As Congress debates college sports, athletes-turned-senators have a seat at the table

WASHINGTON — With a major college sports reform bill on the brink of a milestone in Congress, some former athletes have a special place in the debate: the handful of U.S. Senators who played college sports themselves. Supporters of the Protect College Sports Act, which is poised to pass the Senate on Monday, say the bill is needed to fix what they call an era of chaos in Division I athletics, characterized by ballooning pay for athletes, unlimited transfers between schools, constant lawsuits over eligibility rules and runaway athletic department budgets.

At least half a dozen sitting senators were NCAA Division I athletes, and a handful of others played in Division II or in sports governed by other organizations. As the debate over the bill has unfolded over the past year, their experiences have informed their approach to the legislation. No one in the Senate spent as many years in college sports as Tommy Tuberville, the football coach turned Alabama senator (who is stepping down after this term as he runs for governor in this fall's election in the state).

Tuberville played football at the Division II school Southern State, then went on to be a head coach at Ole Miss, Auburn, Texas Tech and Cincinnati. Tuberville retired in 2016, soon after a federal lawsuit filed by former UCLA basketball player Ed O'Bannon over the use of his name and likeness in a video game began to chip away at the NCAA's longstanding tradition of amateurism. A decade later, name-image-likeness payments, known as NIL, have transformed college sports, as high-level athletes — especially in the revenue-generating sports of football and basketball — now regularly sign deals worth thousands, or even millions, of dollars per season.

Pay for athletes is here to stay, Tuberville, a conservative Republican, said during a speech on the Senate floor in June. "For years, everyone around college sports made money — schools, conferences, television networks, sponsors, coaches — while the athletes were told they could not make any money," he said. "That needed to change, and it did." But other changes, many of them brought about by the flood of litigation that followed O'Bannon, have been harmful, he argued — especially the erosion of NCAA rules about who is eligible to play college sports and the freedom of athletes to transfer between schools without penalty, as thousands of Division I athletes now do each year.

Tuberville initially opposed the Protect College Sports Act because he saw it as government overreach into college sports. But a primary purpose of the Protect College Sports Act is to grant the NCAA a limited antitrust exemption in order to restore the five-year eligibility rule and the one-time free transfer for athletes (subsequent transfers would require an athlete to sit out from competition for a year, with some exceptions). So, this month, Tuberville switched his vote to yes.

"When I was coaching, you used to be able to develop a young person over a four- or five-year period and send them out into the real world as a man or woman with a degree, an education. And that's what it's about," Tuberville said in June. "Now you're lucky to keep a player one season." Though Tuberville may be the Senate's most recognizable name to sports fans, he is far from the only senator with a background in Division I college athletics.