00:03:47.180Senator, we've got a lot to cover on today's show.
00:03:50.000Serious legislation after the August recess.
00:03:53.100Things are back in order, and major issues in legislation are all happening in D.C. this week.
00:03:59.460Well, today was a very, very big day in terms of legislative agenda moving forward with major steps that make a difference for the American people.
00:04:11.440The biggest thing that I think happened today is the Senate voted finally after three years on the Protect College Sports Act.
00:07:00.200It teaches you to keep your head down.
00:07:01.880But it teaches you also to understand that there's usually like a coach or someone that should mentor you in business.
00:07:06.900And also, I think it teaches you not to be a know-it-all.
00:07:09.880Yeah, so you look at the – I think that's exactly right.
00:07:13.780And what is happening in college sports right now is that it's total chaos.
00:07:18.920And, you know, some people have asked, why would Congress get in the middle of this?
00:07:22.860The answer is because Congress screwed it up because the federal antitrust laws were passed by Congress.
00:07:29.240And the current state of affairs is whatever happens, there are no rules because anything, any rule they try to put in place, they get sued and courts strike them all down under the antitrust laws.
00:08:26.400All of those are just getting decimated.
00:08:29.440And we're in a spending shootout that if we don't do something, look, I think within three to five years, there will be 30 to 50 competitive football programs and everyone else goes under.
00:08:43.420And when everyone else goes under, it is college football that pays for everything else.
00:08:47.420If you look at the economics of college sports, and if you don't examine this much, you may not realize it, but basically no other sport makes money except football.
00:08:56.700Men's basketball makes a little, and there are occasional exceptions, you know, when you have, say, a Caitlin Clark or something, that you'll have a moment.
00:09:03.900But as a general matter, the only sport that makes money is football.
00:09:09.300And so at virtually every college, it is football that pays for every other sport, that pays for all the men's sports, all the women's sports, everything else.
00:09:17.420So, if most of the colleges in the country, if their football programs go under, it means the revenue for the rest of athletics go under.
00:09:24.480And it's not even just, so listen, if we did nothing of the roughly 500,000 college athletes in America right now,
00:09:32.500two to 300,000 would lose their roster slots, would lose their scholarships.
00:09:37.180I mean, we're at risk of seeing over the years millions of young men and women lose their avenue to go to college, lose their avenue to get an education.
00:09:46.500And many of these are low income African-American kids, Hispanic kids who might not otherwise have a chance to go to college like sports is for many of these athletes.
00:09:55.500It's their only ticket. And and that would truly be tragic.0.96
00:10:01.220But by the way, not only do you have athletics go away, but but for many schools, if athletics go away, their ability to attract students to apply, their ability to get donors to contribute to the school goes up in smoke as well.
00:10:15.440And so I think if we allow college sports to crater, we will see colleges and universities across the country going broke, going out of business.
00:10:24.620And so it truly is a crisis, and I think a crisis that mandates that Congress act.
00:10:30.080Yeah, and I want to go into actually what actually changed, what this bill changed specifically so people know what that means.
00:10:35.920We're going to talk about that in just a second.
00:10:38.120If it feels like our country finally has momentum again, well, with the leaders we have in the White House, you'd be right, right?
00:10:44.220There's a lot of great leaders in Washington that are fighting to restore common sense in America first.
00:18:30.640You don't build relationships with professors.
00:18:33.720You end up that many of the student athletes, if they're transferring multiple times, they're not really working on their academic coursework.
00:18:40.000Their credits don't always transfer. They're unlikely to graduate.
00:18:43.240And if they're not going on to the NBA or NFL, they end up coming out of it having made a little bit of money on NIL in college, not having a degree, not having the skills.
00:18:52.560And what is powerful about college athletics is it's an avenue for education for so many young people.
00:18:58.420Now, I think it is better that student athletes are compensated.
00:19:02.300I think the old system was unfair, that you had incredible athletes generating millions of dollars of revenue that everyone got rich but them.
00:19:09.820And as a conservative, I think you ought to be able to earn the fruits of your labor.
00:19:13.440If you produce, if you're a star quarterback.
00:19:16.640Tim Tebow and Johnny Football are two examples of this.
00:19:18.800They made, they think transformed, by the way, those universities, including like building the Texas A&M Stadium for what it is now.
00:19:26.680That was on the back of Johnny Football.
00:19:28.740The amount of booster money, the amount of money that was coming to campus.
00:19:31.340and then you're having to do things on the table.
00:19:33.420I don't blame, by the way, athletes for doing that in the past.
00:19:36.340Tim Tebow should have made more money in the NCAA than he did in the NFL.
00:19:40.280Yeah, it was not fair and it was not right.
00:19:42.900So it is an improvement, I believe, that athletes can be compensated
00:20:33.940And that will mean that will slow down the transfers massively.
00:20:38.560You may get one. But what happens and by the way, understand these are you know, these are not pro athletes in the NFL or NBA who are 25 or 30 years old that are grown adults.
00:20:49.920These are often kids that are 17, 18, 19 years old.
00:20:53.060So they're frequently not terribly financially sophisticated.
00:20:56.080They're just showing up at college. And you have agents who are unscrupulous who will go to them and say, hey, Ben, I can get you a little bit more money if you transfer to Alabama.
00:21:06.700Yeah. And and the agents are getting a big cut of the take and they don't care if it screws up your education.
00:21:11.440It's terrible for you. If they can get you to move and they get to put some money in the bank, you have this happening over and over again.
00:21:17.840And it's hurting the student athletes. So one transfer is a big improvement.
00:21:42.900And you can say you're not eligible if you're a pro.
00:21:45.080Right now, the leagues are not able to enforce that
00:21:47.760because that gets struck down under the antitrust laws.
00:21:49.640We also say you can enforce rules like no gambling.
00:21:53.400You look at Brendan Soresby, who a local hometown judge says, all right, he can play at Texas Tech because we want a great quarterback at Tech.
00:22:03.240Gambling is becoming more and more of a problem in sports, and if there's no ability to police it, if you end up having athletes betting on their own games, you are inviting just massive corruption into the system.
00:22:15.620Yeah, and it's no longer actually playing to win.
00:22:19.640right so we put in basic rules by the way we also protect women's sports and we protect olympic
00:22:25.960sports and and we set the ability before before you get to that your olympic sports this is a
00:22:33.300really interesting point that has not been brought up a lot in the media and i want to talk about
00:22:36.880that but before we get to that i want to talk to you real quick about the international fellowship
00:22:40.960of christians and jews three years ago terrorists murdered more than 1 200 innocent israelis and
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00:23:55.020is not alone. Visit joinfof.org. That's joinfof.org. All right, Senator, I want to go back to
00:24:06.200something interesting you said, and you brought the Olympics. If you were in this, any different
00:24:11.320part of this debate, and I was, the Olympics never came up, and you said there's something
00:24:17.120in here that deals with the Olympics. Explain that, because that's also extremely important.
00:24:20.480Yeah, look, we have provisions in this bill that require the larger programs to maintain their roster slots, their scholarship slots for women's sports and for Olympic sports.
00:24:32.100And those are, you know, you look at where, look, every couple of years at the Olympics, we all cheer on America.
00:24:39.340Where do you think the American athletes get their training?
00:24:41.420They get their training at U.S. colleges and universities.
00:24:44.480And one of the consequences of this spending spiral, and what's happening is schools are spending more and more and more and more on football, and so they're cutting everything else.
00:24:54.780They're slashing Olympic sports and women's sports, and that is a terrible outcome.
00:24:59.400This bill limits the ability to do that, but it also, as a tradeoff, protects the ability to put effectively a cap on spending.
00:25:08.860And the cap, there's sort of three buckets. One bucket is a cap that came out of what's called the House settlement, which was litigation that was settled. That's $20.5 million of revenue sharing that colleges can provide. So if they're making revenue from TV, they can share $20.5 million with the athletes.
00:25:28.000There's another bucket this bill creates, which is what's called a retention bonus of $22.5 million.
00:25:34.820And that is not new athletes, but you can take your existing.
00:25:38.400So if you have a star running back, you can say, OK, we're going to share revenue.
00:25:41.340We're going to give you a million or two million bucks a year to stay.
00:25:44.160And that's designed also to produce some continuity, to keep the teams together, to keep student athletes there for four years.
00:25:50.460The retention bonus is designed to make people stickier at the schools they're at.
00:25:55.040And then we thirdly put in that there's an additional $5 million on top of all of that can be spent specifically on women's sports and non-revenue sports.
00:26:08.520And that $5 million does not count to the cap.
00:26:12.060So there's an additional $5 million because we said, look, we don't want to use just stick.
00:26:17.800And so the carrot is, hey, if you spend an additional $5 million on women's sports and Olympic sports and non-revenue sports, that doesn't count against your cap at all.
00:26:26.260And so it sets a total cap at just over $47 million.
00:26:30.740Look, $47 million is a lot of money, but if you compare to what the really big schools are making, you've got schools that are spending $70 million, $80 million or more.
00:26:41.700And so having some competitiveness of bringing it down, even the schools, they're not spending that much now.
00:28:33.240Listen, the two powerhouses in Texas are UT and A&M.
00:28:38.080And to be honest, in any system, if Congress does nothing, UT and A&M are going to be fine.
00:28:43.860If we get to the world of a Super League, if we get to basically a mini NFL, there are so many donors with money and alumni with money from UT, so many alumni with money from A&M.
00:29:23.360And if you think about, look, I, we, the last podcast.
00:29:26.520Because, look, donors only give in sports if they're seeing results.
00:29:30.180So if you're Baylor or SMU, you know, or TCU, and let's say when you throw up $50 million, and then you don't get a good return, it's a lot harder to get that $50 million for the next year.
00:29:45.280And that's the reason why you said after five years, you get the alumni base, like, look, we can't compete with those other two schools, we're done.
00:29:51.660Look, the number three school in terms of the revenue they have right now is Texas Tech.
00:29:55.940But that is massively driven by one donor.
00:29:59.140Cody Campbell is a good friend of mine.
00:30:00.660He played football at Tech, played in the NFL, and he's an oil and gas billionaire.
00:30:05.200And Cody is giving north of $50 million a year to Texas Tech, which is why they have a competitive team.
00:30:11.240It's literally one person writing a check.
00:30:13.380And if Cody ever stopped writing a check, Tech could not compete any further.
00:30:17.560You know, SMU is the other school that arguably compete, could compete.
00:30:21.820They have a lot of wealthy donors, but they have not had donors that are writing checks at the level.
00:30:27.040They just don't have the massive alumni base.
00:34:24.480And listen, if you're a senator and you get a call from the chancellor of the biggest university in your state, you get a call from the president, you get a call from the athletic director, you get a call from the head coach.
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00:40:59.420They have been working tirelessly whipping the votes.
00:41:03.060And so the Senate will pass it sometime next week, final passage.
00:41:07.840I think the House will pass it in the next several weeks after that.
00:41:11.560And what I've asked the president, he's agreed,
00:41:13.700is I want him to sign it at college game day, at the set.
00:41:17.520We'll figure out, depending on the timing,
00:41:19.220It'll be sometime either late September or in October for a big game.
00:41:23.740My hope had been to do it at UT Ohio State, but we didn't get it done quite in time for that.
00:41:28.700But but we will have lots of good choices of college game day to go.
00:41:32.780And and and I believe this will be signed into law before Election Day.
00:41:37.340By the way, one of the points I made to the speaker, I said, listen, you know, he wants all of his members back home in their districts campaigning.
00:41:43.520And I said, there are very few better things that your members could do than come back and pass this bill.
00:42:03.680If we're in the middle of a reelect campaign, there are few better things to do than come back and say, wow, Congress actually did something and did something.
00:42:10.840and and you also have people look the folks watching college sports some are voters some
00:42:15.580are engaged but but some are not and and the people watching college sports like hot diggity0.96
00:42:21.020damn these people are are not completely useless that that is a good way to make the case hey we0.94
00:42:28.240can solve real problems and do something that matters to you and matters to the next generation0.99
00:42:33.060of kids yeah it is going to be really fun to watch and like you said having him sign at game