Apparently, the U.S. Senate will be unable to schedule a vote on the Protect College Sports Act until after its long, late summer recess. Only a slim chance remains that action could be taken next week. Also apparent is that many political insiders understand that means the legislation is dead until after the November election.
The SEC and the Big Ten will be blamed for the impasse. So be it. Fingers could be pointed in many directions. Only Notre Dame has announced support for passage. There is support inside the Big 12 and ACC conferences, but like the SEC and the Big Ten, no formal votes have been taken to support passage of the bill.
There has been an undercurrent of zeal when Senators Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell discussed the 'Protect College Sports Act.' That zeal is that they are not just protecting college sports; they are attempting to save them. At least with Cruz, it is no coincidence that billionaire Texas Tech booster Cody Campbell talks about saving more than protecting: "College sports are in trouble. We need to save ALL of them."
Campbell even defines his efforts as a "mission," ensuring college athletes have "opportunity of education and character development." Educational opportunity and character development are laudable goals, but could it be that Campbell's primary solution of adding more cash to athletic coffers also brings more problems?
The proposed legislation is 250 pages-plus of solutions to many problems in college sports. At the core of almost all the problems is money. The SEC and the Big Ten want a new annual allocation of player compensation funds totaling around $50 million. Both conferences state that a hard, enforceable cap is a necessity. The Big 12 may not love how much the cap will increase, but the conference appears most concerned with how funds from associated entities will make hard caps soft. Without a strongly enforced cap, some programs will no doubt spend more than $50 million, perhaps much more.
Ohio State AD Ross Bjork explained the cap situation well. Bjork said, "We can't create a new floor. We need a ceiling." So far, all the work put into establishing that ceiling has not produced consensus.
Perhaps the legislation still has life, but at this point, the debate and ensuing noise warrant a literary reference. Quotes from Shakespeare's Macbeth or Faulkner's Sound and Fury would both apply: 'sound and fury, signifying nothing'.
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