Congress enters the portal

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Fixing college sports.

Today, members of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee will mark up the Protect College Sports Act. The bill aims to regulate the wild west of college sports law.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Legal fights in recent years have turned up the heat for schools recruiting talent for basketball and football teams, while cutting other programs to keep up with costs.

Can Congress fix what’s broken? WORLD’s Harrison Watters reports from Washington.

HARRISON WATTERS: In 2025, Saint Francis University returned to the NCAA tournament after 34 years.

ANNOUNCER: St Francis is out of fouls…

The game with Alabama State was tied with two seconds to go. Then a layup sent Saint Francis home.

TASSELL: Before some of our players were even back to campus, they were announcing that they were going to go in the portal.

Father Malachi Van Tassell is the Catholic school’s president…and he’s referring to the transfer portal. It allows Division 1 players to change teams without sitting out a full season in between. That started in 2024.

TASSELL: Once that happened, we felt that effect immediately at Saint Francis.

The school had fewer than 2,000 students. Players across the school’s 23 teams started finding better deals elsewhere.

TASSELL: You know, out of 125 players, to have your top 35 go in, then you're not only recruiting a freshman class, then you have to replace all these guys who transfer out.

American schools have long attracted students with athletic scholarships, and many paid for them with media deals.

But in the last decade, spending has ballooned, and student athletes found it unfair that coaches make millions of dollars while amateur athletes got nothing. 

Here’s Andrew Zimbalist, Professor of Economics at Smith College in Massachusetts:

ZIMBALIST: There was finally a settlement in the House case, which said that athletes could get paid NIL money.

NIL: name, image and likeness. House v. NCAA was a trio of cases where student athletes successfully argued the association violated antitrust laws by using athletes’ names, images, and likenesses, but prohibited them from getting paid.

The 2025 settlement set off a spending spree, as top universities fought bidding wars for athletes using lucrative deals on top of scholarships. Smaller schools cut sports like tennis and diving to shore up their football and basketball rosters.

At a recent hearing on Capitol Hill, retired University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban said there’s no end in sight.

SABAN: Now you have schools that have close to $40 million rosters. So, if we continue to do that, we're going to lose Olympic sports, we're going to lose non-revenue sports, we're going to lose scholarships.

In May, Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz and Washington Democrat Senator Maria Cantwell released text for a bill to address some of the problems exposed by the House Settlement. Here’s Cruz:

CRUZ: 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.

The bill covers a lot of ground. It would protect the NCAA from future lawsuits about rules limiting athlete and coach transfers. It would also give schools more options to make money on college sports, though sports economist Zimbalist says that approach focuses on the wrong issue.

ZIMBALIST: The financial problems in college sports need to be dealt with on the cost side, not on the revenue side.

Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno pointed out another problem:

MORENO: …it does nothing about protecting biological women from competing with men in sports.

After last year’s tournament loss, Saint Francis University moved ahead with a plan in the works for several years.

TASSELL: Our decision to become a Division Three institution in the President's Athletics Conference…

NCAA Division III schools operate under a different structure—with no athletic scholarships. The school finished its D-I career last month, and will compete in D-III come this Fall. 

President Tassell says it’s unlikely Saint Francis will ever return to Division 1.

TASSELL: Should small schools be in the athletics business, you know? Should any of us be? and that's a question that only an institution can answer for itself.

The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation committee convenes later today to work on the legislation.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Harrison Watters, in Washington.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.