Hearings to examine college sports, supporting student athletes, and fair competition.

Good morning. Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation will come to order. College sports is one of the few institutions in America that still bring entire communities together. Families plan Saturdays around kickoff. Students pack arenas on cold winter nights. Alumni come back to campus every fall to see friends, to sing old fight songs, and to cheer for the same colors that they wore decades ago. Rivalries are handed down through generations. They become part of family traditions. part of lore and stories that span decades and that connect generations. They become In every corner of the country, college sports carry a sense of place and identity that very few other institutions in America can match. But today, tragically, The foundation underneath college sports is cracking. Fans can see what's happening. Rosters turn turn over every year. Your team develops a great team, and boom, the next year they're gone somewhere else. Schools fight to keep pace with out of control NIL spending. Coaches have to re-recruit their own locker room each off-season. Eligibility disputes are decided by lawsuits and emergency injunctions. Historic rivalries go away. Pro athletes are returning to play in college. The richest conferences keep pulling further and further away, and the mid-major programs become farm teams for the Blue Bloods. In twenty twenty four, Marshall withdrew from the Independence Bowl after its coach left. And twenty-five players entered the transfer portal. UNLV fans watched their three and O team lose its starting quarterback mid-season after an NIL dispute. And the Pac-twelve, one of the most historic conferences in college sports. collapsed under realignment. These things only happen in a broken system. To be clear, this problem wasn't caused by student-athletes profiting from their name, im image, and likeness. The problem is the old system was dismantled without a durable replacement. College athletics is being torn apart from every direction. State laws compete against each other. Agents, collectives, boosters, and media companies make decisions without care for the student-athlete or the greater good. And when national organizations try to create some structure, they're repeatedly sued, forced to change the rules again, or simply blocked from enforcing them. As a lawmaker, It was not my intention to try to insert Congress into college sports. College sports came to Congress because changing the law is the only way to fix the legal chaos that we're seeing right now. Congress, unfortunately, helped create the legal environment in which college sports now operates. Federal antitrust, broadcasting, and interstate commerce laws shape what's and conferences and governing bodies can do. If college sports cannot enforce basic rules because of the laws that Congress wrote, then Congress has a responsibility to adjust them, and we're the only people who can. That's exactly what the Protect College Sports Act does. Legislation that ranking member Cantwell, Senator Schmidt, Senator Coons and I introduced. That's what it's designed to do. For the fans, the Protect College Sports Act creates a national rulebook that restores order to a system that is overwhelmed by transfer chaos, recruiting, inducement, tampering, eligibility lawsuits, and unchecked bidding wars. It preserves real and legitimate NIL opportunities for student-athletes. That's better and more fair. But it also makes clear that college sports should not be a constant and unrestricted free agency, where programs are rebuilt every off-season through payroll instead of coaching, player development, and fair competition. It puts education back into college athletics. Most student athletes, we know, will never play professionally. The statistics are ninety-nine percent of the more than half student athletes in America will not play in the NFL, will not play in the NBA. But college sports is an incredible avenue for opportunity for them. Those athletes, they play to compete, to earn a degree, to gain discipline, to become leaders, and to build a foundation for life beyond the field or beyond the court. This bill is designed to put student athletes on a path to a degree. And it protects their scholarships regardless of injury. If they blow out their knee, their scholarship is still there, and regardless of their performance. The bill also brings accountability to the NIL and to the agent marketplace. It requires standard terms and legal protections in NIL contracts. And it prevents agents from charging outrageous fees, which right now is an endemic problem. Young athletes and their families deserve clear contracts, honest representation, and protection from people who make promises they cannot keep. It establishes strong health and safety protections and restores clear eligibility standards so that rules are not written by local judges or a G League player coming back to swipe a roster spot from an eighteen year old kid fresh out of high school. The Protect College Sports Act also gives universities the option to pool media rights, the same authority given to professional leagues like the NFL. I want to make clear, this provision is entirely optional. It is also not a statement on the current use of the Sports Broadcasting Act, as I know many of my colleagues have expressed concerns that the antitrust exemption given to professional sports leagues is not serving consumers in today's landscape. This new option exists so that schools can make TV money work for college sports by helping to generate revenue to support and preserve Olympic sports and women's sports, to protect traditional rivalries for fans, and to keep games accessible for all of those who love them. Some critics ask, With everything going on in the world, why is Congress focused on college sports? Let me explain. If we do nothing, the current trajectory will concentrate more power in fewer hands and will widen the gap between the richest programs and everyone else. In a few years, if we do nothing, we could lose dozens of historic football and basketball programs, not to mention tens of thousands of Olympic sports at colleges dependent on the revenue from football and basketball. Is that what our country wants? To allow federal law, the failings of Congress, to kill off everyone but the SEC and Big Ten. Look, I'm from Texas. I love the SEC, the Big Ten. They're b- they're incredible institutions. But I also love all of the rest of institutions that make college sports so fantastic and fun to watch. If we do nothing. A few years ago, college football in Texas could be reduced to UT and A and M. Both incredible institutions, but if we wake up and those are the only football programs in Texas, we've done something tragically wrong. As much as I love them, I wanna see Baylor and Rice, TCU and SMU and Texas Tech and all of the great institutions being able to compete and having a chance. Our system of college sports is unlike anything else in the world. This is something to reflect on. There is no nation on planet Earth that has anything remotely comparable to college sports in America. I have to admit, before we began working on this, focused on that i never thought of that you just kinda take for granted that's that's what saturdays are about is college football but there's no other country that has a half million kids at any given time many from low income environments many who would never otherwise have a chance to go to school have an avenue to get an education to learn discipline to learn sportsmanship to learn excellence that is extraordinary If we wake up in a few years and instead of a half million kids in college sports, we have half as many, and that opportunity has been taken away, that would be a profound disservice to this nation. And I believe all of us should prevent this. Let me make a final point. L look, this is a time when both political parties are battling like crazy. We practically can't agree on anything. We wake up in the morning, say good morning, and half of us say, no, it's not. Like, it's just that's the reality of the world we're in. I hope and pray and I'm encouraged that this is a moment where we can come together and I will say I I wanna take a moment of praise for ranking member Cantwell. She and I have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours negotiating this bill. It has been excruciating. I am certain ranking member Catwell thought at multiple times we're never gonna get there I have to admit I thought at multiple times we're never gonna get there I'm gonna confess to everyone there is a secret sauce which is when we had moments when everything broke down I did have my staff bring in Cuban coffee I I am now the the the lone remaining Cuban American in in the Senate and Cuban coffee,

Well, thank you, Mister Chairman.

Yeah.

And yes, thank you for that coffee. I am from Seattle, so that is a way to get get us going. And uh, I wanna thank the witnesses especially for being here, each of you represent a special expertise on this subject, and your uh thoughts and wisdom today will be much appreciated. My colleagues probably know that there are probably twenty-five things that Senator Cruz and I don't agree on, and that's just in this committee. So saying that it is an accomplishment for him and i to agree on this is saying something we agree today that college athletics are in crisis and we agree that the system is broken and unsustainable universities athletes and fans are pleading with us to do something about this issue schools are cutting women's and olympic programs and they are dropping scholarships I think we have a poster out here that shows that. Erasing roster slots to try to keep pace with out of control spending in football and basketball. And I think as coach Saban says in his statement, that this has turned into pay for play. So we cannot have a pay-for-play system and then continue to cut this many women and Olympic athletes in various programs. Just since twenty twenty three, over a hundred programs and more than one thousand athletic scholarships and rosters in women and Olympic sports have been eliminated. And it's going to get worse. In April, the University of Arkansas and Saint Louis University both announced within days of each other they were going to cut the women's, actually, and men's tennis team. Kansas, Colorado, Rutgers, and Washington State, my home state, beloved institutions with strong alumni bases and storied histories are getting hollowed out. And even if the universities are not cutting sports programs, they are taxing students who are not athletes and taking money out of their general funds to cover ballooning athletic program deficit. James Madison University now charges every student an extra twenty-four hundred dollars a year, for athletics. whether or not they ever step on a field. What once felt like a shared national pastime has become a free-for-all, a money flowing with few guardrails, players and coaches constantly moving, and schools struggling to keep pace. As coach Saban notes in his testimony, and I thank you for emphasizing the effect on women and Olympic athletes. I appreciate that coming from a football coach. the whole ecosystem is important. Coach Sabin says, quote, " We will lose scholarships, we will lose Olympic pipelines, we will lose chances for young people who may never play professionally but whose lives are changed by college sports," end quote. The pay-per-play antics and this failed system are putting our future Olympic athletes and future women sports participants at risk. When you ask the American public in a poll about this, it's not football that rises to the top. Only fifty-four percent of the respondents say they really care about football. Eighty-seven percent of the respondents say the most important thing they worry about is women and Olympic sports. And why not? Because they understand how unique they are and how threatened they are by a system that cuts even one dollar from where we are investing today. Clearly, both of these things, women and Olympic sports, need larger investments than we are doing today. Other countries like China and Russia recruit their athletes and do it through dedicated programs and dedicated facilities. We rely on our college system instead to help train the best. Three out of four members of the twenty twenty-four Olympic team in Paris were current or former college athletes. And it was the women Olympians in Paris who took home the majority of the gold. As Notre Dame athletic director, Piet Bakhvich, who Bakhva, who is here with us today, said, quote, "If we continue to go down this path of no legislative action, Olympic and women's sports around the United States will be at risk both this year and years to come." End quote. i believe the failure of us to act here will make us responsible for the outcome of future olympic teams if we don't come up with a solution but as my colleague senator cruz said none of this is inevitable we can and we should write better rules that put athletes first and keep our institution strong and that is exactly what the college sports act does it protects college athletes hard-won rights to be paid name image and and recognizes revenue sharing as in the settlement agreement. It replaces a patchwork of weak state laws with strong federal laws. And our bill makes sure that an athlete cannot lose a scholarship because of an injury or a bad season. And it requires division one schools to guarantee those scholarships even after they've graduated to make sure they can complete that col- after they've finished so they can complete their college education. It requires division one schools to have medical care while athletes play, and for five years after. And we create a sixty million dollar trust fund for athletes with long-term conditions like CTE. That is landmark investment. It also makes sure that medical staff is independent, so that coaches can never overrule a doctor. And it ensures that whistleblowers can't be retaliated against. The bill puts real rules on unscrupulous agents who have started to our youngest athletes at the high school level. And it does this by making sure that we cap their fees and make sure that they are registered in their states. It also ensures that the NCAA and conferences cannot provide women with unequal facilities. That means travel, meals, rest, championship tournaments. Women's get to be, women get to be treated equally as the men's team. And these rights have teeth. If they're violated, the athletes can have their day in court. This bill also gives institutions a way to raise more money without having to rate endowments or levy new fees. I believe, and I hope that Mr. Gee will emphasize on this today, we cannot lose the innovation race with China because we are cutting university R and D and putting it into sports instead. These institutions have very important roles for our nation right now. And any school that chooses can pool its media rights and negotiate with them, similar to what the NFL and NBA do today. It lets these schools build smarter schedules so regional rivals can play closer to home. It requires that every football and basketball game be offered in local markets for free viewing in the home market. I think every one of my colleagues will want to go home and talk about this. We are not letting content be put behind a paywall. so that you can only access it your favorite team if you buy a subscription. And it brings in real revenue. Experts believe that this could bring in an additional four to eight billion dollars in media rights revenue, money that we would like to dedicate to women and Olympic sports. The solution here is to grow the pie, not shrink it, and give schools more resources. Senator Capito and I wrote the equal pay for team USA now act now the law of the land which requires women representing this country receive the same pay medical care and travel and expenses as men and this bill carries that same principle into law here for college we all remember that the women's n c a basketball players given a single rack of dumbbells while they were playing in a championship tournament and the men had a full weight room So this cannot be the standard. So, Mister Chairman, I again wanna thank you for the hard work that this legislation represents. Many athletes have been hurt by us not having this legislation. As I mentioned, athletes who basically failed to basically get a scholarship or a team that did not stick up for them when they were hurt and shouldn't be playing or someone whose program got canceled. and then tried to go play golf at another school only to be told by the ncaa they couldn't play this bill puts real athletes rights into federal law and i hope we can make it the law of the land very soon thank you mister chairman

thank you without objection i ask unanimous consent to admit the uh posters into the record and i'll now introduce our witnesses our first witness is coach nick saban which in in a hearing on college sports there is hard to find another witness who who needs no introduction. Mister Saban is formerly the head coach at the University of Alabama, a team under his leadership that was so damn good it was frustrating to every team in the country and certainly frustrating to every Texas team. Throughout his career, his team won a ridiculous seven national championships, one with LSU and six with Alabama, forty-nine of his players went on to become first-round draft picks in the NFL. And even more importantly, at the University of Alabama under his leadership, his players earned six hundred and fifty-six college degrees. Our second witness, someone who's become a friend over time, Pete Vivacqua, and I'll turn to our colleague from Indiana, Senator Young, to introduce him, but I will on behalf of the committee ask him to break into the notre dame fight song as he does the introduction

well uh thank you mister chairman and welcome to our witnesses uh very few leaders in america are as familiar with the intersection of athletics and business as pete bivacqua and it's a privilege to introduce him for today's hearing pete's been the athletic director for uh notre dame since twenty twenty four of course this is not his first go around at the university He's a fighting Irish alum. He graduated magna cum laude and was a walk-on punter for the legendary Lou Holtz. He arrived for his second stint at Notre Dame with extensive experience and great success in in sports business, serving as chair of NBC Sports CEO of the PGA of America and the first managing director of the US Open championship. He was also global head of golf at Creative Artists Agency, one of the premier talent and sports agencies in the world. I can't fail to mention that Sports Business Journal uh named him one of the one hundred twenty five most influential sports executives of the last twenty five years. Uh, he and I have had uh productive conversations about the future of collegiate sports. We will continue those conversations. I know his experience and vision will be instructive to all of us. So, Pete, thank you for being here. and for contributing to this important conversation today.

Thank you, Senator Young. We'll now turn it over to our colleague from West Virginia, Senator Capito, to introduce our third witness, uh, Gordon Gee.

Thank you, uh, Chairman, and I am excited, uh, to be in this hearing today for many reasons, most importantly because we have two great West Virginians, uh, on the panel, one honorary and one born and raised in Marion County, the first being Doctor E. Gordon Gee and the second, Coach Nick Saban. Thank you both for being here. I'd also like to thank you all for giving me the opportunity to introduce Doctor Gee, a champion for cath- college athletics who has made a profound impact on my state's trademark public land-grant higher education institution, West Virginia University. Doctor Gee, or as we call him, Gordon, was born in Utah and attended the University of Utah, but he is quick to mention that he is a born-again West Virginian. Having served twice as president of WVU, and he always wears his signature, he had the gold and blue bowties. He has experience having served as president of five different universities throughout his career, the University of Colorado, Ohio State, the Ohio State University twice, Brown University and uh Vanderbilt University in addition to WBU. He has also signed more uh college diplomas than anybody else in in the history of this country. He has a long list of academic accomplishments and achievements in uh that he took into his retirement from WVU last summer. But we're here to talk about a a topic that Gordon remains central to Gordon's focus and identity and that is college athletics. Gordon has long been quick to recognize that on-field success translates to the overwell overall well-being and health of an institution. He says athletics is the front porch of the university, the place where people look at us and decide whether or not they wanna walk through that front door. He has served at the Big Twelve conferences, representative to the college football playoff board of managers, as well as chair of the Big Twelve conference board of directors executive committee. As Gordon navigated WVU through the challenges and complexities of the COVID-19 pandemic, he was a leading voice in maintaining that the twenty twenty college football season would go on, saying that West Virginia University will be playing football, even if I have to suit up myself. Gordon's, look at Gordon, uh, Gordon's vast experience in this field will enhance the perspective of our members as we discuss ways to protect college sports and support our athletes. He's battle-tested in this arena and understands factors that jeopardize the co- the future of college athletics as we know them and the impacts that they make. In a recent op-ed, Gordon noted that when it comes to the current state of college athletics, quote, there is so much at stake. the future of of the Olympics, the future of women's sports, the opportunity for young people to earn a scholarship, and compete for something greater than self, and become tomorrow's leaders. So I look forward to hearing from Gordon about how he sees Congress's role in preserving this crucial aspect of our society and I really thank him for being here, and thank him for his friendship.

I thank my friend, Senator Capito, and and in defense of our witness, I I will note he he may not be big, But I am confident he's really damn quick.

Mmm.

Uh, our next witness is Theresa Gold, Commissioner of the Pac-twelve. As Commissioner, Miss Gold has sought to build upon the one hundred year legacy of the Pac-twelve by launching in twenty twenty six with nine member universities. She brings extensive experience in athletics management from UC Davis, UC Berkeley, the West Coast Conference, and the Midwestern Collegiate Conference. And our final witness is Lance Holtzclaw. Mister Holtzclaw is a student athlete, welcome, playing defensive end for the Utah Utes football team. He played football for the University of Washington before transferring to Utah in twenty twenty four. Coach Sabin, you are recognized for your opening statement. Uh, can you make sure to turn your microphone on?

Thank you, Chairman Cruz. I could use a little of that Cuban coffee. Cuz I didn't sleep much last night worrying about this testimony, uh, ranking member Cantwell and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify. And I really want everybody here to know, uh, that I'm not here to represent a conference or a team, but to preserve college athletics as a whole. You know, I think we all have to ask ourselves a question, what is our guiding principles for the future of college including Olympic, women, and non-revenue sports. You know, I've spent my adult life in college athletics. I believe in it. I've seen people come, young people come in the program. Um, need structure, need discipline, need coaching, need academic support, uh, need accountability. Uh, and I've seen them leave with a degree, a career, a family, and a better chance to be successful in life. I think the current system uh that we have in college athletics right now makes it more and more difficult uh to do these things we've moved away from development to focusing on money and not life skills so to put this in perspective if you had the biggest baddest ferrari that you could ever have and it was going a hundred and fifty miles an hour toward the grand canyon somebody needs to tap the brakes and i think that's what we all need to do here and i'm gonna veer a little way from my testimony and you some examples of you know things that i think people may not know that are happening in college football that are huge problems. First of all i think student athletes should profit from name image and likeness as long as those things are authentic endorsements they create branding for themselves they sign with the company they do promotions uh i i think these things are all healthy for their education as well as their quality of life. I think name, image, and likeness has become pay for play. You know, I said five or six years ago when a school that I'm not gonna mention who didn't do anything wrong had what is called a collective. A collective is a organization that raises money, basically from alumni, to be able to pay players and disguise it as marketing opportunities. When the school did that, the first school that did it, I said, does this what we want college football to become? And I got really criticized for that. But it has become that. And um, it's become pay for play. And we've also extended the opportunities now to funnel money from operations, which come to the universities, as marketing opportunities from the university's standpoint, to funnel that money out of operations into paying players. So now if you take that twenty million dollars or whatever it is, you could fund five or six Olympic and women's sports. So these are things that I think need to be addressed, and I think this bill takes a big step forward in doing that. So I think this bill also creates a competitive balance. You know, the NFL, the NBA, Major League Baseball, They all have some kind of rules that govern how they compete. It creates parity, it it creates um you know, something that gives you the opportunity to uh have a framework to build a fair play system in, which I think is really, really important, and I think this bill does that. Right now in college football we have no rules. We have state laws, we have different in every state, we have litigation. The NCAA cannot enforce their own rules, because every time they try to enforce the rule, there's a lawsuit. So, I mean, an example would be, Ole Miss's quarterback, they say he can't play next year, he's playing next year because of litigation. So, but this is just the way it is. It's become an arm race. Who spends the most has got the best chance to win. But I think it's a race to the bottom because if you don't spend to win, You lose your fan base and you don't have any revenue. So how do you manage the other sports? So, um, the one thing that I think this bill does, you know, sort of enhance the enforcement of the house settlement, uh, which to me is a start, which sort of creates a a revenue share, kind of a cap, uh, and also controls some of the name, image and likeness things that this bill tries to control. So, transferring. You know, I think transferring is a good thing. I don't think a player should be trapped in a bad situation. Uh, but I also think multiple transfers have a negative effect. Uh, I think there can be legitimate circumstances where you can transfer more than once. I think if you graduate you should be able to transfer again, cuz you might have a fifth year where you can have more success someplace else. But, unlimited transfers creates free agency. free agency with a collective, now you're talking about bidding more for players. And then you've got agents out there that are not certified, uh, that are enhancing players or encouraging players to get in the portal I can get you more money. So now we have this unbelievable number of players that get in a portal every year, and we have nothing to control agents, uh, we have nothing to control cam tampering. You know, Clemson had a player that was on campus for a whole week, and they come and get, got him off the campus and took him someplace else. So, the, these kinds of things going on in college football are absolutely not what anybody of, any of us signed up for relative to the educational institutions that, you know, we've all tried to, to represent. So, what's the cause and effect of, of transferring? I think every time you transfer you have less and less of an opportunity to graduate. You know, this hits home with me because I actually coached fifty years ago when people didn't graduate. And we saw thirty for thirties on what happened to their life. And we worked hard for a long time to get graduation rates where they are, and I'm proud of the fact that we had six hundred and sixty-eight or whatever the number is, you know, graduates at Alabama over seventeen years. So We we need to get back to, you know, that kind of atmosphere in college athletics. But if you transfer all the time, so first of all, we had players transfer that were in business, so they transfer, they couldn't get business school with the school they transferred to so they got general studies, so they could be eligible. So they minimized the importance of their degree because they transferred. And then also, could they graduate? You got guys transferring three or four years. We have guys playing seven or eight years of college football, which is ridiculous. We had fifty players in the draft this year that were over twenty-five years old, competing against seventeen and eighteen year olds, only because we have no structure in terms of what is eligibility. So the eligibility rule of five years is a really good thing, I think. I think we should protect prep schools if somebody wants to improve their academic circumstance, their clock shouldn't start. And they should still have five years after that, and I think defining who is a pro. I know a guy came from the G League, that's a pro. There's also guys coming from Europe that are pros, that are not under the same rules and regulations. I think all those things need to be controlled. So the collective, what what if we continue to invest more and more in football and basketball? Let me give you the history. My first year we had collective at Alabama. two point seven million. Next year, seven million. Next year, ten million. I retired. Next year, seventeen million, next year, twenty four million. Now you have schools that have close to forty million dollar rosters. So, if we continue to do that, we're gonna lose Olympic sports, we're gonna lose non-revenue sports, we're gonna lose scholarships, and basically what's gonna happen is we're gonna have football and basketball succeed and we'll have club sports for everything else with no scholarships. That that that's that's horrible. I mean, we can't let that happen. And I think we have to continue to figure out ways that we can raise revenue so that we can keep all sports and all opportunities for all young people intact. I think we have to protect scholarships. We mentioned that. Injury, roster decisions, athletic performance should not be r- reasons to get rid of a player. But what we've created now with the portal, which we think is a good thing, all the coach has to say to a player that's not very good is get in the portal. I don't want you on the team. So he gets in the portal and maybe he doesn't get an opportunity. Thirty percent of the people who get in the portal don't get an opportunity. So nobody talks about those things. And it minimizes because everybody recruits out of the portal how many young people out of high school get an opportunity to get a scholarship and play college football and start a career. So I think medical protection, injury protection, and health care are something that's really really important but i also think that congress does not need to micromanage college athletics there's lots of people out there that can help us do that congress does need to fix the mess and the courts create a national framework so people inside college sports can enforce fair rules without legal certainty every rule becomes another lawsuit every standard becomes another risk and the system keeps drifting toward the professional model I believe we want an education-based model that compensates athletes fairly, protects athletes properly, and still preserves development, competition, opportunity, and tradition. That is what this bill is trying to do. It isn't perfect, and I'm sure many, many adjustments need to be made, and I think there's a lot of people who can add to that. But this is a serious bipartisan effort to bring order to a system that is badly needs fixing. I don't think this is bipartisan. I think it should be nonpartisan. It's that important in terms of college athletics, in terms of the future for young people. It protects athletes, it protects opportunity, it protects competitive balance. It protects the sports that do not always generate revenue but still matter. It gives college athletes a chance to move forward with rules that are clear, national, and enforceable. For these reasons I support the Protect College Sports Act and urge Congress to act. Thank you.

Thank you, coach. Mister Mivakwa, you're recognized for your opening statement.

Well, uh, thank you, Chairman Cruz and and Ranking Member Cantwell. It it's an honor to be here, it's an honor to be here with my fellow witnesses and to represent Notre Dame. And I also wanna thank uh, Senator Young for a very nice introduction and also everything he does for our state in Indiana and for Notre Dame. I I agree with Coach Sabin, uh, this is a major milestone to have this bipartisan support to do something for college sports and I think this bill is an enormous step in the right direction. We we have to act now. There is a tremendous sense of urgency. If we don't act now, women's and Olympic sports are going to be de-emphasized or cut, as as you showed, Senator Cantwell. We need to act now to protect athletic departments, and we need to act now to make sure that the student athlete experience, and these are student athletes, they're not just athletes, that the student athlete experience is preserved and maintained and quite frankly reinforced around the country. We need sanity restored to the transfer portal. We need sanity restored to what it means to be a college student athlete around eligibility. I love the fact that we're talking about protecting scholarships, that we're talking about extended medical insurance, that we're talking about some real regulations around agents that are out there, representing these young men and women. We need a realistic cap. The concept of a cap emanating from the house settlement, in my opinion, is a fallacy. There is no cap. It's an equation. It's an X plus Y equals Z equation, X being the cap dollars, Y being the grey space of third-party NIL, which quite frankly right now is littered with abuse and uncertainty. The more money that can come from the cap directly to student-athletes, I think will go a long way. And at Notre Dame, you know, our North Star in the athletic department is preserving that student-athlete experience. We want an integrated student-athlete experience. And we spend so much time in this country talking about the superstars. In our world, the Jeremiah Loves, the Hannah Hidalgo's, uh, Caitlin Clark's, the Cooper flags. But if Congress doesn't act now, there are going to be thousands and thousands and thousands of stories of young men and women, particularly in football and men's and women's basketball, that bounce around to three, four schools. And when you're going to three or four schools over a defined finite amount of time, the educational aspect of this becomes a total farce. And maybe they're earning NIL money along the way, in bits and pieces. And maybe at a young age you feel that NIL money is gonna cure all of your monetary woes for the rest of your life. But these are not the type of kids who have the talent to make it in the NFL, the NBA or the WNBA. And you're gonna have a generation of student athletes, thousands of cases that are finishing their college journey without a college degree, with money that is fleeting, so by the twen time they're twenty five they've torn through that money. And it's kind of a good luck with the rest of your life. You know, when we make a promise to our student athletes, we talk about four for forever. You're four years at Notre Dame. You're four years, you're five years at any university. Whether it's the University of Alabama, West Virginia, the universities in the Pac-twelve where Lance is at Utah, that school owes those student athletes the skills, the education, and the degree to make it in life. And so, I applaud this bipartisan effort. Coach Saban said, " Hey, it's not perfect." But it's progress, it's tremendous progress. And if we don't act now, I, I fear the future of college sports. We need a realistic cap. We need to clear that up. We have to be forthright with one another. If we have these continuing runaway rostrophes, primarily around football and men's basketball, I think there's gonna be two inevitable outcomes. You're gonna have a super league. Because there's only gonna be a small number of universities that are gonna year in and year out and say, OK, we can still invest this type of money to field a nationally competitive football team. I don't think a Super League is good for college football, and I certainly don't think a Super League is good for college sports. The other thing, and I think we've all said it, and and Senator Cantwell, you said it so well. Even the strongest universities, the healthiest universities, if you continue to have these runaway roster fees, if you continue to have a failed house settlement with a cap that is not realistic and continued motivation to move into that grey space of thirty third party NIL, you are absolutely going to see the continuation of the slide that you put up with cutting and de-emphasizing Olympic and women's sports. And that would be a very, very sad day for this country and an unbelievably negative thing to take away all those amazing opportunities for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of young men and women who get their life started in a great direction by participating as a student athlete at universities all around this country. So I I thank you for the efforts you've made so far. I thank you for this bipartisan bill that you've put there. I hope and I know that you wanna work with all of us and leaders in the college space to get this bill in as good a shape as possible. And as I said, I'll repeat myself, I think it's a wonderful step in the right direction.

Thank you, Mr. Gui. You're recognized for your opening.

thank you very much uh mr. chairman and certainly uh ranking member cantwell i'm really honored to be here today in fact i feel a little bit out of place uh with all of these uh yeah i i couldn't i'm five five and a hundred and forty pounds i could hardly get out of bed in the morning let alone uh play anything so it's it's it's very difficult for me to think about hanging around with these folks but i'm but i'm grateful to do so and i thank you uh madam senator uh who is my dear friend from uh west virginia who does a great job uh but not only that as she is just a great person and her husband charlie is a member of the university's board of governors and uh and they are just devoted to west virginia so thank you very much i'm i'm delightful to be here delight to be here and and if i could just say amen to what coach saban said and amen to what uh uh to what my good friend pete said i would do so and uh but i will add a few other things yes i have an unstable employment pattern i have been president of five universities for forty five years um and uh most of the time i have left voluntarily um uh couple of time couple of times i i left just ahead of the sheriff but uh

mister sometimes that happens in politics too

i i could i i know we're we're in a we're in a uh uh the same kind of business in some ways you know i i i must just say that uh i get uh uh the you know woodrow wilson uh left the uh the presidency of princeton to become the governor of new jersey as you well know and when asquire left uh princeton he said he wanted to get out of politics so i uh i sort of think that we're in the same business as a matter of fact so i uh but but in during that time i've i've been privileged to serve these great universities but what i've really been privileged to do is i've been privileged to serve the people of the states in which i in in which i find myself and there these are wonderful people who care deeply about their institutions and care deeply about the opportunities for the young people and and so uh i get so much joy from from fulfilling those expectations and i do have my name on about a half million uh uh um um diplomas in fact i was in the hotel today writing down uh a guy said said uh hi i i was at vanderbilt with you He's about six ten. I don't know. He was big. Of course, everyone looks big to me. But I uh but uh he was a football player. And he's now working for uh Goldman Sachs. And he said that without that football opportunity at Vanderbilt, he would have been distressed. And I just thought that that was really driving the point home today. I've I've chaired the Big Ten conference uh twice. I've chaired the Southeastern conference. I've chaired the Big Twelve. I've even chaired the Ivy League conference, um, which was the most difficult, I might add. And, uh, and, uh, uh, and then of course I've been heavily involved in college, uh, in the college football playoff. But all all of this is just to say that I have seen it. I have experienced it. Um, and I do believe that there is an exes- existential crisis in college athletics. You're taking a look at the poster boy for some of those problems, uh, presence and Chancellors are not free from blame and certainly having been at this for a long time, I probably am at the head of that pack. We've agreed to outrageous salary contracts, reduce the academic mission of being a student athlete, and abrogated too much power to athletic directors and uh conference commissioners. Some, by the way, who seem more aligned with media companies than with their own universities. Um, the end result is that we now have an unsustainable system As as the coach said, as Pete said, we have an unsustainable system unless we take bold action. It's just that simple. The NCAA and the conference is lost in the courts because we fail to allow student athletes to function as true students with great talents who earn the right to monetize those talents so saying that I can hear the chorus now I there are people out there in the back and the bright red things say well this is just a fuzzy headed academic failing to understand the realities of college athletics. Well, I want you to know I plead not guilty. And the reason for that is the fact that I I fully understand the power of college athletics and its impact on the university. Uh, for example, I have yet to be able to persuade a hundred and ten thousand people to show up for a chemistry lecture. Athletics. Well, I I also point out that, uh, you know, coach, to me, uh to me uh to every all the fans it was just a football game to me it was my budget running up and down the field so i had to i had to keep track of that too but athletes play an incredibly important part in the culture and spirit of universities it is absolutely unmatched and what you said uh what both of you said but what you said senator is so true is the fact that i i have traveled the world i have been to so many different institutions around the world this is a unique part of the american culture and it really is so unique that no one has been able to replicate it so this legislation solves uh the governance crisis in college sports with sensible consensus rules which balance and respect both long term stability and student uh athletic crisis also solves the financial crisis which there is a huge financial crisis not only caused by athletics but we have a substantial financial crisis among universities in this country if we don't address it as part of that overall structure we are going to have considerable problems in terms of just sustaining our our our education system. Let me just give you an example. College sports will lose over five billion this year alone. Think about that. The system must capture the billions in media revenue uh that college sports leaves on the table each year. College football already has twice the viewership of the NBA um but half the media revenue. now that just seems to me to be uh to be unsustainable it's something that we cannot really really be able to uh to to even understand so i know that firsthand uh from my time in the conferences etcetera that this is a serious problem this bill provides the option to pull our rights and i say that again to pull our rights where the conferences and schools themselves will decide as you said this is optional whether to sell their rights together but the very fact that we have addressed this is so enormously important. So with this legislation, we bring common sense to a very intractable problem. And I am grateful that uh this is bipartisan. And I and I love what the coach said, it should be nonpartisan. Uh, college athletics should be nonpartisan. It should be about it should be about joy, achievements, and a variety of other things. So making certain that these, there are sufficient resources to support women's sports and Olympic sports are absolutely critical. senator can't well and i have talked about that so many times i feel so strongly about that so today we have an opportunity um and i do believe that that window will close quickly and there are those who don't don't want that window to remain open we have to run through it and i've got some pretty good full backs here including including my my guy right down here he said he'd be my full back too right as a matter of fact so thank you very much mister chairman