Clouds move over Tiger Stadium on the campus of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on March 20, 2023. (Matthew Perschall for Louisiana Illuminator)
WASHINGTON – A U.S. Senate panel on Tuesday further fueled the heated debate over compensation for student-athletes. Senators and experts agreed that the current system wasn’t working, but had different ideas for a way forward.
Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana and chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, hosted a panel with experts, executives and former college and professional athletes to discuss “fixing college sports.”
Cassidy said the “current system is actually hurting student-athletes.”
“Our effort will be: What do we do to protect the student-athlete?” He continued, adding that this approach would also protect universities.
Two of the five panelists Cassidy brought were local Louisiana State Universityincluding Collis Temple Jr., LSU Board of Trustees member and former university basketball star, and Julie Cromer, assistant athletic director and chief operating officer of LSU Athletics.
The event followed a Round table at the White House last weekwhere President Donald Trump promised to soon issue an executive order to transform college sports.
Debate about athletes as employees
The college sports world continues to grapple with the fallout from the 2021 NCAA guidelines that allowed student-athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness.
A federal judge approved the terms of a in June 2025 nearly $2.8 billion antitrust settlement This paved the way for schools to pay athletes directly.
The rules for name, image and likeness offerings vary from state to state.
The college sports landscape is also struggling with gender inequality in NIL deals and the controversial NCAA transfer portal, among other issues.
A bipartisan bill on recess in the US House of Representatives aims to create a national framework for compensating college athletes. It would also prevent college athletes from being classified as employees while providing broad antitrust immunity for the NCAA and college athletic conferences.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, expressed optimism about the bill’s fate during the White House roundtable, saying: “We are close to passage in the House and now believe we have the votes for it.”
But the bill would face a grim path in the Senate, where Senate Democrats have opposed it.
Meanwhile a cross-party proposal Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington state would “provide for a new antitrust exemption allowing college football institutions to sell media rights together” and “make it optional for conferences and schools to pool their media rights together.”
“No transparency”
Jim Carr, president and CEO of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, said: “The impact of student-athletes becoming employees, or many of these court decisions that make it difficult to enforce our rules around what we call education-based athletics, are really – I don’t think this is an exaggeration or too dramatic to put it – critical to ensuring that not just the NAIA, but every one of our institutions, can stay in business long-term.”
Carr, whose association includes about 250 institutions, said that at an average NAIA school, 36% of students are also athletes.
Sen. Chris Murphy called for collective bargaining that allows athletes to “speak for themselves” and noted that Congress should not “micromanage” the relationship between colleges and college athletes.
“We should just give the colleges or conferences and the athletes an opportunity to have a conversation among themselves,” the Connecticut Democrat said.
Bernard Dennis III, principal at Jackson Lewis PC and an expert in labor and sports law, said that if students were classified as employees, “they would be subject to several statutes, not least the (Fair Labor Standards Act), which would allow them to be compensated for their time and overtime, and then it becomes a challenge as to what constitutes that.”
He added: “Under the law it would be whatever is required to do their job, and so if you have eligibility rules around maintaining a certain GPA and things like that, not only does that become your time on the field, but attending class also becomes compensable time? How do you capture that?”
