For the third time, House Republican leadership has scheduled a floor vote on SCORE. The Rules Committee meets Tuesday evening. A rule vote (the procedural pre-vote that decides whether the bill gets debated) is tentatively scheduled for Wednesday. If the rule passes, the actual bill debate and vote unfold Wednesday or Thursday. ACC’s administrative staff briefed athletic directors at this week’s Amelia Island spring meetings that the bill “should pass.” Republican House leaders publicly say they have the votes (which is the only way they would ever put it on the floor).
So, this time might actually be different. The first two attempts (September and December 2025) got pulled before reaching the floor, the December one minutes before scheduled debate.
Five months of revision work have produced a bill that’s been re-engineered to win back the defectors who killed the December version. The populist concessions are real. Coach buyouts must come from designated donations. The $50 million-plus media-rights schools can’t use student fees for athletics starting in 2028-29. The new rule package is real too. The Lane Kiffin Rule barring in-season communication with rival coaches. The Charles Bediako Rule prohibiting pro athletes from returning to Division I. A five-year age-based eligibility framework. A one-academic-year residency before transfer. And the athlete welfare provisions provide political cover: healthcare, mental health, scholarship preservation, sixteen-team minimum, twenty percent athlete board representation.
Republican leaders need every vote. The House margin is 217-212. They can afford to lose two Republicans. The whip count suggests as many as three may defect.
So how does this bill pass?
SCORE picks up Democratic votes. About six of them, per Ross Dellenger’s reporting in this morning’s On3 column. And the way it picks them up is the part worth understanding.
Cover voting, not bipartisanship
Dellenger’s column has a single sentence that, if his sourcing is accurate, explains the political economy of the SCORE Act’s House passage:
Democrats may only vote for the bill if they know it has enough Republican support to pass without them.
That’s not bipartisanship. That’s called cover voting.
The two Democratic co-sponsors, Janelle Bynum (D-OR) and Shomari Figures (D-AL), have geographic interests in big-state football programs. Their constituents care about the Ducks and the Crimson Tide. The athlete welfare provisions give them a public story to tell. A handful of other Democrats in similar districts will vote yes if their vote isn’t pivotal.
Cover voting works because it protects D members two ways. If the bill passes, they can point to the athlete welfare provisions they helped enshrine into federal law. If the bill fails because Republicans couldn’t deliver their own caucus, the D vote doesn’t matter and the failure belongs entirely to GOP leadership. The conditional logic is: vote yes only if R support is sufficient without you.
Cover voting tells you a bill isn’t actually bipartisan even when it picks up cross-aisle votes. Real bipartisan legislation has members from both parties advocating publicly for passage, organizing colleagues, taking the political risk together. Cover voting has members hedging on whether they have to own the substance. And the substance D members are hedging on isn’t the healthcare coverage or the mental health resources or the scholarship preservation. It’s the antitrust exemption, the categorical employment bar, and the broad state-law preemption. Those are the Republican-authored provisions that comprise the actual policy ask.
So House passage is plausible. And the Democratic votes that get it across the finish line aren’t endorsements of the bill. They’re tactical hedges by members who don’t want to be seen blocking athlete welfare provisions but also don’t want to own everything else.
One limit on the cover-voting reading: Bynum and Figures co-sponsored the bill before any cover-voting analysis became part of the public conversation. They may be voting sincerely for the athlete welfare provisions rather than tactically hedging. Cover voting and sincere voting look identical from the floor, so the framing fits Dellenger’s reporting but isn’t independently verifiable. Read it as his analysis of the D caucus dynamic rather than a confirmed pattern.
The opposition is also Democratic, and organized
Representative Lori Trahan (D-MA) sent a letter to House members yesterday urging opposition. Her framing: “The SCORE Act is a partisan project that would permanently curtail the rights of college athletes.”
A separate letter from a group of state attorneys general (Tennessee, New York, Florida, Ohio) plus the District of Columbia, also opposing SCORE, calls the bill “a misguided effort that will enshrine in federal law the arbitrary and biased authority of the NCAA at its worst.” Two of those AGs (Tennessee and Florida) are Republican. The DC AG is Democratic. Whatever the coalition’s politics, the substantive concern is the same: the bill federalizes NCAA enforcement authority that has been challenged repeatedly in court.
There’s also the Nebraska situation. Mit Winter reported Wednesday morning that Nebraska AD Troy Dannen has publicly confirmed that if the College Sports Commission refuses to clear the resubmitted NIL deals that were the subject of the recent arbitration hearing, the Nebraska Attorney General will step in to challenge the CSC and the NCAA. Nebraska state NIL law prohibits penalizing athletes or schools for athletes being paid NIL money. That’s a direct conflict-of-laws challenge to whatever federal preemption SCORE would impose.
The picture: D-side opposition organized this week, state-AG enforcement is being threatened in Nebraska, and the AG letter draws four jurisdictions plus DC. Whether this amounts to a rising trend or a one-week snapshot of activity is something to watch over the next ten days. Either way, the bill isn’t moving through quiet consensus. It’s moving through a margin held by tactical hedging.
That’s the House story.
The Senate is a different story, with a different theory
This morning’s Dellenger column makes the case that the more consequential federal action might not be happening in the House at all.
Is the Senate on the brink of its first ever bi-partisan, all-encompassing college sports bill?
The Senate vehicle Dellenger is referring to is Cruz-Cantwell. Ted Cruz (R-TX, Senate Commerce Chair) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA, Senate Commerce Ranking Member) have been negotiating for more than two months. Their staffs are exchanging drafts. ACC commissioner Jim Phillips was publicly optimistic at Amelia Island this week: “They’re close. They’re going to bring something to the Senate.”
Cruz-Cantwell has been described as “close” or “intensifying” before. The framing has been used multiple times since mid-2025. Each round, conference commissioners have expressed public optimism. Each round, no bill has emerged. This time may finally be different. The pattern of public engagement and private impasse is not.
But there are real impasses on the substantive questions. Dellenger reports the principals remain stuck on transfer limitations, eligibility standards, and most importantly, employment. Tuesday this week, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey and Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti visited both Cantwell and Cruz on the Hill, presumably encouraging them to find a deal. John Calipari, the Arkansas men’s basketball coach, was also on the Hill the same day pitching a narrow bill that would only address eligibility and transfers. Republicans might support a narrow bill. Democrats want a broader one. The Cruz-Cantwell principals met again Wednesday.
Mit Winter’s read, posted this morning:
If the SCORE Act does eventually pass in the House (still a question), any bill that can also pass the Senate will look different and will have to compromise on issues such as employment.
That’s the substantive point that often gets lost in House-vote coverage: even House passage doesn’t actually codify anything until the Senate concurs, and the Senate has its own theory about what a bill should look like. SCORE has, in Dellenger’s words, “little to no chance, no matter what happens in the House, to garner the 60 votes needed in the Senate.” The Senate filibuster requires sixty votes. SCORE’s authors aren’t trying to win sixty votes. They’re trying to create House-passage momentum that pressures Senate Democrats into accepting a compromise bill.
Eric Blevins put the same observation more sharply this morning: “Big development, and it will be really interesting to see how the bill addresses the employment issue that SCORE avoids.”
The Senate compromise probably has to address employment because Senate Democrats won’t pass a categorical bar. A few possible outcomes: pass something narrower (an employment-status framework that depends on collective bargaining, or one that carves out specific contexts); insist on leaving the question open for the labor agencies to resolve; punt with a study commission or delay clause. There’s also a fourth path that doesn’t move the framework toward CBA at all: a narrow bill addressing only transfer and eligibility, which is what Calipari pitched senators this week. Republicans might support that. Democrats want something broader. The CBA-adjacent design space is one possibility among several, not a foregone conclusion.
The CBA pathway, and an important caution
If the Senate vehicle ends up containing employment-adjacent compromise language, the collective bargaining pathway becomes the live one. The framework has been carrying CBA probability here at SCBBQ at 20-26 percent for the entire post-House cycle. A Senate-bipartisan-employment-compromise bill is what that pathway looks like in legislative form.
Matt Brown published a piece in Extra Points this morning offering an important corrective to anyone optimistic about how a CBA conversation actually works. Brown’s framing draws on Scott Bukstein’s textbook on professional sports collective bargaining plus Brown’s own experience with labor organizing. The core analytical move is to quote Marvin Miller, the godfather of the MLBPA and the architect of the first real professional athlete labor movement:
I want you to understand that this is going to be an adversarial relationship. A union is not a social club. A union is a restraint on what an employer can otherwise do.
Brown’s point: any actual CBA negotiation between college athletes and college athletic departments would be adversarial in exactly the way Miller described. The Miller analogy has limits. 1960s MLB was a single-employer commercial league with mature labor law and established athletes as employees; college athletics is fragmented across hundreds of institutions with contested employment status. The structural conditions are different, but the rhetorical point survives.
The Senate political theater that frames the question as a collaborative drafting session between Cruz, Cantwell, conference commissioners, and the NCAA misses what real labor-management negotiation looks like. Management always brings experienced attorneys whose job is to limit compensation. Labor needs counterparties who can fight back.
Brown’s adversarial frame catches something specific about the Cruz-Cantwell process: it has had college sports stakeholders on every side of the table except actual athletes. Conference commissioners are visiting Senate offices. The NCAA president is publishing op-eds in The Hill. Coaches are pitching narrow bills. Nobody is asking what the athletes negotiating from the other side would want.
The framework’s CBA probability hasn’t moved up because the Senate compromise is going to deliver a real labor agreement. It’s moved up because the Senate compromise will probably have to gesture toward employment in ways the SCORE Act doesn’t, which creates legislative scaffolding for downstream organizing. The 20-26 percent band is about that scaffolding effect, not about whether the Senate is producing an actual CBA. There’s a difference between “bill includes employment-adjacent language” and “athletes are now organized and bargaining.” The former might happen this summer. The latter is years away.
The state and litigation tracks haven’t gone anywhere
While Congress works two tracks simultaneously, the College Sports Commission is being tested from below in ways that don’t depend on what the House or Senate does. The honest read of the tests so far: CSC scope is holding up more than it’s being narrowed, with only methodology critiques landing.
The Nebraska arbitration ruled Monday. Mit Winter’s read: “The CSC won on the associated entity and warehousing points, but the arbitrator questioned the CSC’s range of compensation analysis. Specifically, it took issue with the CSC excluding cleared associated entity deals from the database used to determine the appropriate RoC.” So the CSC won on the structural questions that the Kessler motion is also litigating. The “associated entity” definition and the “warehousing” enforcement framework held up. What the arbitrator opened was a methodology issue: the CSC’s range-of-compensation database systematically excludes already-cleared associated-entity deals, depressing the FMV benchmark below what the market actually pays. That’s a real critique, but it’s an adjustment, not an architectural defeat.
Sam Ehrlich reported Tuesday afternoon that the Cousins hearing on the Kessler motion to enforce the settlement has been set for June 10 at 11:30 AM Pacific. The hearing will be a public Zoom call. That’s a two-week delay from the original May 27 date. The substantive question is the same: can class counsel Berman and Kessler narrow the CSC’s reach over MMR-routed deals by interpretation of the settlement’s “associated entity” language?
The timing matters. The SCORE Act floor vote (week of May 18-22) is now likely to happen before the Cousins ruling (June 10). That removes the “race against codification” framing from Monday’s piece. Even if SCORE passes the House on May 21, it still has to clear the Senate (where it can’t) before it would actually codify anything. The Cousins ruling on June 10 happens regardless. The litigation track was always going to outpace the legislative track.
Michael McCann’s piece in Sportico on Monday made the substantive case clearly. The NCAA’s “associated entity” language was negotiated and agreed to by both sides. Courts can’t rewrite settlements. Cousins has to interpret the language, not change it. McCann’s read of the Ninth Circuit precedent (Jeff D. v. Andrus, 1989) is that interpretation can only narrow language that’s ambiguous. The “associated entity” definition is broad but it’s not ambiguous. So McCann reads the Kessler motion as unlikely to succeed on its face.
If McCann is right (and his read tracks with the Nebraska arbitration outcome), Cousins’s June 10 ruling will affirm CSC’s broad scope rather than narrow it. The litigation track is outpacing the legislative track, but “outpacing” isn’t the same as “narrowing.” It could mean confirming.
Daniel Libit’s Sportico reporting from May 5 captured the same substantive frame from the defendants’ side. The brief Libit reported on argues class counsel is asking Cousins to “rewrite” the settlement to permit “an easy end-run around the settlement’s continued ban on pay-for-play.”
SCORE codifies the same architecture the defendants are defending in the Cousins motion. SCORE’s “associated entity” plus “valid business purpose” plus FMV-test language is essentially statutory adoption of the CSC enforcement framework. If Congress passes SCORE, that architecture gets locked into federal statute. If Congress doesn’t pass SCORE (which is the likelier outcome), the architecture’s future depends on Cousins and the next round of arbitration challenges. Based on McCann’s read and the Nebraska arbitration outcome, those tests appear to be confirming the architecture more than narrowing it.
The architecture isn’t being negotiated in two places at once. It’s being tested in two places at once, and so far it’s winning both tests. That’s a continuation of the litigation-as-governance dynamic that’s been the through-line of this series, with the unexpected twist that this round of litigation is reinforcing CSC’s authority rather than tearing it down.
The Trump committee model isn’t on the floor
The Monday piece documented the Trump presidential committee draft that proposed a federally-chartered task force receiving an antitrust exemption and the right to override state NIL laws. The substitution theory of the post-NCAA era required that task force. It’s the institutional substitute that would replace NCAA rulemaking.
The bill on the House floor next week doesn’t contain it. The Sec. 14 commission in SCORE is explicitly placed “within the legislative branch” with congressional appointees only. No White House role. No federal task force. The Senate-bipartisan track also doesn’t include a federal task force.
The substitution theory hasn’t been adopted in the bill that emerged, but the committee draft surfaced May 9, the same week SCORE Rules Print 119-29 went public. SCORE wasn’t drafted to reject the committee model; the two are parallel productions, not sequential. The Sec. 14 commission inside SCORE could conceivably recommend creating a federally-chartered task force in its 270-day report. So “dead” is probably too strong. “Not adopted in the bill that emerged” is more accurate.
Three things are emerging instead of substitution: Congressional action running in parallel without White House coordination, state-AG enforcement, and continued litigation testing CSC scope. None of those tracks substitute for the NCAA the way the committee draft proposed. They reshape NCAA authority around the edges, sometimes by expanding it (SCORE codifies CSC enforcement) and sometimes by adjusting it (Cousins, Nebraska arbitration, state AG threats).
In Monday’s framework I marked the substitution probability at 5-10 percent. I’m moving it to 3-7 percent now, reflecting that the committee model isn’t being explicitly advanced through either federal vehicle but isn’t formally rejected either.
Where this leaves the assessment of the probability framework
Updated probability ranges, with standard caveats: heuristic ranges from publicly available information, not narrowly bracketed predictions, and the pathways are not mutually exclusive. The same institutional environment can produce conference-separation activity AND a CBA framework AND continued litigation-as-governance simultaneously. What’s being bracketed is the probability of each pathway being a dominant institutional dynamic over the next 12-24 months, not the joint probability of all pathways happening at once. Sum these and they will exceed 100 percent. That’s intentional. See Beneath the Shields for the framework’s full definitions.
Conference-separation pathway holds at the upper end of the 10-18 percent band. Big 12-RedBird, Amazon-Duke, FBS governance study, CSC participation agreement failure twice. The substitution-by-other-means activity continues. The committee draft removed some oxygen from this pathway briefly, but the committee draft also isn’t being adopted. So the underlying conference-level activity is what’s actually filling the institutional vacuum, and it’s continuing.
Institutional substitution moves down to 3-7 percent. The committee draft hasn’t been incorporated into either federal vehicle, though the Sec. 14 commission inside SCORE could revive it downstream.
The federal legislation pathway is hard to bracket as a single probability now because there are two distinct vehicles with different theories.
SCORE Act House passage sits at 30-50 percent. Republican leadership has the procedural momentum and is publicly confident about the whip count. Cover voting probably delivers about six D votes if the bill is on track to pass without them. The 217-212 margin allows two R defections, and Dellenger reports as many as three may defect, which would put the bill underwater on Republican votes alone and break the cover-voting math. Republican leadership has been publicly confident about the whip count before each of the prior two pulled votes, so the public confidence signal isn’t itself a positive indicator. The base rate for bills pulled twice and then passed on the third attempt is lower than 50 percent.
SCORE Senate passage (filibuster-cleared) sits under 5 percent. Cantwell as ranking member of Commerce, Trahan plus 4-AG opposition, Democratic base mobilizing against. The numbers aren’t there and aren’t getting there.
Senate-bipartisan compromise (Cruz-Cantwell as a separate vehicle) belongs at 5-12 percent. Talks are engaged but stuck on the substantive impasses. The August recess deadline creates real pressure.
Collective bargaining stays at the upper end of 20-26 percent. The Senate-bipartisan compromise will likely have to address employment in ways SCORE doesn’t, which creates legislative scaffolding for downstream organizing. Matt Brown’s caveat applies: scaffolding isn’t the same as a CBA.
Litigation-as-governance stays at 70-85 percent. Nebraska arbitration on the merits, Cousins on June 10, Sorsby MTD pending, Wilson v. Georgia, the mass-tort ledger (Geathers, Davis), the contract architecture attacks (Heitner privity, Final Payment Trap). The litigation calendar doesn’t slow down regardless of what Congress does.
What I’m watching this week
Tuesday May 19: House Rules Committee meeting in the evening. Rule vote tentatively Wednesday.
Wednesday/Thursday May 20-21: SCORE Act House floor vote, if the rule passes.
Friday May 22: Division I Cabinet meeting. Triple-loaded agenda: five-year age-based eligibility vote, 76-team tournament expansion deliberations, tampering burden-shift proposal.
Tuesday-Thursday May 27-29: SEC Spring Meetings in Destin. Sankey and the SEC commissioners face the Trump committee draft, the SCORE Act floor outcome, and Cruz-Cantwell state-of-play in formal discussion for the first time.
June 10: Cousins hearing on the Kessler motion to enforce the settlement. Public Zoom.
August recess: informal Congressional deadline. If no bill is delivered by then, most legislative observers think nothing happens in 2026.
The federal pathway has woken up. Just not the way the White House wanted, and not the way the committee draft asked for. The substitution theory was a coherent (if politically impossible) bet on replacing NCAA rulemaking with federal authority. What’s actually emerging is messier: House SCORE codifying a contested architecture (probably without Senate concurrence); Cruz-Cantwell negotiating a different architecture (engaged but stuck on substance); state AGs and a House Democrat organizing visible opposition this week; the CSC being tested from below by arbitration and pending litigation, with the test results so far affirming rather than narrowing its scope. Three federal tracks, one judicial track, all moving in different directions.
The bill passes the House next week, maybe…possibly. So, the federal pathway moves, probably not in the form anyone had planned, and there will be ups and downs all along the way. Such is college athletics in 2026.
If you’re finding this analysis useful, share it with someone trying to make sense of where college sports governance is going. The immediate prequel is What the White House Wants for College Athletics (and Why It’s Stuck), which set up the substitution-vs-separation framework that today’s piece extends. The collective-bargaining flagship is How Collective Bargaining Could Stabilize College Football. The longer structural argument is Beneath the Shields.
This is an ongoing series applying political economy analysis to the college sports reform landscape. Recent entries:
What the White House Wants for College Athletics (and Why It’s Stuck) (Sunday)
Reader Feedback: Geathers, the Cap, and the Final Payment Trap (last Friday)
What the 1933 NCAA Handbook Says about College Athletics (last Wednesday)
College Athletics Might Be Losing Its Shields
The College Sports State Law Patchwork
How Collective Bargaining Could Stabilize College Football (the flagship that started it all)
Litigation as Governance in College Athletics
NB: This essay is written in my capacity as a political scientist who studies institutions, incentives, and collective action, not as an institutional spokesperson.
Well done as always
Always informative, thoughtful and insightful without leaning. Thnx KS.