Ossoff says NIL bill is a good first step toward fixing college sports
WASHINGTON — Georgia U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff was among the 77 senators who voted Monday in favor of a bill that would create national standards for collegiate athletics, including how much schools can pay individual players for the use of their name, image or likeness.
The Atlanta Democrat said the measure would make clear improvements to college sports, such as mandating health coverage for athletes and limiting agents’ fees, while making it easier for schools to sustain teams with small fanbases.
“College sports is genuinely in crisis, and the programs that are closing are women’s sports programs and nonrevenue Olympic sports,” he said Tuesday. “The status quo is untenable.”
The bill passed with a bipartisan supermajority. But it is not without its critics, including Georgia U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, who was among 20 Democrats and two Republicans voting “no.”
Warnock said the measure allows top-tier programs to continue to rake in cash without requiring them to share the wealth with the student-athletes who fill out their rosters.
Paul McDonald, an attorney who has represented athletes in lawsuits against the NCAA, said Ossoff and the 26 other Democrats who voted for the Protect College Sports Act should answer for why they supported the bill over the objections of the Congressional Black Caucus and NAACP.
Those groups have argued that top-tier college teams that profit from the talents and labor of Black athletes are often in states that have attempted to gerrymander maps to reduce Black representation.
McDonald said Ossoff and other Senate Democrats running for reelection risk alienating Black voters whose support they will need on Election Day.
Ossoff said that was not his concern when he voted in favor of the bill, although he is open to improvements as the legislative process continues.
“My job is to make the best call I can on the merits of the policy,” he said. “I believe that this is an improvement over a deeply broken status quo.”
The Protect College Sports Act has the support of two organizations that provide scholarships to students of historically Black colleges and universities: the United Negro College Fund and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. The two largest sports conferences for HBCUs, the Southwestern Athletic Conference and the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, also urged lawmakers to pass the measure.
The bill creates a federal framework for colleges to pay athletes while limiting athletes to one penalty-free transfer between schools in five years of athletic eligibility. It also restricts how much agents can be paid as part of NIL deals.
The bill now goes to the U.S. House, which is not scheduled to hold votes until after the midterm elections. A different name, image and likeness proposal has been stalled in that chamber for months, and it is unclear whether the Protect College Sports Act has enough support in that chamber to pass if it is brought up for a vote.
Georgia’s most storied college football programs celebrated the bill’s passage.
The Southeastern Conference, which counts the University of Georgia among its 16 member institutions, issued a statement saying the bill’s passage “represents an important step toward establishing a clear and durable national framework for college athletics.”
Georgia Tech athletic director Ryan Alpert said he was grateful the bill had cleared the chamber late Monday night.
“A federal solution would be a big step toward bringing stability to college athletics and making sure that we’re able to continue to provide student-athletes with comprehensive opportunities to thrive on and off the field, during their college years and beyond,” he said.
— AJC columnist Ken Sugiura contributed to this report.