NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson pulled no punches on ESPN’s SportsCenter, blasting the Protect College Sports Act as a blatant corporate power grab disguised as legislative reform.
Johnson dismissed claims of NIL “chaos,” arguing the bill would strip student-athletes of basic civil and economic rights while insulating power-hungry conferences and wealthy executives from antitrust laws. His remarks echoed his previous call for Black athletes not to support schools in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) that are located in states that attack voting rights.
“Athletes should have a voice in the process. There’s no instability in the game,” Johnson said. “It’s just greed by the conferences.”
“It takes away the rights of athletes,” he added. “It creates an opportunity for the sports leagues to commit what would now be illegal acts because they would have an exemption from antitrust legislation. It’s pretty bad, and it’s unfortunate that players have been able to benefit from their ability on the field, and now, that [would be] taken away.”
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The Protect College Sports Act (PCSA) is bipartisan federal legislation that aims to create uniform federal rules for college athletics. It would establish clear federal standards for Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals, cap sports agent fees at 5%, and standardize transfer portal and eligibility limits. Any legal challenges regarding player eligibility or transfers would also have to be heard in federal civil court rather than state court.
Critics of the bill, including Johnson, argue that it preserves institutional power at the expense of player rights.
“It’s nothing unstable with students being able to collectively bargain. There’s nothing unstable with students not being exploited on the field,” Johnson explained. “There’s nothing unstable with there being true opportunities for families to benefit from the skill that their children are displaying on the basketball court or the football field.”
Johnson’s appearance followed a controversial setup three days earlier, when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) — a co-sponsor of the PCSA — was granted nearly 10 minutes on ESPN’s “College GameDay,” one of the network’s most popular programs, to promote the bill uninterrupted alongside host Rece Davis.
After the NAACP publicly called on ESPN via X to grant Johnson equal time on the upcoming “College GameDay” broadcast in Oxford, Miss., the network opted instead to slate him for Tuesday’s 6 p.m. ET edition of “SportsCenter.” Before Cruz’s appearance, on the premiere episode of “College GameDay” on September 5, analysts Nick Saban and Pat McAfee aggressively lobbied for federal NIL guardrails, framing the bill as necessary to fix a chaotic sport. Saban declared the act “100 times better than what we have now,” while McAfee urged Congress to “get to work to save college sports.”
In addition, Deion Sanders, head coach of the Colorado Buffaloes and former coach of Jackson State University, came out in support of the bill.
Interestingly, just moments after Johnson wrapped his segment, the Senate cleared a major milestone toward passing the legislation. In a 74-24 vote to invoke cloture, lawmakers voted to advance the bill to the floor, setting the stage for a final vote as early as next week. Sanders said he joined Saban because “it was the right thing to do.”
ESPN has reportedly moved away from the intersection of sports and politics, a posture the network has invoked most often when Black talent addresses social justice issues. It has shown no such reluctance when it comes to coverage of the PCSA. According to Awful Announcing, The Walt Disney Company, ESPN’s parent company, and Paramount have been lobbying Congress for PCSA to safeguard their multi-billion-dollar investments in college athletics.
Critics say that for Black star athletes — who disproportionately generate the billions driving college football and basketball — the Protect College Sports Act is a double-edged sword. While the legislation claims to guarantee protected multi-year scholarships and standardized agent regulation, the bill’s capped revenue-sharing model and strict “fair market value” NIL restrictions could suppress the open-market earnings of elite players, preventing them from leveraging their true market value in free-agent bidding wars.
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