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Baker sells certainty to a $14 billion college sports economy before the Senate votes
The NCAA president says he feels "pretty good" about the Senate passing a bill that would fix eligibility, transfer and pay rules. He has already put the House step after the election, and Democrats may filibuster.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- NCAA President Charlie Baker said he feels "pretty good" about Senate passage of bipartisan college sports legislation, and declined to predict whether it reaches Trump's desk this year.
- Baker said he hopes that if the Senate acts, the House will take the bill up as part of what it deals with after the election.
- The Senate bill would bar pro athletes from college sports, set firm eligibility and transfer limits, restrict some conference realignment, and raise the cap on schools' spending to pay and retain athletes.
- Senate Democrats could filibuster the bill outright, with Cory Booker, Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal among those advocating against it behind the scenes.
- Minutes before the interview, a court found that former Purdue men's basketball player Trey Kaufman-Renn could pursue another year of eligibility after four years with the Boilermakers.
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Why it matters
- constraint The higher spending cap only becomes a usable budget number once both chambers act, so athletic directors are still building next season's payroll against the current one.
- exposure While eligibility is decided player by player in court, a roster and its scholarship count can be changed by a ruling that lands after the team is set.
- contradiction Baker treats the bill as settling money, transfers and eligibility; Murphy disputes it improves on the House version Democrats rejected, so the certainty depends on votes from people who reject the premise.
- cost Every month without statute, the rules keep being set by whoever files next, and the NCAA and its schools pay for that in legal fees before any of it reaches athletes.
By itself, a Senate vote leaves the money where it is. The bill needs the House and a signature. Baker described the sequencing as deliberate: "One of the things that you know I learned from my 16 years in state government is: This is a one-bite-at-a-time type business," he told Semafor [12].
What he wants from Congress is a fixed rulebook. "We do have some very fundamental issues that would make a big difference, for certainty purposes around rules and around eligibility and around money and around transfers," Baker said. Those things, he added, "would help sort of settle down a lot of the uncertainty that exists now" [5].
Commercially, he is pitching a swap. "We are spending more money on championships than we've ever spent before. We have more people coming to them than we've ever had before. That's a really great story," Baker said. "But we're all spending a lot of money on lawyers, and I think all of us would rather spend that money on something else" [6]. He did not give a figure for the legal spend [11]. Against an economy Semafor sizes at more than $14 billion [3], a legal bill of unknown size cannot be turned into a saving that a school, a conference or a sponsor can put in a budget.
The politics cut across the usual lines. Baker is a former moderate Republican governor of Massachusetts who served eight years under Obama, Trump and Biden [13]. He praised Cruz, Cantwell and Coons, and credited Trump's involvement while saying the two had not discussed the legislation specifically: "His voice and the participation of a lot of the folks in his administration has made a big difference. There's no question about that," Baker said [14]. Senate Republicans may lose a few of their own votes in the next few days [15]. Murphy's objection is about substance; he told Semafor he does not "buy the argument that this is a demonstrably better version of the SCORE Act" [9], the House bill Democrats turned on last year because it stifled unionization among athletes [10].
In my view the Senate vote gets treated as the planning date whatever the House timetable turns out to be. The alternative is the short list of things the NCAA can change on its own, and Baker has worked through most of it: healthcare benefits for injured athletes after they leave school, a school-based revenue sharing model, and limits on the transfer portal [16]. He is also building a portal database that will let athletes see where fellow competitors transferred and how it worked out, for "a little more clarity about what's real and what's not, so the kids can make better decisions" [17]. Eligibility and the cap stay outside what he can do on his own.
If Democrats hold, the bill dies in the Senate. Baker, who took over in 2023 and has run the organization for about three years [18][19], goes on writing the rulebook one docket at a time. There is no planning date at all.
What to watch
- Whether the few Republican defections flagged for the coming days materialise, and whether Democrats actually mount the filibuster.
- Whether the House takes the bill up after the election, the step Baker deferred.
- What number the final text puts on the higher cap for schools' spending on athletes, since the Senate bill's description does not give one.