College sports are woven into the fabric of American culture.
We build our fall calendars around Saturday kickoff times, and in March we all fill out our brackets. We tailgate in parking lots — rain or shine, hot or cold.
We invite our neighbors over to watch the game at our house, then fire up the grill while all the kids run around in the yard — and, yes, we start our kids early, dressing them in baby clothes emblazoned with the logo of our alma mater or our hometown team.
College sports can be anything from a conversation starter to the foundation of our most meaningful relationships in life. We celebrate with our family when our team wins while wishing we could celebrate with the ones we miss.
And while Kentuckians stand proudly shoulder-to-shoulder, there are a couple of days each year when we make sure everyone knows whether we wear Cardinal red or Wildcat blue.
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These are our traditions. It’s our community, our county, our commonwealth, and our country.
Yes, there are rapid changes happening in college sports.
Multiple rulings throughout our courts, including from the Supreme Court, have knocked the old rules out from under college sports, and there’s not much left holding it together today.
Players are moving schools every year searching for the highest bidder, while institutions feel powerless to stop the rapid change and the quest for more revenue. The academic element of college sports feels like it’s becoming an afterthought.
The pressure to find a solution is increasing.
But I don’t want Congress to dictate what’s next.
Why would we hand responsibility for protecting college sports to an institution as popular as cockroaches and traffic jams?
Multiple bills have been introduced in Congress to rebuild college sports for this new era, dictating how athletes may or may not participate in sports, how they may be compensated, and how universities may or may not administer their athletic programs.
But is there anyone in the American public who is happy with a recent reform passed by Congress? Anything?
Congress can’t keep federal agencies funded, and government workers have missed paychecks. Congress let airport security check lines grind to a crawl for weeks. Congress can’t balance the budget, and there seems to be a government shutdown on a regular basis.
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And now, the American people are expected to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Congress could effectively manage college sports?
College sports should absolutely not be subjected to a governing council of 535 members of Congress, nor should they be regulated from Washington, D.C., like the Postal Service.
College sports should have the ability to adopt their own reforms, and Congress’ role should be to give them that power—and only that.
Whether we like it or not, college sports is a marketplace, and it shouldn’t be subjected to restrictive federal regulation or the open-ended threat of congressional intervention.
This is why I’ve proposed the Collegiate Sports Integrity Act (S. 2147), which works on a simple premise: Remove the antitrust liability for college athletics.
This solution will enable the people who have built, grown, and maintained college sports to decide what’s next.
Where there are emerging disputes, let the stakeholders sit down and come to an agreement, and let them resolve them internally.
Where there is a patchwork of court-imposed rules, let’s empower institutions, athletes, and conferences to figure out how to balance the demands of this new landscape while also preserving the traditional roles of college sports and academics.
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Once there is agreement, everyone signs and agrees to play by those rules.
Who better to protect the integrity of college sports than those who built college sports and will have to work, live, and compete within the new rules?
Questions of revenue sharing, television contracts, institutional alignment, player transfers, and so forth should be handled by the stakeholders in college sports, not on terms set by Congress.
We cannot allow Congress to install a regulatory regime that picks winners and losers; effectively federalizes the governance of state institutions; sets in federal law what could be addressed through basic contracts; will be nearly impossible to reform in the future; and cannot be divorced from politics and parochial interests.
Additionally, since Congress mostly legislates by cobbling together hundreds of unrelated measures behind closed doors—then using imminent deadlines and expirations to gain leverage over rank-and-file members—it is unlikely that any college sports “framework” created by Congress will receive sufficient debate and scrutiny before it becomes law.
In other words, embracing the idea that Congress will create and regulate rules for college athletics means putting blind faith in an opaque process within an institution that is not well-liked or trusted.
To paraphrase former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: We’ll likely have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.
I absolutely do not want to subject college sports and our cherished traditions to that kind of risk.
But the good news is that we don’t have to.
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If we pass the Collegiate Sports Integrity Act and send it to President Donald Trump, we can set college sports on a sustainable path into the future, and we can keep the politicians out of it.
Sounds like a win-win plan to me.
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