WASHINGTON – The morning after the Florida Gators took down the University of Houston to claim the men’s college basketball championship, Rep. Michael Baumgartner on Tuesday introduced a bill that would replace the National Collegiate Athletic Association and dramatically reshape the nation’s college sports landscape.
Speaking on the House floor on Monday, the Spokane Republican lamented that every No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament made the Final Four in this year’s tournament – a reflection, he suggested, of recent changes that have made inspiring upstarts like the Gonzaga team of 1999 increasingly rare.
“Tonight is the NCAA championship, but the magic of March Madness is gone,” Baumgartner said. “There’s no upsets, no Cinderellas. Just bigger brands with bigger budgets. Why? Because college sports is on a downward trajectory, and the magic of what used to make it special is gone.”
The Restore College Sports Act would wrest power from the NCAA – a powerful nonprofit led by a board drawn mainly from universities – in favor of a new commission whose leader would be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. It would also require that conferences include only schools located in a single time zone, a clear rebuke of the realignment that saw nearly all of the Pac-12’s dozen members flee the conference in 2024, leaving behind Oregon State University and Baumgartner’s alma mater, WSU.
The bill would limit coaches’ salaries and require all money earned by athletes through so-called “name, image and likeness” or “NIL” deals to be evenly distributed among all collegiate athletes. That would represent a dramatic reversal after a Supreme Court decision in 2021 opened the floodgates for star athletes to earn millions in NIL deals, a move that advocates celebrated as an overdue recognition of how lucrative college athletics have become.
In an interview on Tuesday, Baumgartner said his bill reflected not only good policy, but good politics. He attributed his focus on reforming college sports during the 2024 campaign to winning the votes of independents and even some Democrats in his Eastern Washington district.
“The NCAA is a defunct and broken institution that nobody likes,” he said. “You need to make elected officials accountable for these things, because it is in the public interest.”
Sam Ehrlich, an assistant professor of legal studies at Boise State University who focuses on the sports industry, said Baumgartner’s legislation stands out from the numerous other NIL-related bills introduced in Congress in recent years because it envisions a wholesale remaking of the college sports landscape, rather than simply putting guardrails on the existing system.
“The NCAA will be furious about it, and I think a lot of the schools would be furious about it, too, just because it really does take a lot of power out of their hands,” Ehrlich said. “It would essentially tear down the system and start from the beginning.”
Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate have held numerous hearings and introduced several bills to address the NIL issue and changes in college sports since 2021, but so far Congress hasn’t come close to enacting nationwide regulations. Invoking the 18th-century poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Baumgartner summed up the situation by saying, “Hearings, hearings everywhere, but where’s the legislation?”
Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat whose alma mater’s Connecticut Huskies won the NCAA women’s tournament on Sunday, has introduced his own legislation to codify NIL rights in federal law. In a brief interview at the Capitol on Tuesday, he estimated the chances of Congress passing NIL-related legislation before the end of 2026 are “close to zero.”
Baumgartner said he thinks the lack of progress on legislation is partly because although plenty of lawmakers are interested in college athletics, few have made it a top priority, as he intends to do. Despite his lack of seniority, the freshman lawmaker has secured positions on two of the three House panels with jurisdiction over college athletics: the Judiciary Committee and the Committee on Education and the Workforce, where he serves as vice chair of the Higher Education Subcommittee.
Ehrlich said the various bills proposed in Congress represent a sort of public negotiation. In that context, he said, Baumgartner’s legislation can be understood as an expression of frustration and an effort to shake up the seemingly stagnant talks.
“This is kind of saying, ‘Hey, let’s just federalize the whole thing,” he said. “It is really strange to see a Republican propose a bill like this.”
In the interview, Baumgartner rejected the idea that government shouldn’t have a role in regulating college sports, pointing out that universities receive huge sums of federal funding. The congressman said that while he hasn’t spoken directly with President Donald Trump about his bill, he has been encouraging White House officials to back it, pitching the legislation as an opportunity akin to former President Theodore Roosevelt’s role in saving college football and creating the NCAA more than a century ago.
In addition to the NCAA, Baumgartner’s legislation is likely to meet resistance from athletes who have found success in NIL deals and the nascent NIL industry. Darren Heitner, an attorney who represents student athletes, wrote in an email that forcing all NIL revenue to be divided equally isn’t fair and “undermines the very concept of name, image and likeness rights.”
“Should a star quarterback who generates millions in jersey sales now subsidize every athlete at every institution? That’s not equity,” said Heitner, founder of Heitner Legal and an adjunct professor of law at the University of Florida and the University of Miami. He also objected to the creation of a federally appointed commissioner with sweeping authority over college athletics.
“We’re moving from NCAA overreach to federal government overreach,” Heitner wrote. “The equal revenue sharing across all institutions and coaching salary caps aren’t just impractical – they fundamentally misunderstand the market forces that drive college athletics. This reads like it was written by someone who wants to return to an imagined golden era of college sports that never actually existed.”
Brennan Berg, director of the sport and recreation administration program at the University of Mississippi, said Baumgartner is right to highlight the skyrocketing salaries of college football and basketball coaches. The recent chaos in collegiate athletics is often attributed narrowly to the explosion of NIL spending, he said, when in reality it is the result of several factors.
“Even before NIL was implemented in 2021, college athletics was already on an unsustainable path,” Berg said, pointing out that some schools have long had far more money than others. “There’s definitely been a facade that it’s always been an even playing field.”
While Berg credited Baumgartner for taking a wider view of the challenges facing college sports, he said the idea of requiring conferences to have only schools from a single time zone is unrealistic. The Southeastern Conference, for instance, has long included schools in both the central and eastern time zones.
“The premise of what Congressman Baumgartner is using, that college athletics is quite a mess right now, that’s correct,” Berg said.
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