RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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CHICAGO -- The White House sent lawyers to Capitol Hill on Wednesday. The bill's Senate authors were said to be ready to file for cloture Thursday morning. But as the deadline hour came and went, and as the night wore on, the Protect College Sports Act was still not done.
Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the negotiations told CBS Sports that congressional staff, White House counsel and conference representatives were working through Wednesday night on the final language of the sweeping bipartisan legislation. The bill would reshape college athletics by providing the NCAA and its conferences an antitrust exemption to enforce spending caps, transfer limits and eligibility rules that courts have systematically gutted.
But the Big Ten and SEC had not delivered their position on the legislation by the 9 a.m. Wednesday deadline set by the bill's co-authors, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.). Big Ten athletic directors met for nearly four hours Wednesday morning in Chicago, the site of the conference's annual media days.
Their meeting was so long, it started before and ended nearly three hours after the 9 a.m. deadline. Later, the Big Ten canceled an evening call with its presidents scheduled for 7 p.m. Meanwhile, a Senate staff member issued a pointed statement making clear that lawmakers' patience was fraying.
"At this point, with every passing minute, odds are slimmer that we can move the bill before the August recess," the Senate staff member said, according to multiple outlets. "We've been working night and day to make the revisions they said they needed."
Congress leaves for its summer recess Aug. 7. Many believe Senate Majority Leader John Thune must file for cloture by Thursday for the legislation to realistically reach the floor next week for a vote. A number of Senate members are scheduled to leave Washington, D.C., for the weekend on Thursday night, and typically, they prefer to receive their voting schedule for the next week before Thursday evening. If the Senate is unable to schedule a vote, Congress and college athletics leaders will miss the last window before a month-long break that would almost certainly scramble the bill's political coalition heading into midterm season.
Still, one source close to the negotiations told CBS Sports that the probability of the bill reaching the Senate floor remains high. As they termed it, the negotiations were more about clarifying and strengthening the language, but they acknowledged that the final obstacle -- getting the language right -- was proving harder than expected.
Sources told CBS Sports on Wednesday that the specific sticking point was the "associated entities" provision. The language is meant to close a loophole that has allowed schools to route money to athletes through corporate sponsors and multimedia rights partners, effectively circumventing the revenue-share cap.
Complicating matters further, the conferences had not yet seen the formal text addressing how associated entity deals would be treated under the new cap structure, sources told CBS Sports. That gap — language tied directly to how the House settlement's revenue-share cap would be enforced — made it impossible to formally react, let alone endorse the bill.
A separate source in the SEC's orbit confirmed the same problem. Congressional staff had not presented the specific language related to associated entities and how they would interact with the House settlement cap. It is, the source said, difficult to react to or endorse something you haven't seen.
When asked on Wednesday, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti was careful with his words about where negotiations stood, but his measured tone carried its own message: exasperation.
"I think it's being perceived that way, that on some issues, every issue is just the Big Ten and the SEC," Petitti told CBS Sports. "And that's not accurate."
Petitti spent most of Wednesday on the phone. He paused his interview with CBS Sports twice to take important phone calls. By 4 p.m., he and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey had spoken at least seven times.
The Big Ten boss then offered a guarded assessment on whether meaningful progress had been made with the bill's sponsors in Washington, D.C.
"I mean, there's some," Petitti said. "It could be small changes in our opinion that (senators) think are big. You're talking about an active negotiation on some of these provisions. What seems simple to one side could be more difficult to the other. So I don't want to characterize it as hard or easy or great progress."
On the question of scheduling calls with Big Ten presidents -- the step that would signal to Thune a credible head count -- Petitti captured the bind precisely.
"Scheduling calls is easy," he said. "Having the right things to say on them is a lot harder."
The urgency behind the associated entities' fix is mathematical. According to documents obtained by CBS Sports on Tuesday, the revised bill creates a retention pool exception of $20 million above the existing revenue-share cap, with up to an additional $5 million available exclusively for women's institutional NIL -- a combined structure that approaches, but doesn't fully match, the $25 million the conferences originally requested. The $20 million number was being negotiated late Wednesday, with several conference sources saying they expected it to rise.
"We need to see specifics," Ohio State athletics director Ross Bjork told CBS Sports shortly after the Big Ten's meeting of athletic directors. "There are certain concepts that have been discussed and proposed that we would agree with, but until you see exactly how it's written and you want to make sure that it's not changed, then we can't really say we're in. We can't really sign up for it yet. So, there are things that we have to have. To me, we have to have some certainty around what the cap looks like."
On the retention pool itself -- the provision that has consum...
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