In May 2026, Senators Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell introduced the Protect College Sports Act. Among other things, this bill contains an antitrust exemption that would give the NCAA legal cover to enforce a cap on student-athlete compensation earned through revenue-sharing, similar to salary caps in professional sports. Coverage tends to describe this provision as “protection from lawsuits.” This is accurate, but it understates what the exemption does. At its core, it is a stand-in for the arrangement that makes those salary caps possible—something that college sports has no way to reproduce on its own.
Under the House settlement from 2025, Division I schools can pay student-athletes a portion of their athletic department revenues. Schools agreed to cap these revenue-sharing payments at roughly $20 million per school. This arrangement is the source of the antitrust problem. When firms that compete for the same workers agree on how much to pay them, it is treated by antitrust law as wage-fixing. A joint agreement by schools to impose a universal ceiling on revenue-sharing payments to student-athletes—and thus suppress the price of an input they buy—is precisely that. So-called “amateurism” once justified this in collegiate sports, but the Supreme Court’s 2021 Alston decision made clear this exception no longer holds. Now, a cap on student-athlete pay is vulnerable to antitrust scrutiny. The antitrust exemption in the Protect College Sports Act would protect this cap.
But why does the NCAA’s cap need this protection when comparable caps in professional sports do not? The reason is that caps in professional sports are the result of a bargain. Leagues desire salary caps to control costs and to preserve competitive balance. Caps are therefore intended to ensure a more compelling product by preventing the wealthiest franchises from buying all the best talent and dominating the competition. However, a cap also suppresses what players earn, so players do not accept one without getting something in return. In the NFL and NBA, for example, players are employees who bargain collectively through a union. In exchange for accepting a ceiling on pay, players secure free agency, minimum salaries, guaranteed benefits, and a defined share of league revenue, among other things. Antitrust law has long recognized this trade-off through the “non-statutory labor exemption,” which exempts restraints that emerge from genuine collective bargaining. Caps in professional sports survive not because they are lawful in themselves, but because collective bargaining shields them from antitrust scrutiny. College sports have no equivalent arrangement. Currently, student-athletes are not employees: they have no union and they do not engage in collective bargaining. The Protect College Sports Act takes no position on whether that should change.
Absent a bargain underlying the revenue-sharing cap in college sports, it remains subject to antitrust scrutiny. This is the gap that the antitrust exemption in the Protect College Sports Act would fill. What professional leagues obtain through collective bargaining, this bill would instead provide to universities by statute: protection conferred by Congress rather than derived from the consent of the student-athletes. The significance lies in the contrast between the two regimes. Without the bill, the cap is legally vulnerable. Schools that agreed to it can still be sued for enforcing it, and the cap holds only as long as it survives challenge. With the bill, that vulnerability is removed and the cap becomes a stable, enforceable limit on revenue-sharing rather than a contested one.
Author Backgrounds:
Ethan Loveland is a Senior Consultant with Coherent Economics, LLC. He has supported clients in antitrust litigation, intellectual property disputes, contract disputes, and consumer protection.
Jacob Pagel is a Senior Analyst with Coherent Economics, LLC. He received his B.S in Statistics from Texas A&M University.
The views and opinions expressed in this content are solely those of the authors, do not necessarily reflect the views of the firm, and should not be construed as professional advice.