The UEFA Champions League final is the biggest sporting event in Europe, so it was no surprise that CBS’s Saturday afternoon coverage was top notch—particularly with Clive Tyldesley on play-by-play. Tyldesley and analyst Rob Green did not try to oversell a tense game that PSG won on a penalty shootout, and they obviously didn’t have to.

The best moment came at the end, before Arsenal’s Gabriel Magalhães sent the final penalty kick over the goal, sealing PSG’s win. As the Brazilian set up his shot, Tyldesley remarked, “I’m a little surprised to see him amongst Arsenal’s chosen five”—accurately predicting Magalhães’ game-ending miss.

And now, the main event…

It’s hard to find bipartisan agreement on much of anything these days. Which is why it felt like a minor miracle when Senators Ted Cruz, Maria Cantwell, Eric Schmitt, and Chris Coons unveiled the Protect College Sports Act of 2026 last week. Considering that Donald Trump appears genuinely interested in the issue, it’s easy to imagine the legislation gaining traction sooner rather than later, and reshaping the economics of college sports.

The headline-making provisions are largely what you’d expect. The NCAA and its conferences would receive a measure of legal peace through a limited antitrust shield—allowing them to enforce eligibility standards and transfer rules without constantly looking over their shoulder for the next lawsuit. The bill also takes aim at conference consolidation, establishes a federal framework for athlete agents, and formalizes name, image, and likeness rights. Though, the legislation artfully dodges the most explosive question of all: whether college athletes are employees.

The more intriguing elements in the bill, however, involve television. Tucked into the legislative plumbing is what amounts to a congressionally sanctioned media-rights experiment: pooled inventory, local broadcast obligations, use-it-or-lose-it requirements, and a modest expansion of the calendar protections that have long kept the NFL off certain Fridays and Saturdays.

The proposal also partially unwinds a story that began more than four decades ago with NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, the 1984 Supreme Court decision that broke the NCAA’s grip on college football television rights. Since then, conferences and schools have largely negotiated media deals on their own. But under the Protect College Sports Act, schools and conferences could form a new pooled-rights entity and jointly market telecast rights—giving college sports leaders the ability to compete more directly against professional leagues for media dollars. They’d also potentially be more attractive to streamers like Netflix, which have shown more enthusiasm for marquee events than season-long tonnage.

There are some red flags for streamers, though. The bill introduces a new concept called “market-level broadcast access,” designed to prevent local college football and basketball games from disappearing behind paywalls. In essence, if an Alabama–Georgia game landed on Netflix or Apple TV, the rights-holder would still have to provide one free-to-view local option in each of the schools’ home markets. That could be done through a sublicense, a local station arrangement, or a free affiliated offering. Either way, it’s still a pain in the ass.

The F.C.C., naturally, would oversee the inevitable battles over that access. Not because Netflix would suddenly become a broadcast licensee, but rather because the commission would gain jurisdiction over complaints alleging violations of the bill’s good-faith negotiation requirement. The provision would thus give regulators a modest foothold in monitoring how streamers distribute premium live sports. That may unsettle professional leagues: The NFL, in particular, may not love the precedent embedded in the legislation that certain sports rights are so culturally significant that they cannot be treated as ordinary subscription content.

That’s not the only novelty. There’s also a “requirement of use” rule for sports other than football and basketball, including many Olympic sports. A broadcaster or streamer that licenses non-marquee sports, such as volleyball, wrestling, or softball, could not simply warehouse those games indefinitely. After one year, any unused rights could revert. The practical result could be an explosion of lower-cost, always-on college sports programming, perhaps on FAST and A.V.O.D. platforms hungry for live content.

And the bill doesn’t stop there. At a moment when Washington has spent years debating a federal right-of-publicity statute for performers, Congress appears to be edging toward creating a federal framework for college athletes’ N.I.L. rights, including “computer-generated representation.” That language opens a host of questions. Anyone who profits from the commercial value of athletes’ identities—video game publishers, Peyton Manning–style production companies, athlete-influencer agencies, documentary filmmakers, advertisers—should be scrutinizing the fine print. Somewhere, lawyers are preparing First Amendment arguments.

Then there is the amendment to one of the most consequential laws in sports media. The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961—the statute that NFL fans are forced to relearn about every autumn—has long prevented the league from scheduling games on most Fridays and Saturdays during the heart of the college season. The Protect College Sports Act would expand that protected window—currently, the second Friday in September through the second Saturday in December—to the first Friday in September through the third Saturday in December. In practice, this could complicate the NFL’s early-September Friday experiments and some mid-December Saturday inventory. Christmas Day games might still fall outside the expanded protected window, although maybe not every year.

Whether that provision survives what is certain to be an intense lobbying campaign from Roger Goodell is another question entirely. But if nothing else, the proposal is a reminder that this legislation is about far more than N.I.L. collectives and transfer portals.

Thanks, Eriq. See you all tomorrow.

John

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