Ted Cruz Advances Protect College Sports Act With 75% Media Rule
Ted Cruz pushed the protect college sports act into markup Tuesday night with the FBS media-pooling language still in place. The revised bill keeps the voluntary rights-pooling option for football teams at the Football Bowl Subdivision level if 75% agree. That leaves the core fight where it started: whether college football can be reorganized around one pooled package.
Cruz and Cantwell Keep the Core
Cruz and Maria Cantwell introduced the bipartisan measure earlier in the month, and the revised version obtained Monday night did not strip out the provision that has drawn the sharpest resistance. The language still allows FBS teams to pool media rights into one large package, but only if three-quarters of the teams agree.
The move into markup gives the bill its next test inside the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, where Cruz serves as chairman. The legislation was introduced amid NIL chaos and lawsuits, but the media-rights section has become the immediate pressure point because it reaches directly into how schools sell football inventory.
SEC Pushback From Sankey
Greg Sankey has already laid out the SEC’s objection in a letter to presidents and chancellors last week. He wrote: “The media pooling, as written, exposes the SEC to potential lawsuits forcing the conference into the media pooling practice...It forces the SEC and Big Ten to either play intraconference postseason tournaments or play only other non-pooling conferences or universities in the postseason to replace the CFP (College Football Playoff)”
That warning puts the SEC and Big Ten on one side of the dispute and the bill’s backers on the other. Sankey’s argument is not about whether the measure exists on paper; it is about what happens if a 75% threshold is used to pull schools into a single rights package and those conferences refuse to move the same way.
Markup Starts Tuesday Night
The timing matters because the revised text was obtained Monday night and then moved into markup Tuesday night, with the provision intact. For FBS schools, the immediate question is whether the voluntary pooling language survives in its current form or becomes the piece that triggers the next round of legal and conference-level resistance.
For now, the bill advances with the same structure that sparked the pushback. Cruz and Cantwell have kept the media-pooling language on the table, and Sankey has made clear the SEC is prepared to fight what he says could become a courtroom issue for the conference and the Big Ten.
