The evidence and the testimony

The Senate Commerce Committee spent three hours Wednesday talking about the Group of 6. Marshall losing its bowl game after its coach left and dozens of players hit the portal. UNLV losing its quarterback over NIL. Washington State losing tens of millions in media revenue overnight. More than 100 programs eliminated since 2023. Ninety percent of College Football Playoff revenue flowing to the Power Four and Notre Dame.

The G6 was the crisis. The G6 was the cautionary tale. The G6 was the reason five witnesses sat at the table to discuss the Protect College Sports Act.

The G6 was not one of them.

The one G6 commissioner at the table — Pac-12 commissioner Teresa Gould — didn’t come to represent the Group of 6. She came to represent a conference that doesn’t want to be one.

The evidence

Sen. Ted Cruz opened the hearing with case studies. Marshall withdrew from the Independence Bowl after its coach left and 25 players entered the portal. UNLV lost its starting quarterback midseason in an NIL dispute. The Pac-12 collapsed under realignment.

“Mid-major programs become farm teams for the blue bloods,” Cruz said. “If we do nothing, the current trajectory will concentrate more power in fewer hands and widen the gap between the richest programs and everyone else.”

Sen. Maria Cantwell added the numbers. Since 2023, more than 100 programs and more than 1,000 athletic scholarships eliminated. James Madison charges every student $2,362 a year in athletics fees — the highest mandatory athletics fee in the nation. Cantwell said Washington State had a $35 million hole blown in its budget after the Pac-12 imploded.

Sen. Jacky Rosen cited the Knight Foundation: “90% of that revenue goes to schools in the Power Four and Notre Dame.”

Every example was a G6 program or a program caught in the wreckage of Power 4 realignment. The committee built its case on the backs of programs that weren’t at the table.

The testimony

Nick Saban — appointed by President Trump as co-chair of a presidential commission on college sports — delivered the sharpest imagery.

“If you had the biggest, baddest Ferrari that you could ever have, and it was going 150 miles an hour toward the Grand Canyon, somebody needs to tap the brakes,” Saban said.

He walked the committee through the spending escalation at Alabama’s NIL collective — the booster-funded entity that raises money for Name, Image and Likeness deals that, for the most part, amount to pay-for-play athletic compensation disguised as brand deals: “$2.7 million... $7 million... $10 million... I retired. Next year $17 million. Next year $24 million. Now you have schools that have close to $40 million rosters.”

“It’s become an arms race,” he said. “Who spends the most has got the best chance to win. But I think it’s a race to the bottom.”

Pete Bevacqua, Notre Dame’s athletic director, warned of the logical conclusion: “You’re gonna have a Super League because there’s only going to be a small number of universities that are gonna wake up year-in and year-out and say ‘OK, we can still invest this type of money to field a nationally competitive football team.’”

“I don’t think a Super League is good for college football,” Bevacqua said, “and I certainly don’t think a Super League is good for college sports.”

E. Gordon Gee — 82, president of five universities across four conferences — said he should be playing Canasta on a beach. Instead he was at a Senate hearing accepting blame.

“We’ve agreed to outrageous contracts, reduced the academic mission of being a student athlete, and abrogated too much power to athletic directors and conference commissioners,” Gee said. “They have a very limited notion of what they should be about.”

College sports will lose more than $5 billion this year, he said. College football already has twice the viewership of the NBA but half the media revenue.

Three Power 4 voices. Three diagnoses of a Power 4 problem that happens to swallow everyone else.

The reluctant representative

Teresa Gould has spent 36 years in college athletics. She is the commissioner of the Pac-12, which is relaunching July 1 with nine member universities.

The Pac-12 is a Group of 6 conference. It does not want to be one.

Gould testified about student-athletes traveling coast to coast for contests, about athletes who “never show up at an in-person class on their campus anymore,” about well-being no longer at the center of decisions because of economic pressures.

She did not come to speak for the G6. She came to speak for a conference trying to rebuild from the wreckage of realignment — the very wreckage the committee cited as evidence of the crisis. The Pac-12 is not lobbying for the middle class of college sports. It is trying to escape it. Nobody wants to solve these problems. They just want them to be somebody else’s.

The ACC and Big 12 submitted letters of support. So did the American Conference and Conference USA. On paper, that looks like a coalition. It is not. Cantwell said she believes the ACC and Big 12 sent supportive letters because they fear their leagues will “eventually, go the way of the Pac-12 and be picked apart by the SEC and Big Ten.” They “think that’s what is going to happen to them next.” They are not advocating for the G6. They are trying to avoid becoming the G6. The common interest is real. The solidarity is not.

They know how their system has damaged the programs whose voices never seem to matter — until the issues those programs raised start threatening someone more powerful. Program cuts, collapsing media revenue, athletes exploited by unregulated agents — the G6 has lived this for years. The ACC and Big 12 started caring when the same forces reached their door.

The American and Conference USA sent support letters too. They actually need this bill. But letters don’t testify. Letters don’t answer questions. Letters don’t get quoted in the recap stories.

Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester flagged the gap. The panel was heavy on high-revenue football. She asked for HBCU representation, non-revenue sport voices and female athletes. The Congressional Black Caucus sent letters with concerns. The committee had heard the criticism before — after being called out for not including athletes, they added Lance Holtzclaw, a student-athlete at Utah. A Power 4 player.

The pattern held. The G6 was discussed. The G6 was not consulted.

The door that only opens from the inside

Twenty-three years ago, Tulane president Scott Cowen sat in a similar chair and made a similar argument. His football team had gone 12-0 in 1998, finished 10th in the BCS standings and played in the Liberty Bowl while one-loss teams from major conferences played for the national championship.

Cowen testified before Congress on Oct. 29, 2003 about exclusion. About a system designed by the powerful, for the powerful, that offered everyone else a seat at the kids’ table and called it access.

The names change. The dynamic doesn’t. Jamie Pollard has spent more than two decades as Iowa State’s athletic director — a Big 12 school that has watched conference realignment, revenue concentration and rule-making consolidation reshape the sport around programs like his. He described the current landscape as well as anyone: “The same people that say they want rules only want rules if they don’t apply to them.”

The Big Ten and SEC want rules that don’t apply to them. The ACC and Big 12 want rules that protect them from the Big Ten and SEC but don’t require them to share with the G6. Everybody supports reform until the reform applies to them. You can write a transfer rule. You can cap agent fees. You can mandate a revenue-share number. You cannot legislate the willingness to live by the rules you wrote.

More than 40 pieces of college sports legislation have been introduced in the last six years. None reached a floor vote. That is why. Cruz called this bill “the last, best hope.”

Holtzclaw, the only athlete at the table, said something that landed differently than he may have intended: “Decisions about college athletics should not be made solely for student athletes, but made with student athletes.”

Replace “student athletes” with “the Group of 6” and the sentence still works.

It leaves us asking: who is going to be the next Scott Cowen? And will anybody bother to invite that person to speak?

What the bill would do

The Protect College Sports Act is a bipartisan bill sponsored by Cruz, Cantwell and others. Key provisions:

• Antitrust exemption — Limited exemption allowing the NCAA to enforce governance rules without legal challenge. Congress is the only entity that can grant this.
• Transfer rules — One-time transfer without restriction. Additional transfers require a one-year residency waiver (exceptions for graduation and extenuating circumstances). Five-year eligibility clock.
• NIL and revenue sharing — Codifies the House settlement framework (current cap $20.5 million per school). NIL disclosure required over $600.
• Agent regulation — Agent registration required. Fee cap at 5% (current college agent fees run as high as 20%).
• Media rights pooling — Optional pooling requiring 75% of FBS opt-in (104 of 138 schools). Local market game availability required — no paywall. Unused non-revenue sports media rights revert to schools.
• Athlete protections — Scholarship protections for injury, performance and roster decisions. Health coverage for five years post-eligibility with no out-of-pocket costs. $60 million medical trust fund including HBCU coverage. Independent medical staff — coaches cannot overrule doctors. Whistleblower protections.
• Competitive balance — Big Ten/SEC expansion prohibition. Championship and training facility parity for men’s and women’s sports.
• Recruiting restrictions — No coaching staff recruiting during season or playoffs.
• Eligibility — Defines who qualifies as a professional (G-League, European pros).
• Commission — Creates a commission to study unresolved issues including employment status and collective bargaining.