Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the chair-in-waiting for the powerful Senate Commerce Committee, vowed on a podcast episode released Friday morning that Republicans would prioritize solving the “future and viability of college athletics” next Congress.
“When the Democrats were in the majority, it just wasn’t a priority for them,” the senator said in an episode of his weekly podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz. “It will be a priority. We are going to address it. As chairman, I can convene hearings. I’m in charge of every hearing the Commerce Committee has. I invite witnesses for the hearings. I can call up markups. I can decide what bills get marked up and what bills don’t, and it gives you the ability to drive an agenda that is just qualitatively different.”
Spokespeople for the current Commerce chair, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Cruz has proposed broad-based legislation that would establish a national NIL standard, provide the NCAA an antitrust exemption and declare that college athletes are not employees of their universities.
The Texas senator has, in the past, made a number of optimistic prognostications about a college sports reform bill passing Congress, none of which have yet come to fruition.
In the fall of 2023, Cruz pegged it as a 60-40 chance that a college sports reform bill would pass that year. In March, he offered 50-50 odds of a bill passing this year. The closest anything came was in June, when a House committee approved, on a party-line vote, an anti-athlete employee bill introduced by Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.). But the bill never made it to the floor.
At a press conference held at Texas A&M in September, when again asked to give a probability of passage, Cruz looked ahead to 2025.
“There’s bipartisan interest in saving college sports, and there’s bipartisan acknowledgment that Congress needs to act,” he said. “I can tell you this year, I tried very hard to make that happen. That didn’t come together this year. I am hopeful next year it will.”
On Thursday, Republicans elected South Dakota Sen. John Thune to serve as the next majority leader, a choice that likely bodes well for the NCAA’s desire to keep college athletes from becoming employees.
However, as Sportico’s Michael McCann wrote last week, there are a number of reasons—indeed, no fewer than 10—why the GOP takeover of Congress will not necessarily foreclose the path to athlete employee status.
