Mark Few’s been wearing nice suits a lot lately.
First, when he was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, presented in part by Arkansas head coach John Calipari. Then, when he showed up earlier this week on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., flanked by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and, once again, John Calipari. He was there to speak on behalf of the Protect College Sports Act and lobby for its passage through Congress.
That’s more of a suited-up Few than Gonzaga fans have seen since the Bulldogs were still a plucky Cinderella; back when Few’s whole style was an off-the-rack baggy ensemble straight outta the Bon Marché’s “Middle School Vice Principal” catalogue. No disrespect; by early 2000s standards, Few looked as sharp as anyone in the game.
For a guy whose public image has long since been quarter-zips and chinos, the suit is jarring enough. What he was doing in it on Monday was, for some, even harder to square.
In the early days of NIL, it was Mark Few who sat in front of Maria Cantwell’s Senate Commerce Committee in 2021 and argued that college athletes were no longer “amateurs” and deserved to be paid whatever the market would pay them, entitled to a fair cut of the billions generated by their image and labor. Now he’s standing next to her on the Capitol steps, backing a bill that hands the NCAA what five years of courtroom beatdowns couldn’t: immunity from the antitrust lawsuits that forced it to pay players in the first place.
Few didn’t mince words. “Now, five years later, I think you can sense the desperation in everybody’s voices,” Few said. “We really, really need help, and we need it from Congress. This bill might not be perfect, but it’s far and away the best thing we’ve got out there right now.” Later telling The Spokesman-Review that his commitment was about leaving the sport better than he found it after 38 years on the sidelines, Few made it plain that coaches and administrators view the PCSA as the only emergency brake left.
Less than twenty-four hours after Few departed D.C., the Senate voted 74-24 to advance the bill past a filibuster, putting the legislation on a direct track to clear the chamber.
So how does a bill that labor advocates have spent months railing against get 74 votes in a bitterly divided Senate? And what happens to college basketball—and Gonzaga—if it lands on the President’s desk?
Well, Schoolhouse Rock exists for a reason. Being “just a bill” is not the same thing as being “a law.” Yet.
Tuesday’s 74-vote landslide means the bill will almost certainly pass a final Senate vote soon. From there, it heads to the House of Representatives, where the congressional calendar becomes crucial. Lawmakers have roughly two weeks of session left before adjourning on October 2 to campaign for the midterms. While Donald Trump has signaled he’ll sign the bill, the odds of the House rushing a 171-page regulatory overhaul through committee, passing it as-is, and enacting operational rules before November are practically zero. The bill is headed for a post-election lame-duck session in December or early 2027.
In other words: don’t panic about opening night just yet. As jarring as it was watching Few advocate for legislation that would decimate this year’s roster if passed immediately, the coaching staff can read a calendar. Few knows this bill almost certainly won’t become operational law before the Zags play Purdue in Las Vegas.
Still, that doesn’t mean Zag fans should pretend this legislation isn’t coming down the pike because it has momentum. And when it finally lands, the PCSA will fundamentally reshape Gonzaga’s competitive reality for the next decade plus.
What the Protect College Sports Act Actually Does
It takes a real college basketball sicko to read a 171-page legislative PDF front to back. Luckily for Slipper Still Fits readers, I am precisely that kind of sicko.
Once you strip away the doublespeak, the Protect College Sports Act is a high-profile hostage exchange. But before examining what each side gave up, it helps to understand why Congress had to step in as hostage negotiator—a five-year legal train wreck starting with an 1890 antitrust statute: the Sherman Act.
Under federal antitrust law, independent businesses cannot collude to cap worker salaries or prevent employees from switching companies. For nearly a century, universities hid behind the NCAA to do exactly that, claiming college sports was “amateur education” rather than commercial business while quietly cashing billions in television and merchandising revenue.
Then in 2021, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that college sports is a commercial entertainment industry subject to antitrust law. For the next five years, every time colleges tried to enforce a rule—capping NIL deals, limiting transfer waivers, or holding back seniors—athletes sued under antitrust law and won.
Upon realizing they could no longer enforce national rules without getting hauled into federal court four times a week, university presidents and ADs came to Capitol Hill with a singular demand: a federal antitrust exemption.
By granting that exemption, the Protect College Sports Act hands colleges a legal get-out-of-jail-free card. It gives universities and conferences statutory immunity to finally police their own spending, cap roster payroll, and limit transfers without fear of the next federal injunction. Best of all, it packages that cartel power under the clever guise of an orderly, uniform rulebook that treats every school as an equal partner.
The problem, of course, is that handing a multi-billion-dollar sports cartel an antitrust exemption to cap wages and restrict player movement looks atrocious to labor-friendly lawmakers, player advocates, and a skeptical public. If this bill was just a naked power grab by wealthy university presidents looking to slash labor costs, it would have been laughed out of Congress on day one. To get Democrats like Maria Cantwell to co-sponsor the legislation, clear a Senate filibuster, and survive public scrutiny, universities desperately needed progressive political cover.
So lawmakers sweetened the pot with genuine player perks: federally protected NIL rights, a 5% cap on agent fees (down from the wildly predatory 20% that existed before), ten years of guaranteed degree-completion scholarships, and five years of post-eligibility injury healthcare.
In exchange, the bill establishes a rigid system of institutional control that translates into five massive rule changes across all college sports:
- A national payroll cap (with a massive football loophole). Under the House v. NCAA settlement, schools can pay athletes directly from athletic department funds up to roughly $20.5 million a year across all sports. But after the SEC and Big Ten pitched an absolute hissy fit in July, lawmakers added an extra $22.5 million “retention fund” for schools big and bad enough to feel the $20 million was insufficient to their needs. While mid-majors strain to fund $15 to $20 million, the football behemoths can now legally spend over $45 million a year on rosters without breaking a single rule.
- The return of the one-transfer rule. Unlimited free agency is over. Undergrads get one penalty-free transfer; enter the portal a second time, and you sit out a mandatory year. For many fans, this represents a welcome return to roster stability. For others (like professional labor attorneys, union rights advocates, antitrust scholars, and pretty much anyone who holds an actual degree in labor history or basic constitutional law), it’s a flagrant, brazen, and borderline medieval violation of basic worker mobility.
- A five-year eligibility clock. A federal codification of the already-contentious five-in-five policy: a strict five-year cutoff starting at age 19 or high school graduation to complete four years of eligibility. Lawsuits demanding extra COVID years are dead, and 22-year-olds returning from European pro clubs or the G League are locked out.
- An audit on booster collectives. Third-party NIL deals over $600 must clear an independent “fair market value” standard via a national clearinghouse. If Papa Murphy’s pays Massamba Diop a reasonable amount of cash to appear in local ads or on a billboard, that passes without a hitch. But if they hand him $10 million to post selfies playing penny slots, the clearinghouse voids the contract and penalizes the program for sneaking payroll around the cap.
- A 19-school conference cap. Conferences cannot expand past 19 members, and private equity is strictly barred from buying athletic departments to form breakaway super leagues.
The Fan Divide: Sanity Check or Cynical Power Grab?
Depending on what kind of fan you are, the Protect College Sports Act looks like either a return to sanity or an ugly corporate power grab.
If you’re exhausted by the last three years of chaos, the bill feels like a long-overdue corrective measure:
- Roster continuity. For years, college hoops built its magic on multi-year player development and consistent system-first play. In the NIL era, the portal turned the offseason into an annual auction where rosters turn over 70% every April. Bringing back the one-transfer penalty restores real continuity, which no hoops fan is arguing against.
- Stopping sleazy mid-season tampering. Routing third-party NIL through a clearinghouse cuts off the shadow market where rich programs use booster cash to quietly poach rosters in February.
- Protecting the Cinderella ecosystem. By capping conferences at 19 teams and outlawing private-equity buyouts, the bill prevents the SEC and Big Ten from breaking away into an exclusive 32-team football cartel, keeping the dream of March alive for everyone else.
On the other hand, the bill’s logic unravels into breathtaking hypocrisy the moment you view it through modern employment law.
The hard pill for fans to swallow is that it doesn’t matter how you feel about “student-athletes.” According to federal judges, regional labor boards, and five years of antitrust rulings, college athletes perform specialized commercial labor. They are employees.
The hypocrisy of the PCSA is that it attempts to create a bizarre, unprecedented legal category: employees with a permanent asterisk. It expects athletes to accept the strict payroll caps, corporate oversight, and behavioral control of formal employment, while simultaneously denying them the basic career mobility, workplace protections, and collective bargaining rights that every other legal worker in the American economy takes for granted:
- It penalizes young athletes for normal career mobility. In literally any other walk of American life, if your job sucks or a better offer arrives, you walk. A computer science major at UW can transfer to Florida State tomorrow simply because they prefer the weather, and nobody revokes their right to code. Head coaches routinely shatter contracts and jump ship for eight-figure buyouts without hesitation. But an 18-year-old athlete who transfers a second time is treated like company property, forced to forfeit a full year of playing time, television exposure, and NIL earnings for an arbitrary rule that nobody can justify beyond bemoaning that roster turnover makes the whole thing feel slightly less “magical.”
- It cements a permanent financial hierarchy. While the bill establishes national spending limits, Congress already carved out that $22.5 million retention loophole for the Big Ten and SEC. If you were hoping federal legislation would put every school on equal financial footing, think again. The football giants will still legally outspend basketball-first programs more than two-to-one; the bill doesn’t create equality, it simply puts a hard ceiling on just how wide that chasm is allowed to grow. Which, for Gonzaga, is not necessarily a bad thing.
Why Labor Unions Are Terrified
If you want to know why the AFL-CIO and ten major professional sports unions—including the NFLPA, NBPA, and MLBPA—staunchly oppose the bill, you have to look beyond college basketball.
In professional sports, team owners can’t just get together in a backroom, invent a salary cap, and agree not to hire each other’s players. In normal corporate America, if competing tech companies or hospital chains conspire to cap wages or enforce “no-poach” rules, it’s a felony under federal antitrust law. The only reason the NFL and NBA are legally permitted to have salary caps and draft rules is that they negotiate them directly with recognized player unions. Under American law, you either have an open market where workers are free to seek the highest bidder, or you sit down and bargain with an organized workforce
The PCSA bypasses this norm completely. Senator Cantwell points to “neutrality” language in the bill that doesn’t explicitly ban athletes from unionizing down the road. But labor leaders view that as an empty gesture. The right to unionize isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on if the very things a union would fight to negotiate (wages, revenue splits, and workplace mobility) have already been legally foreclosed by the statute itself.
To the broader labor movement, that sets a terrifying precedent. If a multibillion-dollar entertainment industry like the NCAA can lobby Capitol Hill for a customized federal law that redefines what counts as an “employee,” it hands corporate America a ready-made playbook they’ve been seeking to unify for years to bypass organizing battles through political fiat.
What Does This Have to Do With the Zags?
If the bill were to pass before November, Xaivian Lee, Chauncey Wiggins, Javon Bennett, Izan Almansa, and probably also Nathan De Sousa would all become immediately ineligible. But Few understands the calendar. With the House adjourning on October 2, the bill will almost certainly not become operational law before the season tips off.
He’s playing the long game. Gonzaga operates with national title expectations every single year, but unlike the Kentuckys and Michigans of the world, it has zero FBS football revenue pulling in nine-figure television windfalls to support those ambitions with 5-star recruits and expensive transfers. In an uncapped, unregulated free market, football factories can cross-subsidize their basketball rosters with limitless cash. Gonzaga simply cannot survive a sustained bidding war against Texas, Washington, or Arkansas. It doesn’t matter that your basketball program is a perennial powerhouse if a middling, 6-6 football team in a power conference generates more cash in television rights than your entire athletic department makes in a year.
To labor lawyers, using an act of Congress to cap player compensation and penalize employee transfers is textbook corporate wage-fixing. And make no mistake, that is precisely what it is according to the people who are experts in the field and also the Supreme Court. But for Gonzaga, that federally mandated spending ceiling doubles as an existential financial firewall. It keeps the cost of championship contention at a price a basketball-first school with no football team can actually afford, at least for the time being
Without those federal limits, the SEC and Big Ten could foreseeably their billions in football television cash to buy up every elite roster in the country, cordon off the biggest basketball brands into an untouchable super-league, and lock basketball-first programs out of the sport’s highest tier forever. That would be an absolute death sentence for parity, reducing a tournament built on the premise that anyone can beat anyone on a neutral floor to the same predictable oligarchy that has dominated college football for decades.
Few admitted on the Capitol steps that the bill “might not be perfect,” but pleaded that it’s “the best thing we’ve got.” And he’s not wrong. Watching him lobby alongside the establishment figureheads he’s spent thirty-plus years upsetting through culture and player development isn’t easy for longtime Zag fans to stomach. But to keep the national championship window open in the modern era, Gonzaga has to fight for federal guardrails. Because without a legally enforced spending cap, the once-scrappy Cinderellas of the college basketball landscape simply cannot afford a ticket to the dance in a world where college basketball is bankrolled by college football money.
