The System That Was Never Fair to Begin With
My cousin Marcus played Division I football at a mid-major program in the Southwest Conference. Full scholarship. Film sessions at six in the morning. Mandatory workouts that the NCAA officially called 'voluntary.' Travel that consumed Fridays and Sundays and sometimes Thursdays when the scheduling worked out that way. Four years of his physical peak dedicated to a program that generated millions in television revenue.
He graduated with a degree in communications and a shoulder that required surgery twice before he turned thirty. The program kept his name on a jersey they sold in the campus bookstore for $89.99 for three years after he left. He received nothing.
That was the NCAA model: extract maximum economic value from young athletes, pay them nothing, and call it amateurism. It worked for seventy years because the athletes had no legal alternative and no political constituency. Walk away and lose your scholarship. Complain and lose your eligibility. The cartel held.
What the SCORE Act Actually Does
The Supporting College Athletes and Restoring Equity Act — the SCORE Act — represents a serious federal attempt to impose a coherent national framework on what has become a regulatory catastrophe. The Name, Image, and Likeness revolution that the Supreme Court essentially forced on the NCAA in 2021's NCAA v. Alston decision was necessary and overdue. But it created a patchwork of fifty state regimes with different rules, different enforcement mechanisms, and wildly different competitive implications for programs in different states.
The result is exactly what you'd expect from uncoordinated state-level improvisation: a bidding war in which the largest programs in the richest states can offer NIL collectives that function as de facto salaries, while smaller programs in states with more restrictive laws compete at a structural disadvantage that has nothing to do with coaching quality or player development. Transfer portal chaos. Recruiting violations that nobody can track. Athletes who signed NIL deals in September discovering the collective's funding evaporated by January.
The SCORE Act would establish federal standards for NIL agreements, create dispute resolution mechanisms for athletes, and impose transparency requirements on the collectives that have become the actual power brokers in college recruiting. With White House backing, it has a cleaner legislative path than previous reform attempts that died in committee.
Trump's support for this matters substantively, not just politically. The administration has consistently positioned itself as an advocate for working-class Americans who've been squeezed by institutional arrangements that benefit powerful interests at individual expense. College athletics is a case study in exactly that dynamic: a billion-dollar industry that successfully laundered labor exploitation as tradition for most of a century.
The Conservative Case for This Reform
I want to be clear about something, because I know there's a faction of the right that views any federal involvement in college sports as regulatory overreach. I understand that instinct. I share it in most contexts.
But the NCAA isn't a free market. It's a cartel. Specifically, it's a cartel that used its regulatory power over eligibility — the thing athletes need to play — to suppress compensation that a competitive market would have provided. Federal antitrust law already applies to this behavior; the Alston decision confirmed it. The question isn't whether government is involved. It's whether federal intervention creates a rational national framework or leaves the current chaos in place.
The chaos isn't neutral. It systematically benefits the programs with the largest alumni donor bases and the most permissive state regulatory environments. Small-market programs, programs at HBCUs, programs that serve athlete populations with fewer options are getting crushed in a bidding war they can't win. That's not market efficiency — that's incumbent advantage operating under the cover of uncoordinated regulation.
A federal framework that creates baseline protections for athletes, enforces contract transparency, and prevents the most predatory collective practices would actually make college athletics more competitive, not less. More programs could recruit effectively. More athletes would have enforceable rights. The schools with the biggest checkbooks would still have advantages — that's not eliminable — but they wouldn't have the additional advantage of operating in the least regulated environment.
My cousin Marcus will never get what he was owed. The athletes currently playing in systems where NIL deals evaporate without recourse deserve something better. The SCORE Act isn't a perfect solution. No legislation is. But it's a real attempt to impose accountability on an industry that spent seven decades avoiding it. That deserves support.
