Sen. Maria Cantwell says she wants any NIL legislation to also address NCAA athletes' rights

WASHINGTON - Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said Wednesday that she wants any type of Congressional legislation related to college sports to cover more than issues related to athletes’ activities making money from the name, images and likenesses (NIL).

In an interview following a hearing on nominees to a variety of federal agency posts, Cantwell covered a range of college-sports issues, including the role of university presidents and a changing media environment in recent major-college conference realignments, the role of boosters in athlete NIL activities and the impact of recent college-sports developments on Title IX and Olympic sports.

She also said she plans to hold a Commerce Committee hearing on these issues within the next 60 days. How that timeframe impacts the possibility of a bill getting through Congress this year remains to be seen.

But asked whether she has something more in mind for legislation than a measure that primarily addresses NIL – as the committee’s ranking member, Ted Cruz, R-Tex., has suggested in draft bill he has circulated – Cantwell replied:

"Yes. Yes, that's right. That's right. If we could find it. Yes. If we could find that.”

As chair of the Senate committee with primary jurisdiction over college sports, Cantwell's views on a potential bill are crucial.

The issue is complicated, she said, including what she called “this race to the top, where people are like, 'Yeah, we're going to get the two biggest conferences and the two biggest teams, so we're going to get all the revenue and then you guys all get, you know, short shrifted.’ I don't think that's what we want. And so we're going to have to ... figure this out.

“And I think the problem is we have been hoping the NCAA for some time now would figure that out. And yet here the college presidents are -- they're in the card game, basically. They're in the card game. And that's a challenge.”

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In Cantwell’s state, the University of Washington, will be leaving the Pac-12 Conference for the Big Ten. Meanwhile, Washington State has been left scrambling, along with Oregon State, as the Pac-12 has fallen apart. UCLA and USC already were headed to the Big Ten. Then Washington and Oregon followed suit; Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Arizona State decided to head for the Big 12; and California and Stanford for the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Cantwell said that she views the broader range of issues facing college sports as “a problem that has many different issues within a larger context. …The sub-context here is a huge shift in how the eyeball business is being arranged. And the problem is, just like … the commoditization of advertising has led to less journalistic opportunities, now the eyeball-chasing business leaves a $30 million hole in Washington State University because they're the odd man out. And then that leaves that school without resources and without the ability to do not just sports but other very important college priorities. We have to look at that.”

She said this issue “is transforming and transforming the support for a lot of things that are really key to athletic competition in the United States of America -- not just Title IX … and support for women and how are we going to preserve that. But how do you keep a college system that is, if you will, the training ground for your future Olympic athletes? We don't want to be the host of a future Olympics (which the United States will be in 2028), and then, all of a sudden, we've destroyed the pipeline of athletes because we got this wrong as it relates to college athletics.”

She added: “There's very unique things within this about NIL and the change to the transfer rule that I think has precipitated some activity that has let boosters out of the box that never should have gotten let out of the box. And I think we need to put them back in.”

As the bottom line, she said: “You could do a lot of different things here. And so the question is: Is there something that we could get agreement on that would be an immediate thing on trying to not create a process without transparency that is giving some schools advantages right now while we still look at the larger issue? … We're just going to have to get everybody together and see. I'm trying to find a win-win-win situation here. … We’ll see.”

Cantwell's comments come a day after the Senate Judiciary Committee held a lengthy hearing on college sports that featured NCAA President Charlie Baker among a panel of seven witnesses designed to represent a wide range of college sports stakeholders, from athletes to school administrators to conference commissioners to collectives, the donor groups dedicated to pooling resources earmarked for NIL opportunities and payments to athletes at a given school.

There is a wide range of bills and draft proposals for bills that have been introduced or circulated this year in the House and the Senate. Whether any of them could advance this year or early next year, before the 2024 election cycle gets going in earnest, is anyone's guess. The House has been in flux amid the turmoil over selecting a new Speaker, and there are myriad other issues, beginning with the ongoing fight over funding the government.

College sports has drawn interest from Republicans and Democrats in ways that have crossed usual party lines, but as with other issues, lining up votes in the Senate -- in a committee, never mind on the floor -- can be a tall task.

Cantwell said the committee came close to agreement on a bill in the last Congressional session “that was more narrowly tailored just to NIL,” but included elements of proposals from Sens. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who had been the committee’s chair, and from Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., who have been, and remain, strong advocates of legislation that would address a range of issues beyond NIL, including athlete health, safety and welfare.

However, she said, “the problem was, at that point, a lot of people wanted to jettison the HBCU's from Division I, and we didn't think that was such a good idea. And we weren't for that for a bunch of different reasons. And so the negotiations fell apart over that issue.”