Congress just started a race it can’t win

On Wednesday morning — the day before the Senate Commerce Committee voted on the Protect College Sports Act — University of Miami president Joe Echevarria sat down on the Joe Rose Show and told everybody exactly what he was going to do.

The TV contracts across all four power conferences expire between 2030 and 2036, he said. That window is when the next realignment wave hits. Miami was the second-most-watched program in America last year with 131 million viewers, Echevarria told his audience. Already positioned.

“We today as a university are playing for the next contract,” Echevarria said. “We’re not playing for the one we’re in.”

He told his audience Miami would be “invited to be where the leading one is. They won’t leave us out.” He described a Super League model — conferences as divisions, media rights negotiated collectively, the NFL/AFL merger as the template. A sitting Power 4 president, on the record, the day before a Senate committee advanced a bill to freeze conference membership, describing the post-conference future like he’s already read the invitation.

That same day, the Daily News-Record reported that Sun Belt commissioner Keith Gill is pushing to raise the league’s exit fee from $5 million to $25 million — a 5x increase to fortify a conference whose own members are eyeing the door.

Last week, first-year Memphis head football coach Charles Huff told WMC Action News 5 he expects the Tigers in a Power 4 conference by 2028. Two years. He pointed to the same TV contract windows Echevarria cited.

“There’s some TV contracts at some of the conferences that are up for negotiation, and that’s when you can make a move,” Huff said. “You can’t just knock on the door of a conference and say, ‘Hey, let us in.’”

A Power 4 president on the radio Wednesday morning. A conference commissioner fortifying his exit fees the same day. A G6 coach on the booster circuit the week before. All of them acting — in the same news cycle as the legislation designed to stop them.

Then Congress voted. And every timeline in college sports accelerated.

The PCSA cleared the Senate Commerce Committee 19-9 on Wednesday. The bill freezes conference membership for any league generating more than $700 million annually, pools media rights on the NFL model and hands the NCAA new antitrust protections. It needs 60 Senate votes, a House passage and a presidential signature. The Senate recesses August 8.

I’ve covered conference realignment and the economics of college sports for the better part of three decades. I have never seen a piece of legislation more likely to cause the exact thing it was designed to prevent.

The bill’s sponsors — Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell — built a coalition of 24 conferences, 267 schools, the NCAA, the NFL, MLB, the NFLPA and the NBPA. They got 19 votes in committee. They have a floor vote coming. And in the process, they handed the SEC and Big Ten the clearest justification those two conferences have ever had to threaten to take their ball, grab the programs they want on the way out and build something new without the rest of college sports in the room.

Sports attorney Mit Winter put the question plainly after the vote: “If the bill doesn’t pass, has it permanently damaged the relationship between those conferences and the rest of college athletics? Meaning, will the bill have the opposite of its intended effect?”

The answer is yes. Pass or fail, the damage is done.

Twenty-four conferences just told the SEC and Big Ten — on the record, in a Senate hearing room — that they want Congress to cap their revenue, freeze their rosters and redistribute their media money. (The full reaction breakdown is here.) Cantwell accused the two conferences of “puppeteering” and “intimidating” their own member schools. Per Yahoo’s Ross Dellenger, some senators viewed the absence of SEC and Big Ten support as a selling point for the bill. The bill’s backers didn’t just oppose the two most powerful conferences in American sports. They used that opposition as a marketing strategy.

The SEC and Big Ten tried to negotiate. Dellenger reported that Wednesday night talks between the conferences and senators collapsed. Joint statement the morning of the vote. A second statement that evening rebutting Cantwell directly: “Senator Cantwell’s characterization of the Big Ten and SEC engagement regarding the Protect College Sports Act does not accurately reflect the process that has occurred.” They were in the room trying to hold the door open, got called puppeteers on the way out and lost anyway.

Then the alliance cracked open.

SEC commissioner Greg Sankey told Front Office Sports he was “disappointed” that the ACC and Big 12 endorsed the bill without consulting the SEC first. Think about that. The SEC commissioner expected the ACC and Big 12 to stand with him — and they chose the other side.

Cantwell explained why. The ACC and Big 12 endorsed, she said, because “they think that what happened to the Pac-12 is what’s going to happen to them next. That somebody’s going to come and rearrange the deck chairs of those conferences, steal the schools with the eyeballs.”

She said it like it was a revelation. It was a confession.

The ACC and Big 12 endorsed this bill to save themselves from the SEC and Big Ten. The 267 schools and 24 conferences in the press releases — the Sun Belts, the MACs, the Conference USAs — are the political cover. The actual institutional beneficiaries are about 20 to 25 mid-tier Power 4 programs whose media rights value depends entirely on staying in a conference with marquee brands. The Wake Forests. The Boston Colleges. The Kansas States. When the Pac-12’s valuable schools walked, the conference collapsed and Washington State and Oregon State were left holding the bag. The merger ban keeps Miami, Florida State, Clemson and a few others locked in place so the ACC doesn’t suffer the same fate.

Except those schools want out. The merger ban cages them. And now their conferences have publicly aligned with Congress against the SEC and Big Ten — the two leagues most likely to take them. If you’re Greg Sankey, and the ACC just sided with 267 schools and the United States Senate to legislatively cap your conference’s power, what exactly is your incentive to protect the ACC’s membership going forward?

The legislative calendar makes this worse. The bill needs 60 Senate votes. Two Republican committee members — Indiana’s Todd Young and Mississippi’s Roger Wicker — already voted no. Young’s spokesman told the Indianapolis Star the senator “hopes that additional changes can be made to the bill to address concerns raised by the Big Ten.” Those are home-state votes for the SEC and Big Ten, peeled from the bill sponsor’s own party on committee. Senators — and potentially representatives in the House — will find themselves having to answer to the same divided constituencies that have made it hard to even get here.

Getting those votes will be hard. But why would those with the power to move now wait until Congress decides their fate?

An NBC Sports report citing a Capitol Hill source said the bill likely won’t pass before the November midterms. If it doesn’t, the process resets with a new Congress. That’s a window measured in months — and Echevarria, Huff and every conference commissioner in the country can see it.

The SEC and Big Ten have options. They can lobby the Senate and House to strip the merger ban. They can let the bill pass and sue — sports law professor Michael LeRoy told the Associated Press they’d have viable claims under the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Fifth Amendment. They can exploit what College Football Xpress identified as a gap in the bill’s language: the ban targets conferences acquiring members, but it’s less clear on a school going independent and later applying to a new league. Florida State leaves the ACC, goes independent, negotiates its own media deal, applies to the SEC eighteen months later. A good lawyer will make that argument.

Or they can do what every logical actor does when someone is about to lock the door: walk through it first. The question is whether the SEC and Big Ten are already in a room somewhere discussing exactly that — moving to expand before the bill is signed, locking in media agreements, creating legal facts on the ground that make retroactive application constitutionally questionable. The legislative calendar gives them time. The committee vote gave them the reason.

Meanwhile, nobody in this entire debate has bothered to ask the athletes what they think.

Athletes.org — representing more than 5,200 current and former college athletes — called the PCSA “a power grab” the day before the vote. The bill, they wrote, “shuts athletes out of the room, shuts their voices out of the process and hinders the momentum of collective bargaining.” The bill’s NIL regulations, transfer restrictions and compensation caps all constrain athlete earning and movement. The NCAA — the organization Athletes.org noted “once cited the Thirteenth Amendment’s Slave Labor Exception, comparing its own college athletes to prisoners as a legal justification to not pay them” — gets new antitrust protections and regulatory authority over compensation. The NFLPA and NBPA endorsed it anyway, backing legislation that caps the earning potential of their own future members.

And none of it — breakaway, super league, expansion — happens without the networks agreeing to pay for it. ESPN, Fox, CBS and NBC hold the contracts that fund the entire system. The conferences can discuss whatever structure they want. The networks decide whether to write the check. Nobody in this debate has asked them either.

Scott Schneider, an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law — Ted Cruz’s own state flagship — put the structural problem plainly: “One-size-fits-all didn’t work for the NCAA. It won’t work for Congress either.”

Sun Belt members receive roughly $2 million a year from their ESPN deal. The Big Ten distributed $79.9 million per school last year. The bill proposes to govern both with the same rules. The NCAA tried that for decades. Ask anyone in Hattiesburg or Harrisonburg how well it worked.

The G6 coalition backing this bill is fragile for a reason nobody on Capitol Hill seems to grasp: the best G6 programs don’t want to stay in the G6. They want out. Huff is telling Memphis boosters to plan for Power 4 by 2028. JMU president Jim Schmidt told boosters in Richmond last month he does not view the Sun Belt as a permanent destination. Boise State, South Florida, San Diego State, UConn — every top-shelf G6 program is positioning to jump the moat separating them from the Power 4. The merger ban walls off the only path they have to get there.

Heartland College Sports reported this week that the Big 12 is on pace for $710 million in gross revenue in 2026. The PCSA’s merger threshold is $700 million. The Big 12 endorsed a bill that now freezes its own membership at 16 — locking out Louisville and Memphis, the two schools most commonly cited as expansion targets. If media rights pooling gets stripped in the House, the Big 12 will have endorsed a bill that traps its membership, caps its schools’ spending and does nothing to close the revenue gap with the conferences above it. And the G6 programs that endorsed the bill alongside them just watched their ladder get pulled up.

The 24 conferences and 267 schools who backed this legislation are not a coalition. They are a collection of competing interests — programs trying to climb, programs trying to hold, programs trying not to fall — temporarily united by a bill that promises something different to each of them and may deliver for none of them.

The people who need to move are already having the conversation. Congress started a race. I don’t think it can win.