College football’s greatest athletes have never had it so good.
But as the likes of The Ohio State University’s Jeremiah Smith and the University of Texas’ Arch Manning get ready to duke it out on the field this season, the fight over their financial futures may well be waged not on the gridiron — but in Washington.
A recent rapid expansion of labor rights for student athletes has upended college sports — once considered the domain of amateur athletes. After more than a decade of political and legal fights, players are free to change schools with no penalty, take part in endorsement deals and receive payment directly from universities.
The NCAA, which oversees more than 500,000 athletes from 1,100 colleges, has warned that recent developments and looming questions threaten competitive balance — and may even harm college athletes — and it’s looking to get back a measure of control, with help from Washington.
The nation’s sports-fan-in-chief is ready to engage: President Donald Trump in July signed an executive order geared at “saving college sports,” while congressional Republicans, meanwhile, are eyeing a sweeping piece of legislation that could potentially bring a close to one of the most tumultuous periods in college athletics — but end the decadeslong push for collective bargaining for players.
Labor rights advocates are worried. “I think having a federal law, plus an EO, plus Trump’s signature on the federal law, these things would sort of change the game, and I think ultimately set us back,” said Jason Stahl, the founder and executive director of the College Football Players Association, which pushes for labor rights for players.
At the center of the debate is the SCORE Act — a GOP bill sponsored by Rep. Gus Bilirakis and backed by the NCAA that passed through two House committees in July. The bill would protect the NCAA from a litany of future lawsuits challenging its rule making authority and bar universities from classifying student athletes as employees — arming the NCAA with renewed authority over a sporting environment just about everyone involved agrees has turned into a Wild West.
Trump’s executive order set the stage for what could be a larger overhaul of collegiate athletics by Republicans in Washington. The directive tasks the National Labor Relations Board and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer with making a conclusion on college athletes’ employment status, which could affect everything from how they’re paid to potential benefits and workers compensation.
The NLRB declined to comment, but Stahl said that the agency under the Trump administration will almost certainly recommend classifying the players as non-employees, making a potential pathway toward collective bargaining much more difficult.
When reached for comment on the SCORE Act, the White House did not explicitly endorse the bill but said the president was focused on college sports.
“President Trump signed an executive order to provide the stability, fairness, and balance necessary to protect student athletes and college sports for generations to come,” spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement. “This action is a crucial first step for the survival of all college athletics, and the President looks forward to Congress prioritizing this issue in the months ahead.”
And the president has been vocal about his plans to reshape college athletics.
Trump revitalized the presidential council on sports, fitness and nutrition in July, inviting famous former college athletes including Ohio State’s Nick Bosa and UNC’s Lawrence Taylor to be a part of it. Fixing college football, the president said at a White House event promoting the council, would be a key element of its mission.
“The fans are upset about it,” Trump told reporters. “And players are being taken from team after team and being traded around like playing cards. And a lot of money’s passing and nobody knows what’s happening. So these people behind me are going to be very much involved in figuring that whole thing out and working on it and trying to bring some sanity to that incredible — not only the football — college sports.”
For the last several years, much of the money headed to the players was fronted by donor-led third-party organizations dubbed NIL collectives — which effectively paid players largely for just joining programs — limiting the control coaches and programs have over their rosters.
College football’s smaller schools often see their best players leave every year for greener and more profitable pastures. Longtime fans are lamenting the loss of loyalty in their favorite sport.
The NCAA and other backers of the SCORE Act say it’s necessary to add guardrails and stability back into the sports landscape. Critics call it chaos. “It’s a mess,” Trump said.
As for labor advocates? They call it a rebalancing of a system that allowed schools, leagues and administrators to rake in billions while the athletes saw virtually nothing.
“I have a corporate job,” said Justin Falcinelli, who won two national championships as an offensive lineman with Clemson and now works with Stahl’s College Football Players Association. “If I were to get an offer from a different corporation for much higher, my job would have to reconcile that and either match it or let me leave. That’s the reality of business.”
Player labor advocates fret that a combination of the SCORE Act, Trump’s new focus on collegiate sports and recent settlements could unwind the hard-won economic benefits they’ve only recently obtained.
For decades, coaches saw their salaries jump while the biggest universities raked in millions. Meanwhile, “just eating a cookie could end your scholarship,” Falcinelli said.
“You see coaching salaries just increase ten-fold,” he said. “They build a $70 million football facility. All this time saying ‘we can’t afford to pay players though, that’s out of the question.’”
Already, major labor changes are afoot heading into the 2025-26 football season. In June, a district court judge approved a major NCAA settlement that allows schools to directly pay their players. Every school that opts to participate into the system directly will have a cap of $20.5 million to dole out to athletes for the coming season.
But that will likely not be the final world. Because of the constantly shifting legal landscape, the NCAA has been pushing hard for the SCORE Act. “Some of the most important changes can only come from Congress,” Tim Buckley, NCAA senior vice president of external affairs, told POLITICO in a statement, pledging to “build a bipartisan path forward that ensures the long-term success of college sports and the ongoing opportunities they provide to young people.”
The NCAA has spent years begging for congressional intervention. Its president, Charlie Baker, once a popular Republican governor of Massachusetts, is banging the drum for the SCORE Act.
“The opportunity here for the SCORE Act to do some very good things for college sports is quite high,” he said on CBS Sports in August. “It’s very encouraging. Let’s leave it at that.”
Baker supports the SCORE Act for several key reasons, he told CBS: It preempts conflicting laws on NIL in dozens of states in the interest of competitive balance, provides the NCAA with anti-trust exemptions to draft new guidelines for players on concepts like eligibility and “deals with the employment question.”
Proponents of the SCORE Act also cite more selling points. The bill would guarantee academic and career support, they argue, bar schools from revoking scholarships in the event of an injury and mandate that institutions cover medical expenses for student athletes for injuries incurred on the field for up to three years post-graduation or separation, among other benefits.
And the alternative, the SCORE Act’s proponents argue, only threatens more discord — particularly for athletes in non-prime-time sports.
“Talk about Olympic sports,” Baker said. “You turn everyone into an employee and it’ll have profoundly negative impact on Olympic sports.”
It’s not just the GOP that backs the SCORE Act. Two Democrats, Reps. Janelle Bynum of Oregon and Shomari Figures of Alabama, joined Republicans in co-sponsoring the bill in July, and two Texas Democrats signed on in August. But many Democrats oppose the legislation, along with major sports unions and labor organizations.
“Any legislation like the SCORE Act that undermines those rights is nothing more than an attack on the very people who keep collegiate sports alive,” Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.), who introduced competing legislation in the House to give college athletes the right to collectively bargain, told POLITICO in a statement. “Congress should use its power to deliver economic fairness for the athletes whose hard work fuels this industry — not to protect the billion-dollar interests that exploit them.”
Figures, one of the Democratic co-sponsors of the SCORE Act, said that advocates for granting college athletes employee status aren’t taking into account the complexity such a measure would introduce into the landscape.
“At the end of the day college athletics has always been about student athletes, students first, and we have to protect that in the long term interest of college sports,” he said, “and in the long term interest of setting students up for success and allowing universities to provide a lot of the benefits that they can as student athletes.”
Nick Niedzwiadek and Juan Perez Jr. contributed to this report.
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