish you with famous coaches and politicians who will dazzle you with official sounding terms like “Protect College Sports.” They’ll have no evidence mind you, and they definitely won’t let you hear from any student-athletes, but it’s going to be entertaining. And when we get to the end, all the magic in the world will not divert your attention from the fact that student-athletes are being illegally dealt with, and it’s the NCAA doing it. These are the facts and they are undisputed.

To paraphrase Justice Kavanuagh: Illegal is illegal. Getting a freebie from Congress doesn’t make it less illegal, it just means you can’t be prosecuted for it. Don’t support this effort and let it die the quick and silent death it deserves.