Senate Passes College Sports Bill That Would Stop Major Universities From Cutting Track and Cross Country

The college sports bill the Senate passed late Monday was written with football in mind: payroll caps, limits on conference size, rules for coaches who try to leave mid-season. One provision reaches a long way past the football office. Schools with more than $80 million a year in athletic revenue would have to keep their women’s and Olympic sports, track and field and cross country among them, at the number of teams, roster spots and scholarships they had in 2024-25, and hold that line for nine years.

The Protect College Sports Act passed 77-22, the Associated Press reported, after years of talks led by Republican Ted Cruz of Texas and Democrat Maria Cantwell of Washington. It would write into federal law the 2025 House v. NCAA settlement, the deal that first let schools pay their athletes directly, and give the NCAA limited antitrust protection to enforce its rules.

That baseline year will catch the eye of anyone who follows college track, because it was the last season under the old scholarship limits of 12.6 for men’s track and field and 18 for women’s, with five and six for cross country. The settlement took effect on July 1, 2025, and replaced those limits with roster caps of 45 athletes per track team and 17 per cross country team.

Every one of those spots can now be funded, but programs that had carried big squads had to shrink. BYU, which had run rosters in the mid-60s to 70 for a decade, told the Deseret News it would cut 15 men and 18 women. “The days of taking a flier on a kid who might have potential with some work are done,” coach Ed Eyestone said. Washington State went further in June 2025, dropping its field events and scaling back sprints and hurdles to concentrate on distance running.

Senate Commerce Committee Democrats counted 74 schools above the $80 million line when the bill cleared committee in June. Schools taking in between $50 million and $80 million face the same requirement over a four-year window, with an easier route to an exemption, according to a summary from the American Council on Education. The Congressional Budget Office put the cost of keeping those rosters and scholarships at “tens of millions of dollars per year.”

There is money for these sports too. On top of the $21.5 million schools can already share with athletes, the bill adds a retention fund of $22.5 million, and that fund rises to $27.5 million only if a school spends the extra on NIL opportunities for athletes in women’s and Olympic sports, according to the Commerce Committee. Scholarships could no longer be pulled over performance, injury or a roster decision, and schools would cover medical costs for sports injuries for five years after an athlete’s last season.

The bill would also put into law a five-year eligibility clock that starts at 19 or at high school graduation, close to the rule the NCAA adopted in June to replace the redshirt. Distance running is where that change has drawn the most attention, since so many international recruits arrive older. Mercyline Kirwa won the NCAA 10,000m title for Iowa State at the NCAA Outdoor Championships in June as a 26-year-old freshman, ahead of BYU’s Jane Hedengren. On transfers, an athlete would be allowed one move with immediate eligibility, and more in certain cases, including when a school drops their sport.

Opponents argued the bill does more for the institutions than for the athletes. Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy said last week that it “places a cap on the students’ cut of the revenues, but there are no caps on coaches’ salaries or on the size of donations to athletic programs.” Unions and civil rights organizations have lined up against it too, among them the AFL-CIO and the NAACP, whose objections include the bill’s silence on whether athletes can be treated as employees and bargain as a group.

President Donald Trump called it “a really big deal” after the vote, but it is not law yet. The House never managed to bring its own version to a floor vote, and it is out until after the Nov. 3 elections. If both chambers have not passed the bill before January, the process begins again from nothing in the new Congress.