A New Era for College Sports: The Saving College Sports Proposal Outshines the SCORE and SAFE Acts

Introduction

College sports stand at an existential crossroads. This uniquely American institution has enriched and shaped American culture for over a century. It has given us reasons to cheer for our student athletes, schools, communities, and country. It has developed many of our nation’s leaders by cultivating grit, determination, and resilience. The impact of college sports on social mobility is unmatched throughout the world. Through talent, hard work, and perseverance, college sports have helped generations of young Americans to achieve their own American Dream.

Tragically, this once-great institution is now characterized by chaos and mismanagement. This is largely because the greatest battles in college sports are being waged in courtrooms rather than on the field. Recent judicial decisions concerning Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) compensation for student athletes have imposed crippling financial pressures on college athletic budgets, forcing colleges to eliminate entire athletic programs (Carey, 2025). The status quo is not only tragic but also unsustainable. With every passing day, more American athletes are losing access to life-changing opportunities.

It is now widely acknowledged that college sports cannot be saved without effective federal action. President Trump took the first important step towards reform on July 24, 2025, with an Executive Order titled “Saving College Sports” (The White House, 2025). Unfortunately, this crisis cannot be solved through executive action alone. The reason, as discussed further in the following section, is that current law does not provide college sports with the same exemptions to antitrust law enjoyed by professional sports. College sports additionally suffer from a hopelessly outdated and counterproductive governance structure. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has proven itself incapable of responding effectively in the face of NIL developments. This failure of leadership has resulted in a national college sports landscape characterized by a patchwork of inconsistent state laws (Cohen, 2025a). Fixing this problem will likewise require congressional action.

Congress is currently considering three prospective solutions: (1) the Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Enforcements (SCORE) Act; (2) the Student Athletic Fairness and Enforcement (SAFE) Act; and (3) a legislative proposal from Saving College Sports, an independent education and advocacy organization (House Judiciary Committee, 2025; Cantwell et al., 2025; Russo, 2025). Of the three, only the latter adequately addresses the crisis. This proposal alone can save non-revenue sports—including Olympic and women’s sports—from financial ruin while also restoring the integrity of college sports, as an institution. Finally, only the Saving College Sports proposal legislatively advances the priorities recently laid out by President Trump in his July 2025 executive order, codifying its policy framework into enforceable federal law.

The Crisis in College Sports

The challenge facing college sports is twofold. The first and largest problem is that college sports lack the same exemption to antitrust law enjoyed by professional sports under the Sports Broadcasting Act (SBA, 1961). The Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) protects market competition by prohibiting monopolies, collusion, and other similar business practices that restrain trade. While obviously beneficial in other contexts (e.g., where a price-fixing agreement between allegedly competing companies benefits both parties at the expense of consumers), the logic of preventing collusion breaks down in the domain of competitive sports. This is because in sports, the desired “product” is a good game played by two relatively well-matched teams—an outcome that can be undermined by the iterative effects of unrestrained competition.

To provide sports viewers (“consumers”) with their desired product, sports leagues collude by providing less successful teams with a share of the revenues generated by more successful teams. Professional sports organizations do this by pooling television advertising revenues (Marcello, 2025). Absent this provision, winning (aka popular) teams could easily translate their revenue advantages into compounding talent recruiting advantages. Much like the game of Monopoly, a few teams would come to dominate their respective leagues, thereby ending meaningful competition, and with it, viewer interest.

The current crisis in college sports emerges from the fact that colleges and the NCAA—the governing body for college sports—long operated as though they, like professional sports, were immune from antitrust law. On these (fictious) grounds, the NCAA denied student athletes compensation for the use of their NIL. The Supreme Court exploded this legal fiction in NCAA v. Alston (2021) in a stunning 9-0 ruling that threw open the doors for colleges to compete for student athletes through lucrative NIL payments. A subsequent antitrust lawsuit, House v. NCAA (2025), resulted in a settlement in which the NCAA agreed to $2.8 billion in backpay to athletes and the creation of a $20.5 million per year fund for Division 1 athletes, beginning in the 2025-26 academic year (Fritz & Colbert, 2025).

The problem with allowing robust NIL competition in college sports derives from the fact that only football and men’s basketball generate net revenues for athletic programs. In effect, these two “makers” create the funding stream for every other college sport program (“takers”), including all Olympic and women’s sports. College competition for top student athletes in revenue-generating sports (through NIL packages) is rapidly draining funding from non-revenue-generating athletic programs. Scholarship opportunities are withering, and entire programs are being shuttered (Vann, 2025). As of July 1, 2025, 41 Division I Olympic sports programs have been cut, removing opportunities for 1,000 athletes (Massoud, 2025). In the case of targeted cuts to women’s sports—all of which are non-revenue generating—these cuts would seem to violate Title IX protections for women’s sports (Nuckols, 2025). The situation is expected to worsen in the coming years (Ridpath & Sommer, 2022).

The second challenge facing college sports concerns governance. The NCAA has long ardently opposed any form of student athlete compensation, reasoning that athletes receive sufficient compensation from their athletic scholarships. The intuitive reasonableness of this position is belied by the realities faced by student athletes in rigorous, hyper-professionalized programs (Ridpath & Sommer, 2022; Saporito, 2023). These students are, in effect, unpaid professionals who generate vast revenues for colleges. Most do not go on to become professional paid athletes.

The NCAA’s commitment to the principle of “amateurism”—non-compensation for athletes—was a one-way street. It did not include, for example, preventing college sports programs from becoming multi-billion-dollar enterprises. The reason for this inconsistency likely has much to do with the NCAA’s governance structure, which is dominated by Division 1 “Big 10” and SEC college programs. In effect, the NCAA operates “of, by, and for” the most profitable sports programs. Smaller programs, Olympic sports, and all women’s sports are minimally represented in the governance structure (Ridpath & Sommer, 2022). Student athletes are not meaningfully represented at all (see Table 1).

A better governing structure is possible. For example, the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) features a 16-person governing board that includes five independent directors (31.25%), three student athlete representatives (18.75%), two “at large” athletic representatives (12.5%), three elected representatives (18.75%), and three members from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) members (18.75%). The USOPC federal charter status additionally creates opportunities to impose accountability through the entities governing charter, unlike the NCAA, which operates on its own authority, despite the substantial federal interest in higher education (Cohen, 2025b; Higher Education Act, 1965).

Analyzing the Three Legislative Proposals

Congress has before it three proposals to address the crisis in college sports: the SCORE Act, the SAFE Act, and the Saving College Sports proposal. The three proposals share several features. Each addresses the following:

• NIL Opportunities: Athletes should be able to profit from endorsements and sponsorships, reflecting market value.
• Agent Access: Athletes should be able to hire sports agents so long as protections are in place to prevent unfair exploitation.
• Uniform Standards: Federal rules should replace inconsistent state NIL laws to simplify compliance.
• Athlete Support: Health coverage, financial literacy, and career development programs should be prioritized.
• Transparency: NIL deals should be reported and examined to ensure students are not taken advantage of.

Unfortunately, both the SCORE Act and the SAFE Act fall short in key respects. The SCORE Act, the bill neglects to address the most fundamental issue undermining the viability of college sports in the new NIL landscape: the absence of pooled media rights for college sports. The absence of such provisions raises concerns as to how colleges will fund new requirements, including NIL oversight, expanded medical care, and scholarship guarantees. The SCORE Act’s antitrust exemptions allow the NCAA to preempt state NIL laws. The purpose of these provisions is to contain further expansions of NIL compensation rather than to prevent the deterioration of funding to non-revenue sports. These provisions entrench rather than reform the NCAA’s outdated governance model that has historically generated conflict between college sports stakeholders, resulting in litigation and regulatory inconsistencies across states (Cohen, 2025a).

The SAFE Act addresses pooled media rights; however, it does so by forcing (not merely allowing) colleges to combine their rights into a single, national pool with the goal of squeezing out an extra $4–7 billion a year in revenues. Nothing in the SAFE guarantees that this money will be used to protect smaller schools or non-revenue sports if the numbers do not shake out as anticipated.

The SAFE Act also leaves in place the NCAA—the same governing body that has spent decades fighting athletes in court, changing rules only when forced, and protecting the power schools at almost every turn. It then adds a new committee to manage the distribution of pooled media rights along with oversight by the Federal Trade Committee and state regulators. This amounts to layering government bureaucracy over a failed system rather than striking at the root of the problem: the NCAA itself. The SAFE Act even leaves open the door to recategorizing student athletes as school employees and thereby unionizing them—a move that would be inconsistent with the cultivation of athletic excellence, which is the entire purpose of sports.

The Saving College Sports proposal excels where the SCORE and SAFE Acts fail (see Table 2). In line with President Trump’s objectives outlined in his July Executive Order, the proposal addresses the near-term fiscal crisis in non-revenue-generating sports, while also implementing long-term reforms to tackle systemic governance issues. Specifically, it addresses the following:

1. Pooled media rights: The Saving College Sports proposal amends the SBA to enable colleges and universities to collectively negotiate with media networks. Estimates suggest doing so could double college sports revenues, creating a large cushion for college athletic programs to offer NIL packages up to the levels established by the House settlement without sacrificing funding to other sports programs (Marcello, 2025). Schools (via conferences) would decide shares based on metrics like viewership or fairness, not top-down mandates.
2. Independent Governance: The Saving College Sports proposal minimizes federal involvement in college sports governance by creating a nimble and responsive independent Governing Body—a federally chartered non-profit entity modeled on the USOPC. The Governing Body’s broadly representative structure will enable it to effectively respond to future challenges without aggressively favoring entrenched interests or sacrificing the well-being of student athletes. By contrast, the SCORE Act props up the NCAA, giving it more power, while the SAFE Act only partially curbs its authority while adding a layer of bureaucracy.
3. Preservation and Protection of All Programs: The Saving College Sports proposal balances the interests of all schools (big and small), non-revenue sports, and Olympic and women’s sports. It ensures scholarships and roster spots are protected by codifying the three-tiered framework outlined in President Trump’s July 2025 executive order. Under this approach, failure to maintain—or, in the case of departments with over $125 million in revenue, failure to expand—would trigger audits, funding reviews, or lawsuits (as directed by the executive order and enforced through the new governing body) (The White House, 2025). The SCORE Act fails to acknowledge the massive revenue shortfalls being faced, which is the underlying cause of cuts to non-revenue sports and women’s sports. The SAFE Act fails to establish specifics on the implementation of any revenue plan, instead creating a complex revenue allocation system that will only create further dispute and chaos.
4. Transparent and Accountable Oversight: The Saving College Sports proposal creates a new Governing Body, with public reporting and congressional audit powers. The governing body is required to file annual financial reports that are made publicly available. This includes breakdowns of revenue (e.g., from optional pooled media rights, estimated at $4-7 billion yearly), distributions to schools/conferences, and spending on athlete benefits. Unlike opaque NCAA finances, this lets fans, athletes, and lawmakers track if funds truly support non-revenue sports without hidden siphoning to elites. Congress can audit these finances at any time and summon leaders to testify on issues as they emerge (e.g., rule enforcement or fair treatment). The Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Office of Inspector General (OIG) can launch probes into complaints, such as unfair revenue shares or NIL abuses. Congress retains the authority to strip the governing body of its antitrust exemption and dissolve it. Importantly, the antitrust exemptions for rulemaking and optional media pooling automatically terminate if protections for scholarship and roster spots lapse for two straight years across revenue tiers (Power 4, mid-majors, small schools). This self-enforcing clause ties accountability directly to outcomes, like preserving ~500,000 athlete spots and averting 100-150 projected cuts by 2028. This approach outperforms both the SCORE Act’s NCAA-controlled, opaque enforcement and the SAFE Act’s fragmented FTC-state model, which risks inconsistency.

Conclusion

The Saving College Sports proposal directly addresses the two challenges that threaten the viability of college sports in the context of NIL compensation for elite student athletes in revenue-generating sports: the need for pooled media rights and governance reform. The SCORE Act addresses neither issue. The SAFE Act does better; however, it does so at the cost of inserting convoluted enforcement mechanisms and leaving open the door to unionizing student athletes (both the SCORE Act and the Saving College Sports proposal prevent this). Only the Saving College Sports proposal offers the needed visionary, athlete-first approach to a sustainable future for college sports and student athletes.