‘I Don’t Think We Have a Plan B’: College Sports Begged Congress for Help and Got Nothing

Conference commissioners are smart people. The leadership at the NCAA national office is full of bright and savvy folks, too. Athletic directors from across the country know how the game away from the field needs to be played.

And collectively they just failed. Spectacularly, actually.

College sports begged Washington, D.C., for help, becoming perhaps the first-ever major industry to proactively ask for the handcuffs and shackles of regulation after mismanaging their way to controlled chaos.

They spent millions on lobbying efforts. Expensive dinners and five-star hotel stays were commonplace. The amount of hours spent on Capitol Hill were too numerous to fully calculate. There were committee hearings galore. Roundtables were assembled featuring knights both golden and of an educational commission brought out to speak on all the manner of issues.

The fruits of such labor? Bupkis.

No bill with hundreds of pages of text, no law, and certainly not even a vote on the docket at this point before a long weekend.

On Thursday, like a train barreling down the tracks that everyone could see coming, the Senate adjourned for the week. Cloture on the Protect College Sports Act was not called by the chamber’s majority leader and the bill’s only hope of making it to the floor for a vote is essentially down to a Hail Mary early next week. Passing through the House before the congressional recess—already a dim prospect—feels like a door which has been fully shut. Detractors from both sides of the aisle have already voiced opposition in ways that have been fully political and predictable.

“After speaking with conference leaders and university presidents in recent days, one thing is clear: There is overwhelming consensus that targeted intervention from Congress is necessary. I am grateful to Senators Cruz and Cantwell for making meaningful changes to strengthen this bill. This is the legislation we need now,” NCAA president Charlie Baker said in a statement. “While no bill is perfect, I implore college sports leaders and Senators to support this bill now. It is our best chance to deliver the benefits and level playing field student-athletes deserve while providing the protections institutions need to sustain college athletics long term.”

“We recognize it’s not going to be perfect for us in every one of those places,” Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti said Tuesday. “Hopefully we are in a position where it provides a lot more help than not. If we can get to that place, then we can move into a position very quickly to support it.”

Except that support, full and unadulterated, has actually been fleeting from both the Big Ten and the SEC in recent weeks as it became clear that finding a solution in Congress would come only on their terms or not at all. This has not only slowed whatever progress was made in the past few months but also is the height of hubris from the two leagues as part of the entire ordeal.

You cannot invite the wolf to the hen house and then throw a fit when he brings roasted chicken to dine on. There was always going to be something the Power 2 conferences were going to disagree with—along with a slew of other schools looking out in self-interest—and wrangling over that in the final stages could well sink the entire effort that always felt doomed from the start.

To be fair, the prospect of Congressional action is not completely dead in the water. There is still a week to go until the summer recess and even the slow-moving Senate can get something over the line in the 11th hour. Though most on both sides of the aisle will be focused on midterm elections in a few months, there’s a slim possibility of some movement between now and then. A lame duck action may linger in the background as well.

But there are few good options—and no perfect ones—right now for college sports. Everybody, despite the positive statements in recent weeks, knows it.

“I’ll be honest with you,” says one commissioner who has spent significant time in D.C. “I don’t think we have a Plan B.”

That is a constant refrain from most of the Power 4 leagues and something Baker has acknowledged in past interviews with Sports Illustrated since he was hired with the expressed intention of getting tangible protection from the hill.

For some it could be a solution in itself, with college sports backed so far into a corner that it needs to finally rip the Band-Aid off and move toward something once talked about in whispers behind the scenes.

“It’s time,” argues one Power 4 athletic director, “to fully start exploring collective bargaining. We may have no choice.”

The number of options for the enterprise is indeed dwindling. As complicated as going to the bargaining table with athletes may be, it is something that draws closer to reality by the passing day. Some will welcome a new tactic, others will hold out hope for a solution that may never come and a handful will decide a golden parachute may be the best exit route professionally before anything else.

That’s the reality many may soon be facing after going on a fool’s errand to beg Congress to help and believing it will work out better than throwing an ill-timed goal line fade. In any other industry, such a futile effort may well result in a few firings and some leadership turnover.

For college athletics, however, it may merely wind up leading to a few more committee meetings and changing who is receiving a check on K-Street later this fall. Same as it ever was.

There have been a lot of smart people involved in trying to protect college sports from itself, but turning to Congress for salvation remains the dumbest way to go about it.

The past week was no better illustration of that.

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