March 05, 2025 | Read Online

I don't think we can ignore these congressional college sports hearings anymore

Yes, there was another NIL hearing. But 2025 isn't 2022, and legislative action faces a very, very different political reality

Good morning, and thanks for your continued support of Extra Points.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. On Tuesday morning, the US House Committee on Energy and Commerce held another hearing on college sports and NIL, titled: “Moving the Goalposts: How NIL is Reshaping College Athletics. If you are so inclined to watch the entire thing, well, you’re in luck. The recording of the hearing can be found here.

In many ways, this hearing looked like many of the other hearings I’ve written about. Like this one, for example. Or maybe that one. Like most previous hearings, the witness list skewed towards NCAA-friendly voices (coaches, athletic directors, former athletes), and did not include the perspective of current elite athletes. Like many previous hearing, questioning from members of Congress suggested that many lawmakers had not been following the debate closely, or were more interested in talking about completely different topics.

But over the last few years, it was also pretty easy to simply ignore almost everything that came out of Congress, because nobody had any pathway to actually pass any legislation. College athletics reform is not a topic that deeply engages most lawmaker offices, and there was not anywhere close to enough Democrats and Republicans to agree on getting anything through a divided Congress and Democratic president.

After watching much of the hearing, I understand why many of my colleagues are inclined to brush the hearing off as more of the same. After all, the same political battleground lines exist in 2025 that they did in 2024 and 2023, and Congress has a lot of other problems to address right now.

But this year, and this Congress, are not the same as last year.

Today, Republicans control the House of Representatives, albeit by a tiny margin. They also control the US Senate and the White House (and if we want to be technical about it, also the NLRB, the Supreme Court, the NCAA presidency and most of the social platforms we use to complain about all those things). While the pathway to getting a bill passed without any Democratic support in either chamber is difficult, it does exist. And hey, the first two months of this presidential administration has clearly shown that if they want something bad enough, they’re not going to wait on pesky things like Congressional Authorization.

If Republicans decide they want action on college athletics reform badly enough…it’s going to happen, no matter how many lawyers and economists oppose it.