Tommy Tuberville has been on the podcast before, but he s coming back on to debrief what s going on with the Protection of Women, Girls, and Sports Act, the recent hearings surrounding Title IX, and his bipartisan legislation.
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00:00:18.040Welcome back to the Gains for Girls podcast. I hope you all are enjoying the holiday season.
00:00:32.660Today's guest has been on the podcast before, but he's coming back on to debrief what's going on with the Protection of Women, Girls and Sports Act that is hung up in the Senate right now.
00:00:43.480We want to debrief Title IX, the recent hearings surrounding this topic, and his bipartisan NIL legislation.
00:00:51.360So check out the interview here with Senator and Coach Tommy Tuberville.
00:00:55.840Well, Senator Tuberville, I am so glad you're back on.
00:00:59.220I kind of just wanted to start with getting a few of your thoughts on this hearing that just took place a few weeks ago.
00:01:04.740You know, you have members of the U.S. House and even some of your Democrat colleagues who say that our stance is transphobic and bigoted and hateful and the list goes on.
00:01:15.200To me, it's, I mean, it's just incredibly telling when they start name calling, which is what I saw as one of the witnesses a few weeks ago.
00:01:23.860I saw that the entire four hour long hearing from the House Democrats.
00:01:28.300And so I just kind of wanted to ask you, you know, why do you think it is that they resort to this?
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00:02:02.600What they do is they make everybody, try to make everybody look like they're the bad person in the whole thing that's going on.
00:02:10.020When behind the scenes, it's kind of like in the last election, you know, the election fraud, the Russia collusion, Democrats from all the way from Obama to Clinton to this last election with Biden.
00:02:23.120And everything that they accuse people of doing, they do themselves.
00:03:42.540You know, this is taking us back in time.
00:03:45.840There was a Democrat witness, the sole Democrat witness, who is the president of the National Women's Law Center, which personally, I believe, should change their name to the Anti-Women's Law Center.
00:03:56.960And in her testimony, she said that women should just learn to lose gracefully.
00:04:03.180Gosh, as a coach, you know, you coached women's sports.
00:04:29.000I've told people this over my lifetime, that one of the things that our country has had that's made our country better, it is the opportunity to participate in sports at a young age, middle age, from high school, junior high, all the way through college, and even make money doing it.
00:04:47.380You learn things that you don't learn at home.
00:04:49.960I learned probably more, and my dad and mom probably would not like what I'm saying.
00:04:54.880I probably learned more from my high school coaches because I spent more time with them because my mom and dad worked.
00:05:01.100And I spent more time with them and learned things about life that I probably wouldn't have learned at home.
00:05:08.200And I think you look at a lot of these athletes, and I would say, as I was coaching, probably half to maybe three-fourths of the student athletes had one or no parent.
00:05:19.020And so the coach is actually the parent.
00:05:21.680And so I was parent to 1,000 young men, and it didn't make any difference what race, what religion, what economic background.
00:05:30.720It was, hey, you're part of this team, and if you're going to stay on this team, you're going to work together to make this team successful.
00:05:37.180And to me, that's made the United States of America very, very special because you don't have that in other countries.
00:06:23.520But you, you were the lead sponsor of the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which passed actually in the U.S. House, falling entirely on party lines.
00:06:33.700But it's hung up in the Senate right now.
00:06:38.320But, you know, is there any update as to what this looks like, what we can expect for this piece of legislation in the future from the Senate, or even what we can expect in regards to Title IX from the Biden administration?
00:06:51.300Yeah, Rodney, I think that the next year will be a big year for what you and I are talking about, women's sports and really sports in general.
00:06:58.940Because being here three years, my understanding of what goes on up here, you get more done, and people turn back into basically Americans and human beings during an election year.
00:07:10.940So next year, we've got a national election.
00:07:19.060That being said, the reason I'm saying that is because I think you're going to have some people from the left that just have absolutely washed their hands of what's going on right now in Title IX and women's sports, transgenders, all those things.
00:07:34.100I think you're going to see some of them come back to reality.
00:07:36.880Because if they don't, they're going to lose.
00:07:39.640And because it is a losing proposition all over the country.
00:07:43.800I don't care if you're an independent, Republican, or Democrat.
00:07:48.360It should be about America and giving people opportunities.
00:07:52.260That's what America stands for, opportunities.
00:07:54.940And now you start giving scholarships to men to play in women's sports, there will be a lawsuit bigger than any lawsuit you've ever seen over this.
00:08:05.980You have the Big Ten that's going to step up and say, whoa, hold a minute.
00:08:09.920I mean, we're stepping off into something that people don't believe in, and it's not fair, and it's not safe.
00:08:17.840So I think that you're going to have a lot of these politicians up here that might be giving us a call and say, Coach, about that PASS Act you had up.
00:08:25.860You know, I'm up for re-election, and I can't have this going against me when I'm out campaigning.
00:09:01.420So I think that's what we're going to see, too.
00:09:03.920But now, actually, speaking of kind of bipartisan efforts here, you, along with one of your Democrat colleagues, have been working together to implement the PASS Act.
00:09:15.360Tell us what this is and really how this can benefit sport in general.
00:09:21.320Well, you know as well as I do that this NIL is really tearing college athletics apart.
00:09:29.420And even now, I saw yesterday in my state of Alabama, the legislative branch is bringing it up to vote on whether high school players can make money.
00:09:40.320Now, but past it, unfortunately, in 30 states, it's legal now to pay high school players in sports in high school.
00:09:48.380I don't understand where this is going.
00:09:50.100But I do know in colleges and universities, the NIL is really dividing our universities.
00:09:58.260And you're going to have the haves really take over because the ones that have the money, and you know the ones I'm talking about, whether it's basketball or football or swimming, whatever, they're going to be able to afford it.
00:10:12.480And at the end of the day, it's what I'm telling everybody.
00:10:17.860The people that are going to suffer on this is going to be Olympic and women's sports because the money that would normally go to produce women and Olympic sports come from donations.
00:10:31.700And you're not going to have the donations.
00:10:34.680It's all going to go to the young men or women to play the game and not going to run in budget.
00:11:11.180I feel like I saw the effects of this at Kentucky.
00:11:14.020Of course, swimming is not a large revenue sport at any school.
00:11:17.220But, of course, basketball at Kentucky is huge.
00:11:20.860And once this whole NIL deal kind of came to fruition, we saw our basketball players, our football players getting car deals and all kinds of different things.
00:11:31.300And I think it hurts the competition aspect of playing sports.
00:11:35.880I believe, of course, you know, there can be conversation about what this looks like and how to make compensation fair.
00:11:42.480But it's ruining competition as a whole, I believe.
00:11:46.560I believe certain aspects of it, for sure.
00:11:49.540And so I wanted to ask you how the PASS Act and the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, really Title IX, how do those work together and go hand-in-hand?
00:12:16.520Now, more and more of these schools are making money.
00:12:19.080But you can take the five big conferences and probably survive to a certain degree, but you're still not going to have the money to buy the better coaches in Olympic sports and women's sports.
00:12:30.820You're not going to have the same budgets for travel and all those things.
00:12:34.680But, you know, we want to equalize it to some degree.
00:12:38.860Now, I'm for players if they can make money fine, you know, at the end of the day.
00:12:43.080What gets me is the transfer portal has really taken effect.
00:12:47.820And it's, you know, one year, you know, you've got some players.
00:12:52.020The next year, they're playing at other universities across the country.
00:12:56.020The young man that just won the Heisman Trophy two years ago had played a couple of years at Arizona State and transferred because of the transfer portal.
00:14:16.160I wonder if these same women's teams or the same women's athletic department at Oregon or wherever this lawsuit came from,
00:14:25.400I wonder if they would be just as outraged by this story coming from University of Washington about the male athlete taking the women's scholarship.