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The Senate PCSA negotiations take an ominous turn for UNC
ARLINGTON, TEXAS - DECEMBER 06: Cody Campbell walks behind the trophy after the Big 12 Championship game between the Texas Tech Red Raiders and the BYU Cougars at AT&T Stadium on December 06, 2025 in Arlington, Texas. (Photo by John E. Moore III/Getty Images) | Getty Images
Late last Friday night, the presidents of universities in both the SEC and B1G, on separate conference calls, reversed course and gave their blessing to the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA) legislation. Why the change of heart? The offices of Senators Ted Cruz and Maria Cantwell caved on several key points, turning the bill into a dream come true for the SEC and B1G.
While the legislative process remains far from complete (more on that in a minute), the bill represents UNC’s worst case scenario. In fact, an argument could be made that this bill hurts UNC the most across the entirety of college sports. Before dismissing that as the sort of breathless hyperbole dominating headlines these days, consider the following:
Locked into the ACC …: The original version of the bill proposed to lock P4 conference members in their current conferences. The mechanism for that was a required five-year hiatus as an independent between leaving one P4 conference for another. Financially, that would mean paying an exit fee and then operating without conference media rights money for five years.
In UNC’s case, that would mean an exit fee around $130,000,000 and then running its athletic department for five years without the ACC’s media distribution. UNC earned around $50,000,000 from that distribution during the last fiscal cycle. Simply put, the proposed PCSA requirement would blow nearly a $400,000,000 hole in UNC’s budget over the next five years if it left the ACC. That’s prohibitively painful for a university proudly supporting 28 sports.
Without knowing what SEC membership might look like financially five, ten, or 15 years down the road, it becomes impossible to determine how many years of SEC money might pay off that five year loss. The difficulty of that calculation is part of the reason for the PCSA’s proposed five year window. It introduces a good measure of uncertainty down the road on top of the certainty of near-term financial pain.
…but without the originally-proposed revenue sharing . The prior version of the bill included potential revenue sharing to lessen the blow of freezing P4 members where they stand. ACC schools prevented from switching to the cash-flush SEC or B1G in that version would have had the real hope of forcing media companies to negotiate with the entirety of the FBS division rather than one conference at a time. The two provisions were joined at the hip in that respect — conference realignment language designed to prevent further P2 expansion or a super league, combined with revenue sharing language designed to avoid permanent JV media status for ACC or B12 members.
However, the latest version keeps the conference realignment language but scuttles the much-discussed revenue sharing provision. In the latest revision, the SEC and B1G could volunteer to share revenue, but under no scenario would they ever be required to. The conference realignment language, however, remains unchanged.
Death to the Super League! Long Live the Super League! In retrospect, it appears that Senators Cruz and Cantwell decided that preventing a so-called super league was the hill on which they would make their stand. Towards that end, preventing UNC, Florida State, Clemson, or Miami from leaving the ACC became the negotiating point they wouldn’t back down on. However, they happily conceded the SEC and B1G virtually everything else they wanted in exchange.
Examples: The PCSA now bolts an allowed “retention fund” around $27 million on top of the original revenue sharing cap. That pushes legal university payment to athletes up to $48.8 million per school. Transfer rights would be dramatically scaled back. An anti-trust safe harbor would eliminate lawsuits over transfers, eligibility windows, and roster limits.
In other words, the bill protects the SEC and B1G from themselves, in the sense that it ends bidding wars above an enforceable cap. It protects those conferences from their labor force, as it disallows lawsuits on mobility and compensation restrictions. It also protects these two conferences from their competition, locking down ACC and B12 membership configurations that the market clearly values far less than the current SEC and B1G set ups.
TL;DR version : This version of the bill creates a financial landscape highly favorable to the SEC and B1G and locks it in. Simple as that. That’s why the SEC suddenly pivoted from “hell no” to “hell yeah!” Cruz and Cantwell seem to think preventing a super league is worth that exchange. But, the current version of this bill is just a super league landscape by another name.
Those aren’t the only issues with the bill , but those are the consequences immediately relevant to UNC. As the university often cited as the one the SEC and B1G covet the most, Carolina stands to lose the most. A Congressional bill that makes changing conferences a financial impossibility, on top of freezing in place the game’s current financial hierarchy, on top of making college football roster construction dramatically more expensive, would seem UNC’s worst case scenario. The current version of the bill most helps the weight class including Ohio State and Alabama, as well as billionaire-financed schools like Miami and Texas Tech. And it sacrifices UNC’s options to get there.
Final point: The states with B1G and SEC schools collectively send 318 members to the House of Representatives. That’s 73% of the 435 votes in that chamber. If this version gets out of the Senate, and if the SEC and B1G schools continue to see this bill as favorably as they do now, it likely gets sent to the White House.
Now might be a very good time to get in touch with Senator Tillis and Senator Budd.
The Senate PCSAUNCPCSACody CampbellBigChampionshipTexas Tech Red RaidersBYU CougarsAT&T StadiumArlingtonTexas
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