It took nearly five years, billions of dollars and a recasting of its amateurism model, but the NCAA appears to have snagged a reform ball back from California’s legislature.
In an unexpected move Wednesday, California Assemblymember Chris Holden pulled his legislation, The College Athlete Protection Act, from a hearing before the state’s Senate Education Committee. Holden had been advised against moving forward with the bill by the committee chair, state Sen. Josh Newman, according to staff.
“Though this is not the result we hoped for with AB 252, ultimately we did not have the support of the committee chair,” said Assemblymember Holden in a statement. “Still, this is not a fail. Our original bill language, in large part, focused on creating opportunities for college athletes to be paid and was critical to the NCAA revenue sharing settlement. I take these major shifts in the standard of college athletics to be an indication that we are headed in the right direction.”
The situation effectively ended Holden’s years-long legislative effort to get college athletes paid, Willie Armstrong, Holden’s chief of staff, said. Holden is term-limited, and AB 252, which already passed the state assembly last summer, had been built around the objective of requiring California universities to directly compensate their athletes through a “degree completion fund” backed by revenue sharing.
However, in the wake of last month’s announced settlement in the House v. NCAA case, which Holden said achieved “significant progress toward athlete compensation,” he removed the revenue-sharing language from his bill. Holden planned to carry forward with a revised version of AB 252 that focused on providing greater health and safety standards for college athletes and preventing athletic programs and scholarship opportunities from being cut.
Instead, he was forced to cut those plans short Wednesday–no doubt to the delight of the NCAA, which staunchly opposed AB 252. The association took a victory lap in the wake of its abandonment.
“The NCAA and member schools have been working hard to educate lawmakers in California and across the country about the positive changes taking place at the association to address the needs of modern student-athletes,” Tim Buckley, the NCAA’s senior vice president of external affairs, said in a statement. “Those changes combined with the landmark settlement proposal (makes) clear that state-by-state legislation would be detrimental to college sports, and create more challenges than they solve.”
AB 252 was championed by the National College Players Association and its director, Ramogi Huma, who had been an integral player behind the scenes with this bill and several previous legislative efforts in California to have college athletes directly share in the fruit of their labor.
“It’s disappointing that California college athletes will be left without (AB 252’s) protections but we will continue fighting for them and college athletes nationwide,” Huma said in a text message. “We will look to sponsor a similar bill next year.”
Holden, similarly, held out hope that the other parts of AB 252 would be revived next legislative session. “I have laid some groundwork and I believe my colleagues can get it done,” he said in the statement.
Instead of California or another state’s legislature, the NCAA is hoping Congress will take the lead in passing college sports reform laws, specifically ones giving the NCAA and conferences antitrust exemptions and preventing athletes from obtaining employee status. Earlier this month, the House Education and Workforce Committee voted along party lines to advance a Republican-led bill prohibiting college athletes from becoming employees of their schools or conferences “based on participation in certain intercollegiate athletics.”
Though that marked the furthest a piece of federal college sports reform legislation had moved in years, it remains unlikely that any such bill will pass this Congress, especially given the proximity of the November election.
Meanwhile, a law in Virginia is set to take effect Monday that would allow schools to directly compensate athletes for their NIL rights and prohibit the NCAA from punishing any school for doing so.
(This story has been updated with a statement from California Assemblymember Chris Holden.)