Ex-Division I athlete presses fellow lawmakers to rethink college sports rules
Plus: Senate passes three more funding bills, Trump rolls out health care plan on last day of ACA open enrollment and Schumer unveils Democratic housing agenda.
First Things First
Programming note: Congress Nerd Sunday will not publish this weekend in observance of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. The edition will instead land Monday evening and the regular weekday schedule will resume Tuesday evening.
Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) this afternoon presented a simple theory of the case at the first-ever Congressional College Athletics Summit: For Congress to succeed in enacting rules of the road that allow college athletes to be paid for endorsements and other commercial uses of their personal brand, it can’t just treat name, image and likeness (NIL) as a standalone problem.
The former Division I volleyball player and member of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee convened athletes, league executives, labor advocates, Title IX lawyers, and academics in the same room to publicly grapple with what comes after the collapse of the NCAA’s old model.
Against the backdrop of the dark wood paneling, classical detailing, and old-world gravitas of the Jefferson Building’s Members Room at the Library of Congress, the stakeholders stress-tested ideas for roughly three hours on federal guardrails, revenue sharing, the implications for women’s and Olympics sports and the limits of market solutions—before lawmakers commit to a path that could reshape college sports for decades.
“I truly believe that the system of college sports is better today than it was a decade ago,” Trahan said in her welcoming remarks. “Unfortunately, much of the conversation about the future of sports over the past year has taken a very different tone. Too often it’s been focused on restricting athletes’ rights, silencing their voices and attempting to return to a system that overwhelmingly benefitted a small group of traditional power brokers.”
