Sen. Ted Cruz is confident the Protect College Sports Act will hit the Senate floor this week. Whether it actually does is another matter.

Cruz, speaking with CBS Sports on Monday, was resolute. The bill received a significant boost late Friday when the Big Ten and SEC endorsed the legislation, giving it new momentum after weeks of negotiations. Cruz, one of three authors of the bipartisan legislation, said he has spoken directly with Senate Majority Leader John Thune and President Donald Trump multiple times and believes the Senate will stay in session until the bill passes.

“This bill is going to pass,” Cruz said, “and it’s going to pass this week out of the Senate.”

But between confidence and a floor vote stands a procedural labyrinth. As of late Monday afternoon, the text of the bill had yet to be finalized. “Final details are still being worked through,” said a spokesperson for Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., a co-author of the bill.

Cloture, the step required to schedule a vote in the Senate, could drag on for several days or longer, according to a Republican Commerce Committee aide. Even if Thune filed cloture on Monday evening, that would potentially schedule the bill for a late-week vote at the earliest.

The Senate’s final week before its August recess is already congested. A spending bill, budget resolution and three or four additional competing items are fighting for floor time. The Senate is tentatively scheduled to recess Aug. 7, though that date could be extended into the weekend, sources told CBS Sports.

Big Ten, SEC join to support Protect College Sports Act, breathing new life into landmark legislation

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Brandon Marcello

Cruz has a bigger vision for where this ends: President Trump signing the bill into law before a college football game kicks off later this fall.

“It is my hope that President Trump will sign this bill into law on ‘College GameDay’ this fall when the House comes back and passes it with a big bipartisan vote, following the big bipartisan vote we’re going to get in the Senate, I believe, this week,” he said.

Trump told reporters Monday that “the NIL, or whatever it is, is very close to getting solved.”

The urgency is real, though nothing about this bill has moved on schedule. It was on life support late Thursday as the Big Ten and SEC wrestled with lawmakers over language on associated entities and the revenue-share cap before a breakthrough Friday provided the two conferences with the clarity they needed.

Cruz credited the White House with playing a decisive role in forcing the breakthrough. He described what he called “very intense” conversations over the weekend involving Big Ten and SEC commissioners, university presidents, Trump adviser Randy Levine and Cody Campbell, who leads the President’s commission on college sports.

“At the end of the day, everyone recognized  No. 1, the crisis, and No. 2, that this bill is the only viable path to addressing the crisis,” Cruz said.

“I think Randy and I are common-law married in 12 states; we’ve spent so much time talking,” Cruz joked.

The associated entities provision is the mechanism meant to prevent schools from routing money to athletes through corporate sponsors and multimedia rights partners to circumvent the revenue-share cap. The final deal raised the revenue-share cap to $48.8 million, including $21.3 million from the House settlement, a $22.5 million retention pool and $5 million for non-revenue sports.

Senate passage this week and a signing ceremony on college football’s biggest weekly stage remain aspirational. Sen. Eric Schmitt, one of the three authors of the bill, appeared on CBS Sports’ College Football Insiders and said he believes the bill could snag 80-plus votes in the Senate because of the Big Ten and SEC’s endorsement. The bill still requires at least 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, and if it clears the Senate, it would still need to pass the House before reaching the President’s desk.

Without a Senate vote before the August recess, the chances for passing the bill into law would shrink considerably. Most lawmakers will be focused on the federal budget and campaigning for mid-term elections when the Congressional recess ends. 

Cruz acknowledged the legislation isn’t perfect. It’s the product of three years of negotiation and months of daily sessions with Cantwell, the bill’s Democratic co-author. He said Monday the Big Ten and SEC endorsement fundamentally changed the bill’s prospects in Washington, D.C.

“Many of the hurdles this faced in the House were because of concerns the SEC and Big Ten had,” Cruz said. “And now broadening that coalition, I think it makes it much easier for Republicans and Democrats to support the bill.”

The coalition behind the bill now includes 27 athletic conferences, more than 360 colleges and universities, the NCAA, NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, the players associations for both the NFL and NBA, and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, Cruz said.

The bill would provide a limited antitrust exemption for the NCAA and its schools to enforce a cap on payments to athletes and rules related to eligibility and transfers. The bill also creates an opportunity for schools to sell media rights as one large entity rather than on a conference-by-conference basis. The Big Ten and SEC do not want to participate in the media pool and sought language making clear participation is voluntary. Smaller conferences believe that pooling media rights will help fund less-profitable sports and close the financial gap between the rest of college sports and the two biggest conferences.

“If we ended up in a world with a mini NFL, the giant powerhouses would continue to survive, but all of the rest of the schools would have their programs decimated,” Cruz said. “And when college football gets destroyed, it doesn’t just take football down with it.”