The Protect College Sports Act Reveals The Dark Heart Of Management
The Protect College Sports Act passed another procedural vote in the Senate yesterday, by a 70-21 margin. It will clear a few more procedural steps this week before going up for a final vote, at which point it is expected to pass and be sent to the House. In the meantime, it continues to mutate into a worse and more exploitative version of itself.
More than 35 amendments were added to the PCSA yesterday, and one in particular stands out. Republican senators Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville amended the bill to sharpen its language on how NIL spending would interact with the proposed salary cap for players. The bill now explicitly states that vaguely defined NIL money earned by players would count against a given program’s spending cap on players, which would be set at $48.8 million.
From the pro-PCSA perspective, the argument for such an amendment is that it is meant to prevent that nefarious practice, which we are all now familiar with thanks to Kawhi Leonard and the Los Angeles Clippers, known as salary cap circumvention. The goal is to prevent a scenario in which a school could spend all the way up to the $48.8 million cap with direct payments to players, and then have its NIL collective or another “associated entity” throw additional NIL payments at the players, effectively exceeding the cap.
What would actually count as an associated entity, though? If Nike wanted to sign a hot-shot Oregon quarterback to a lucrative shoe deal, would that count against the school’s spending cap given the longstanding association between the two entities? If the owner of a few local Taco Bell franchises wanted to shoot a commercial with the five-star defensive tackle, would the money he gets paid count against the cap? As is always the case, the bill’s vague language is meant to conjure enough hypotheticals and semantics to obscure its true purpose: To go to extraordinary lengths to deny college athletes their share of the money made in the sport they play. For the lawmakers who voted yes on this bill, it is not enough to simply put a cap on the players’ revenue share, they must also ensure that as little of that revenue as possible is transferred from administrators to athletes. Their ideal future is one in which the boss hogs and local dealership owners who currently make up the NIL collectives continue to foot the bill, thus allowing schools to “spend” up to the cap while keeping as much money as possible in the pockets of coaches, conferences, and schools.
There is something instructive in seeing college sports’ administrative class and the senators in their pockets attempt to create a new world from scratch. If the story of professional sports is one of labor slowly clawing back from ownership what is by rights theirs, then college athletes are much nearer to the beginning of that story than their peers in the professional leagues. It is at this starting point that the punitive impulses of management can be seen most clearly. It would be completely absurd for the federal government to suggest that LeBron James’s Nike deal should have counted against the Lakers’ salary cap because Nike is the team’s jersey sponsor, but that’s only because of the power NBA players have already seized through collective bargaining. College athletes, on the other hand, are fresh targets, and you can see in the PCSA and all the rotten reasoning pouring out of its boosters the precise ways that management likes to squeeze labor when given the chance.
That desire never really goes away, of course. You can see in Britt and Tuberville’s amendment the same punitive impulse that drove Steve Ballmer’s fellow owners to knife one of their own. Any acknowledgement that the players are worth more than they are paid, whether the money comes from an NIL collective or a sham sponsorship deal, has to be denied by force. That such an impulse is now at risk of becoming federal law tells you everything you need to know about how all-consuming it is.
