The Protect College Sports Act and the HUSTLE Act, Explained

The 30-second version

Why Washington is finally moving

For most of the NIL era, “federal college sports bill” has been shorthand for a press release that goes nowhere. More than a dozen have been introduced since 2020. None became law. What’s different now is that the ground underneath college sports actually changed — and the change created problems only Congress can fully solve.

The House v. NCAA settlement took effect in July 2025. It let schools pay athletes directly for the first time, capped that direct revenue sharing (starting at $20.5 million per school in Year 1, rising annually — our Year 2 revenue-sharing guide covers the current cap and how schools are deploying it), and created a new enforcement body, the College Sports Commission, to review every third-party NIL deal worth $600 or more through its NIL Go clearinghouse. ^[15][16][22]

That system is now producing something college sports has never had: an official ledger of NIL activity. Through April 30, 2026, NIL Go had cleared 26,556 deals worth $242.35 million since launch, with 2026 alone averaging nearly $29 million in approvals per month. It had also rejected 1,153 deals worth $56 million that failed its market-value and business-purpose tests. ^[15]

But a settlement is not a statute. The CSC’s authority rests on a court agreement, not law, and it is already straining. Its own CEO, Bryan Seeley, described the environment bluntly this spring:

“It’s a market where schools are manufacturing NIL for student-athletes.”

Deals routed through school-connected “associated entities” — collectives, multimedia rightsholders, apparel partners — made up 78% of submissions during the winter transfer window, far beyond what the system was built to handle. ^[21]

Meanwhile, more than 30 states have their own NIL laws, several written specifically to give their flagship programs an edge, and the threat of antitrust litigation hangs over every rule the NCAA tries to enforce. Schools want legal cover. Athletes’ advocates want enforceable rights. Both are asking Congress for it — they just disagree, sharply, on the terms.

That’s the collision the Protect College Sports Act and the HUSTLE Act are trying to resolve.

How we got here

The Protect College Sports Act, explained

The PCSA runs 111 pages and touches nearly every unresolved fight in college sports. ^[19] The honest way to read it is as a trade: athletes get a package of federal rights and protections they’ve never had, and in exchange, the NCAA and conferences get something they’ve wanted for a decade — legal protection to actually enforce rules. Everything else in the bill hangs off that trade.

One national NIL standard

The bill grants student athletes a new federal right to earn NIL compensation and replaces the state-by-state patchwork with a single national standard. ^[1] Schools, conferences, and the NCAA could not punish an athlete for signing an NIL deal or hiring a registered agent. ^[4]

It also writes basic consumer protection into NIL contracts for the first time: agreements must spell out the key terms — what the athlete is actually obligated to do, and how much they’ll be paid. ^[1] Anyone who has seen the vague “future NIL activities to be determined” deals that NIL Go keeps rejecting will recognize why that’s in there.

Two provisions matter enormously and have gotten almost no coverage:

The $600 disclosure rule. Athletes’ NIL compensation above $600 per year must be disclosed — the same threshold the House settlement already uses for NIL Go — but now as a matter of federal law rather than court agreement, with student-athlete privacy protections built in. ^[4]

A federal NIL agreement database. Section 104 of the bill establishes a database of NIL agreements. ^[3][4] Read together with the disclosure rule, this would create the most complete official record of the NIL market ever assembled. How much of it becomes visible to the public is the open question — the bill text pairs disclosure with privacy protection, which suggests aggregate reporting rather than a browsable list of individual deals. We’ll be watching that detail closely, because it determines whether federal law makes this market more transparent to fans and analysts, or only to regulators. (Our view: even aggregate, sport-level and position-level disclosure would be a major upgrade over today’s landscape of leaks and agent-sourced numbers.)

Agent rules with teeth

Both bills share DNA here, and the PCSA carries the full package: ^[1][2][4]

• Agents must register with a state and certify that registration to the NCAA before they can lawfully represent a student athlete.
• Agent fees are capped at 5%. For context, the NFL and NBA players’ associations cap agent fees at 3% and 4% respectively — college athletes, many of them teenagers, have until now negotiated in a market with no cap at all.
• The NCAA must maintain a public, searchable registry of registered agents, so athletes and families can verify who they’re dealing with.
• A range of deceptive practices becomes federally prohibited — including misrepresenting NIL opportunities to induce an athlete to enroll at or transfer to a particular school, and signing athletes to contracts that extend beyond their eligibility. Violations can void the contract and expose agents to damages. ^[3][4]

Senator Cantwell has framed this bluntly, saying some athletes have been victimized by agents charging exorbitant commissions or attempting to claim the athlete’s intellectual property outright. ^[6]

Sec. 115 · Title II

The money: revenue sharing and a new TV framework

The bill doesn’t blow up the House settlement — it builds on it. Section 115 extends the settlement’s revenue-share cap structure in federal law, taking the framework schools are already operating under and giving it a statutory foundation that outlives the court agreement. ^[3][4]

The more ambitious money provision is Title II, which amends the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 — the law that lets the NFL, NBA, and NHL pool their media rights — to extend the same antitrust protection to college sports. ^[1] Schools could voluntarily join a collective to jointly negotiate media rights; supporters estimate pooled negotiation could generate more than $9 billion in new revenue across college sports, with requirements attached that the money support women’s and Olympic programs. ^[1][2] No school is forced to join, and existing media contracts stay in place. ^[1]

Title II also includes fan-facing provisions that have flown under the radar: market-level broadcast access requirements for football and basketball, a prohibition on certain conference mergers, a requirement that distributors who buy rights to non-revenue sports actually make those games reasonably available to the public, and a directive that the college football season conclude by roughly January 8 where practicable. ^[3][4]

Player movement, eligibility, and the coaching carousel

This is where the bill will generate the most locker-room debate: ^[1][3]

• Transfers: every athlete gets one transfer with no eligibility penalty. A second transfer means sitting out a year, with exceptions — including if a school discontinues the athlete’s sport, or in cases involving sexual assault or harassment.
• Eligibility: a five-year clock starting at age 19 or high school graduation, with carve-outs for pregnancy, religious missions, military service, and other approved absences. Publicly reported summaries also note the bill bars former professional athletes from regaining college eligibility.
• Tampering: athletic associations get explicit authority to enforce rules against improper recruiting contact and transfer inducements outside designated windows. ^[4]

And then there’s Section 110 — rules governing mid-season coaching transitions, a provision one sponsor reportedly dubbed the “Lane Kiffin rule.” It bars football coaches and key staff from leaving mid-season to effectively take over another FBS program in the same competitive season, including through recruiting, roster management, NIL activity, or game-planning. ^[19] The backstory: Kiffin’s widely reported nine-figure move from Ole Miss to LSU landed in the middle of the SCORE Act’s December floor push and became an instant argument that the “stability” bill didn’t address the most visible instability in the sport. ^[20] The PCSA’s drafters clearly took notes.

The safety net

The protections package is the part athlete advocates like most, even the ones who oppose the bill overall: ^[1][4]

• Scholarships: Division I schools must guarantee scholarships for 10 years after an athlete’s final season, and scholarships can’t be reduced or revoked over athletic performance, injury, illness, or roster-management decisions.
• Medical: schools must cover out-of-pocket costs for sports-related injuries during an athlete’s career and for five years after their final competition, plus catastrophic injury coverage, second-opinion coverage, and an exit physical. A $60 million medical trust fund helps smaller schools meet the requirements.
• Women’s and Olympic sports: athletic departments with more than $80 million in revenue — 74 schools, essentially the power conferences plus Notre Dame — cannot cut women’s and Olympic teams below their 2024–25 levels for nine years. All Division I schools must maintain minimum team and roster counts. The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee endorsed the bill on the strength of this section. ^[2]
• Voice and recourse: a federal Office of the Student Athlete Ombudsman, a requirement that at least one-third of athletic-association governing boards be current or recent former athletes, whistleblower protections, and — significantly — a private right of action. Athletes can sue to enforce their NIL rights, agent protections, and health and scholarship guarantees, and they cannot be forced into pre-dispute arbitration to do it. ^[1][3]

Sec. 118

The trade at the center: antitrust protection

Section 118 is the engine of the whole bill. It gives schools, conferences, and the NCAA targeted protection from antitrust liability when they enforce the bill’s rules on compensation, eligibility, transfers, and agent oversight. ^[4]

Understand what that means practically: for years, nearly every NCAA rule — transfer restrictions, eligibility limits, compensation caps — has been one lawsuit away from collapse, because courts kept finding that an association of competing schools agreeing to limit athlete pay looks a lot like an antitrust violation. The PCSA’s answer is to write the rules into federal law and then shield their enforcement. Supporters call it the only way to have rules at all. Opponents call it immunizing the defendants. Both descriptions are accurate; the disagreement is about whether the athlete protections in the rest of the bill are a fair price.

Sec. 122

What the bill deliberately doesn’t decide

Section 122 is one sentence of enormous consequence: the bill is expressly neutral on whether athletes are employees. ^[3]

This is the sharpest break from the SCORE Act, which affirmatively barred athletes from ever being classified as employees. ^[12] The PCSA punts — employment status and collective bargaining stay unresolved, live questions for the NLRB, the Department of Labor, and the courts. That neutrality is precisely what makes the bill palatable to some Democrats and intolerable to athlete-organizing groups, who argue that locking in rules on transfers, eligibility, and compensation without giving athletes a seat at a bargaining table decides the question in practice, whatever the text says. ^[23]

The HUSTLE Act, explained

If the PCSA is about how NIL money gets made, the HUSTLE Act — the Helping Undergraduate Students Thrive with Long-Term Earnings Act — is about what happens to it afterward. Introduced December 8, 2025 by Senators Cantwell and Blackburn, with Senator John Cornyn among the cosponsors and a House companion from Reps. Greg Steube (R-FL) and Brendan Boyle (D-PA), it’s the rare college sports bill with genuinely bipartisan personal-finance DNA. ^{[6][7][10][11]}

The problem it targets is well documented. NIL deals generated more than $1.2 billion in the 2023–24 academic year, with projections above $2.5 billion as revenue sharing takes hold — and by one Fox Sports estimate, at least 25 college athletes earned $2 million or more in 2025 alone. ^[6][10] Yet in an NCAA survey of more than 9,800 athletes, 49% said they needed educational resources on taxes and financial literacy, and only 9% had ever met with a financial counselor. ^[10] A 20-year-old earning career-peak income during a four-year window, with no financial guidance, is a textbook setup for regret.

The NIL Investment Account, in plain English

The bill creates a new tax-advantaged account type — think of it as a purpose-built cousin of a Roth IRA, designed around the shape of an athletic career: ^[6][7][10]

• Contributions: athletes can contribute NIL earnings up to the annual federal gift-tax exclusion — currently $19,000 per year — and those contributions are excluded from taxable income. ^[10][18]
• Growth: money in the account grows tax-free.
• Withdrawals: timing determines the tax. Withdraw before graduation and it’s taxed as ordinary income; withdraw after graduation and it’s taxed at long-term capital-gains rates — a meaningfully lower bill for most people. Early or excess withdrawals face penalties unless used for qualified purposes such as education, medical expenses, or career transition. ^[6]
• The long game: up to $35,000 of unused funds can roll into an IRA or similar retirement account once the athlete has been out of college sports for at least a year. ^[7]
• Guardrails: account trustees must provide annual financial education, and the Treasury Department is directed to write regulations preventing abuse and tracking contribution limits. ^[6][7]

A simple illustration (numbers rounded, for illustration only — this is not tax advice): a receiver earns $50,000 in cleared NIL deals in 2026. She contributes $19,000 to an NIL Investment Account, excluding it from that year’s taxable income, and pays tax on the remaining $31,000. The $19,000 grows untaxed through her career. After graduation she withdraws some at long-term capital-gains rates for a move and first apartment, and a year after her final season rolls the rest — up to $35,000 — into an IRA. She has retirement savings at 23 that most of her non-athlete classmates won’t start for a decade.

The agent overlap — and where the bill actually stands

The HUSTLE Act’s second half modernizes the Sports Agent Responsibility and Trust Act with the same core package that later appeared in the PCSA: state registration, the 5% fee cap, the public agent registry, and bans on deceptive recruiting-adjacent conduct. ^[6][7] With the PCSA now carrying those provisions toward a floor vote, the HUSTLE Act’s distinct contribution is the tax account — which runs through the Senate Finance Committee, a separate and slower lane. As of this writing, S. 3378 has not received committee action. ^[8]

Notably, the HUSTLE Act has drawn support from the institutions themselves: the NCAA endorsed it publicly, and SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey praised its approach to financial education and long-term savings. ^[7][10] Whatever happens to the account structure this Congress, the concept — treating NIL income as career-length wealth rather than spending money — now has bipartisan sponsors in both chambers and buy-in from the sport’s power centers. Ideas like that tend to survive even when specific bills don’t.

Where the SCORE Act fits

You can’t understand the current bills without understanding the one that keeps failing. The Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements Act — H.R. 4312, the SCORE Act — was 2025’s main event: the NCAA- and power-conference-backed House bill that would codify the settlement’s revenue-sharing terms, preempt state NIL laws, regulate agents, require schools with $20 million+ in athletics revenue to maintain at least 16 varsity teams, grant antitrust protection, and — critically — declare that athletes are not employees. ^[12]

It made history by clearing House committees, the first comprehensive NIL bill to do so. ^[17] Then it made a different kind of history by repeatedly failing to reach a floor vote: pulled in September 2025, pulled again in December 2025 after the procedural rule scraped through 210–209 and members of the House Freedom Caucus balked at federal intervention while Democrats whipped against what Rep. Lori Trahan called a giveaway to the NCAA and power conferences, and stalled a third time in May 2026 amid opposition that by then included the Congressional Black Caucus. ^[13][14][20]

The lesson House leadership appears to have drawn: the SCORE Act’s coalition was too narrow. The PCSA is the recalibration — Senate-first, genuinely bipartisan sponsorship, employment neutrality instead of an employment ban, and a much larger athlete-protections package. Rep. Baumgartner’s H.R. 9137 gives it a House landing pad. ^[5] The SCORE Act technically remains alive; practically, the energy has moved.

The three bills at a glance

Who’s for it, who’s against it

The Protect College Sports Act’s endorsement list is, by college sports standards, staggering: 24 conferences and 267 schools across 49 states, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, the NFL, MLB, the NBA, and major coaches’ associations, with Nick Saban testifying in support and President Trump — who signed a “Saving College Sports” executive order in July 2025 — publicly behind federal action. ^[2][22][23]

The opposition is smaller but pointed, and it comes from the people the bill regulates most directly. All three major athlete-organizing groups — the National College Players Association, Athletes.org, and the United College Athletes Association — publicly oppose it. ^[23] Their argument isn’t that the protections are bad; it’s that rules governing athlete compensation, movement, and working conditions should be negotiated by athletes, not enacted over their heads and then shielded from legal challenge. Utah football player Lance Holtzclaw put the softer version of that case directly to the Commerce Committee in June: make reform with athletes, not just for them. ^[23] The nine committee members who voted no reflect a mix of that concern and its mirror image — lawmakers wary of federal involvement in college sports at all, the same tension that helped sink the SCORE Act. ^[2][13]

It’s worth being precise about what this split is and isn’t. It is not athletes versus schools on whether athletes should be paid and protected — everyone in the fight now claims that ground. It is a disagreement about who writes the rules: Congress and the institutions, or athletes with bargaining power. The PCSA’s employment-status neutrality leaves that second path technically open, which is exactly why it satisfies neither side completely — and why it might pass.

What happens next — and the honest odds

For the Protect College Sports Act: it needs Senate floor time and, realistically, 60 votes. The 19–9 committee margin suggests the bipartisan math is possible; floor calendars in an election year suggest nothing is guaranteed. If it clears the Senate, H.R. 9137 sits in three House committees — Judiciary, Energy & Commerce, and Education & Workforce — and the House has now failed three times to pass a less ambitious bill. ^[5][14] The counterweight: the SCORE Act failed partly because it was seen as one-sided, and the PCSA was engineered to fix exactly that. A Senate-passed bipartisan bill with White House support arriving in the House is a very different proposition than the SCORE Act ever was.

For the HUSTLE Act: its agent provisions are already riding along inside the PCSA. The tax account needs the Finance Committee, and tax provisions often travel by attaching to larger tax vehicles rather than passing standalone. Watch for the NIL Investment Account to reappear as a title inside something bigger.

For everyone else: until a bill is signed, nothing changes. State laws, the House settlement, and CSC enforcement remain the operative rules. If you run a compliance office, an agency, or a collective, you are planning against a moving target — which is itself the strongest argument every witness made for Congress to finish the job.

What it would actually mean

For athletes. The tangible wins are the fee cap and the safety net. On a $500,000 NIL portfolio, the difference between an uncapped 15–20% commission and a capped 5% is $50,000–$75,000 staying with the athlete — per year. The 10-year scholarship guarantee and five years of post-career injury coverage address the quietest risk in college sports: the athlete whose earning window closes with a torn ACL and a tuition bill. And the HUSTLE account would give the thousands of athletes earning five and six figures — not just the headliners — a structural nudge toward keeping some of it. The cost, per the athlete groups: accepting transfer limits, an eligibility clock, and compensation rules they never voted on. ^[1][6][23]

For schools and collectives. Preemption is the prize — one national rulebook instead of 30-plus state regimes and a compliance department’s worth of gray area. The antitrust shield means transfer and eligibility rules that actually stick. The SBA amendment dangles a genuinely new revenue pool for programs outside the media-rights aristocracy. In exchange, the protections package is a real cost center: guaranteed scholarships, expanded medical coverage, and roster floors are line items, and the nine-year women’s and Olympic sports lock-in removes the budget release valve some athletic directors were quietly counting on. ^[1][2]

For the market — our lens. The NIL Standard exists because this market has never had an official scoreboard; every valuation, ours included, is an estimate built on public reporting, comparable benchmarks, and disclosed deal flow. Federal law would change the shape of what’s knowable. A statutory $600 disclosure requirement and a federal NIL agreement database would create the most complete official record of athlete compensation ever assembled — and the CSC’s deal-flow reports have already previewed what even partial transparency does: they revealed a market where 44% of athletes with cleared deals play sports other than football and men’s basketball, something no one could have verified two years ago. ^[15][21] A registered, fee-capped agent market should also improve the signal quality of reported deal values, since a chunk of today’s inflated “sources say” numbers are negotiating leverage wearing a press pass. Whether the federal database is public, aggregate, or regulator-only is the single provision we’d tell readers to watch. Transparency is the difference between a market and a rumor mill — and for the first time, that choice is written into a bill with a real chance of becoming law.

FAQ

Sources

1. U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation — “Cantwell, Cruz, Coons & Schmitt Release Bipartisan Bill to Stabilize College Sports, Protect Athletes and Expand Revenue Sharing” (2026)
2. U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation — “Bipartisan Protect College Sports Act Advances to Full Senate” (June 2026)
3. Protect College Sports Act of 2026 — bill text (Senate Commerce Committee, May 2026)
4. Protect College Sports Act of 2026 — section-by-section summary (Senate Commerce Committee)
5. Congress.gov — H.R. 9137, Protect College Sports Act of 2026 (House companion, introduced June 4, 2026)
6. U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation — “Cantwell & Blackburn Introduce Bipartisan Legislation to Protect College Athletes’ New NIL Compensation” (December 8, 2025)
7. Office of Sen. Marsha Blackburn — “Blackburn, Cantwell Introduce Legislation to Help College Athletes Save for the Future by Investing NIL Earnings” (December 2025)
8. Congress.gov — S. 3378, HUSTLE Act
9. HUSTLE Act — bill text (Office of Sen. Maria Cantwell, December 8, 2025)
10. Office of Rep. Greg Steube — “Reps. Steube, Boyle Introduce HUSTLE Act to Help College Athletes Invest NIL Earnings and Build Long-Term Financial Security.”
11. Office of Sen. John Cornyn — “Cornyn Supports Bill to Help College Athletes Save for the Future by Investing NIL Earnings, Curtail Abuse by Agents” (December 2025)
12. Congress.gov — H.R. 4312, SCORE Act (CRS summary)
13. The Hill — “House cancels vote on the SCORE Act amid GOP opposition” (December 2025)
14. The Hill — “House GOP halts SCORE Act vote due to lack of support” (May 2026)
15. Yahoo Sports / USA TODAY — “NIL money is accelerating — and the latest numbers are eye-popping” (May 2026)
16. College Sports Commission — NIL Deal Flow Reports
17. House Energy & Commerce Committee — “CMT Subcommittee Advances SCORE Act to Standardize NIL for Student-Athletes to Full Committee” (July 2025)
18. Internal Revenue Service — Gift tax FAQ (annual exclusion, 2025–2026)
19. GovInfo / GovTrack — H.R. 9137 bill records (S. 4668 companion status)
20. Front Office Sports — “How the SCORE Act Vote Fell Apart” (December 2025)
21. Front Office Sports — “College Sports Commission Says NIL Go System Under Strain” (March 2026)
22. Employment Law Lookout (Seyfarth Shaw) — “After House v. NCAA: Will Congress or the White House Bring Order to College Sports?” (October 2025)
23. SportsEpreneur — “What the Protect College Sports Act Reveals About Athlete Representation” (June 2026)

The NIL Standard tracks legislation that affects the college athletics market. This guide describes pending bills as introduced and amended through July 2, 2026; provisions may change before any final vote. Nothing here is legal, tax, or financial advice.