Washington — Former Alabama football coach Nick Saban and other college sports figures testified Wednesday in support of a bipartisan bill aimed at reforming a system where players can increasingly earn millions of dollars while moving freely between schools.
Senate Commerce Committee leaders held the hearing as they made the push Unveiling the legislation Last week, advocates hoped they could break an impasse in Congress over how college athletics should be regulated.
The bill, introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., would regulate payments to athletes, limit them to one “free” transfer during their careers and create a “Lane Kiffin rule” that restricts coaches from leaving programs during the season. Cruz called the proposal “our last, best hope for saving college sports.”
“If you have the biggest, baddest Ferrari you could ever have and it’s going 150 miles an hour toward the Grand Canyon, somebody’s gotta hit the brakes,” Saban said in his opening remarks. “And I think that’s what we all need to do here.”
Notably absent from the witness list, which included Notre Dame’s athletic director and the PAC-12 Conference commissioner, was any representative of the Southeastern Conference, where Saban won seven national championships between Alabama and LSU.
Supreme Education Council And the Big Ten The two most powerful conferences in college sports oppose the bill, arguing that it “leaves critical issues unresolved.”
The legislation aims to restore competition to college athletics by ensuring success is defined by how “universities build the team, not because they have a billionaire in their back pocket,” Cantwell said.
She also addressed opposition to conferences directly, noting that they fear “someone will come along and rearrange the chairs at those conferences, steal the schools’ eyeball, and then leave everyone with everything else.”