College sports leaders’ latest push for federal legislation has stalled.
The SCORE Act, which plenty around the industry hoped would reach the House floor this week, was effectively cast aside after the Congressional Black Caucus pulled its support for the bill on Monday.
By Tuesday, the House Rules Committee postponed its markup of the bill, leaving it in limbo. And, more likely, dead.
“The financial pressure on athletic departments are real and it’s being wielded on Capitol Hill, as a weapon against the very athletes this bill claims to protect,” Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) said during a Tuesday news conference. “What the SCORE Act would’ve delivered are massive handouts to the NCAA, SEC and Big Ten dressed up with modest concessions for a select group of athletes at the wealthiest schools. Meanwhile, every other athlete at every other institution gets left out in the cold.”
The SCORE Act has been the preferred congressional action of the Power Four commissioners to effectively codify parts of the House settlement and grant college sports the antitrust exemption plenty so desperately crave.
And now that it’s not going anywhere? We’ll see.
Many in the industry remain optimistic a bipartisan approach from Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) could be the solution. Cruz and Cantwell’s bill has been percolating for weeks, and there’s belief language could be released for broader discussion as soon as this week.
There’s also, well, politics at play with all of this.
President Trump has staked some capital on college sports legislation in creating a presidential committee composed of myriad stakeholders from in and around the enterprise to peck away at potential options. With midterms approaching, it remains unclear whether Democrats will be willing to help deliver the White House a legislative win on such a contentious issue.
Players push back on NCAA employment argument
One notable moment from Trahan’s Tuesday news conference came from two women’s basketball players who pushed back on the NCAA’s position that athletes do not want employee status.
Michigan’s Brooke Daniels and Maryland’s Oluchi Okananwa, who joined Trahan for the call, were asked about the NCAA’s and conferences’ repeated assertion that athletes generally do not want to be classified as employees.
They were, shall we say, not exactly aligned with NCAA talking points:
Daniels: “They don’t want that employee status to be a thing because when you’re an employee, you get the right to unionize. Being an employee also opens up doors for international athletes like Charlisse [Leger-Walker] and other athletes that I’ve played with at my time at Oakland and even at my time at Michigan.
“When you also are employees, once again, you have to listen and have somebody else at the table, and you can’t just make rules based off of how you feel. You have to have rules and involve everybody. Being an employee pretty much formalizes that you have to have different agreements and approvals involving different people that are probably going to go against your underlying issues that you’re trying to bring forward.”
Okananwa: “It’s honestly comical to have them say that we don’t want to be seen as employees when we’re kind of already operating as employee workers. I mean, our sport is at the center of everything that we do, especially with our time here at the university. Rightfully so, because it is something that we love and something that we 100% signed up for. But I think it’s time and they know it’s time to come to the truth, which is that we are employees. We should be treated as such and we should be brought to the table with employee rights.”
I’ve been skeptical of the persistent contention that athletes don’t want to be employees, but it was refreshing to hear a pair of high-major players actually enumerate those sentiments.
