Protect College Sports? Senate just protected bad coaches instead | Opinion - USA Today

College athletics “nap rooms” scored a major victory in the U.S. Senate this week. So did 250-foot-long Daktronics video boards at college football stadiums.

Athletics directors secured a big win, too, because Congress didn’t come after their annual bonus packages that can exceed a half-million dollars.

The Senate isn’t coming to stop the decades-long gluttony rampant within college sports. It’s just trying to rein in athlete freedoms and the earning potential of a particular group of individuals — a group that doesn’t include coaches.

Perhaps the biggest winner in the “Protect College Sports Act” passed by the Senate? Losing college football coaches. They’re taking a victory lap.

This bill, which politicians pretend will address the “chaos” and “crisis” inside college athletics, fails to address the soaring salaries for coaches and their bosses, or the $50 million severance checks for fired coaches.

There’s never been a better time to be a bad football coach. Just ask South Carolina’s Shane Beamer. He’s making $8.25 million this season, and he’s 2-11 in his past 13 games against Power Four opponents. When South Carolina inevitably fires Beamer, he’ll be owed a buyout of more than $22 million, in part because the Gamecocks awarded him multiple unnecessary contract extensions.

"We've been spending all week trying to make the football coaches happy," Sen. John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) told reporters in Washington D.C. Kennedy raised several criticisms of the bill but voted for it anyway.

Coaches will be especially happy that an amendment that would cap coaching salaries at $5 million failed. The amendment also would’ve put a cap on buyouts.

The Senate didn't have the stomach for that, and every coach on the hot seat exhaled. Losers, you can relax. Your $50 million buyouts are safe! This bill would constrain athletes’ earning potential and reimpose transfer restrictions, while allowing fired coaches to cash failure money paychecks for years while relaxing on Buyout Beach.

The bill isn’t law yet. It must pass in the House, and it’s not clear whether the House has an appetite for a Senate bill that purportedly will “protect” college sports, but it’ll protect nobody more than the coach who’s getting paid millions to go 4-8, then gets paid more millions to go away.

If the bill becomes law, it would largely restore a one-time undergraduate transfer rule. That's another win for the bad coaches. Why? Because, if athletes realize they’re playing for a stooge, they’ll be dissuaded from transferring out of the stooge’s program, if they previously burned their free transfer.

Who and what does this legislation actually “protect"? Well, it would award the NCAA an antitrust bailout and leave free and clear the exorbitant salaries for coaches and athletics department officials. The bill would not address skyrocketing buyouts for failed coaches. It makes little headway in reining in runaway spending and won’t prevent athletics departments from racking up huge deficits.

If the money’s not going into athletes’ pockets, where do you think it’ll go? Where it typically goes: Into the pockets of executives and coaches (including fired coaches) and into buildings.

Exhibit A: Illinois unveiled a new video board this season that measures the length of six buses. Because, you know, a video board that’s five-bus-lengths wide simply wouldn’t be sufficient.

Exhibit B: Division I athletics facility spending would make a Russian oligarch blush. Take Clemson, for instance. Its football facilities include a slide, bowling lanes, a barber shop, a mini golf course, and a “nap room.” Let's not just pick on Clemson. This type of overindulgence abounds throughout the FBS, where athletics departments blow through money like drunks on a Vegas bachelor party.

Exhibit C: Amid a particularly active coaching carousel in 2025, FBS schools accumulated up to nearly $270 million in possible severance costs for fired football coaches, according to an analysis by The Athletic. The real cost will be less than that, because of settlements of offset clauses, but the fact remains coaching salaries keep soaring, and so do severance packages.

Exhibit D: Schools specialize in unnecessary contract extensions. Oklahoma awarded Brent Venables an absurd contract extension before this season. Never mind that Venables' previous deal ran through the 2029 season, and nobody was kicking down OU’s door to plunder him. Oklahoma tacked on two more years to his contract and made it more expensive to fire him.

Then, Oklahoma's season started, and the Sooners flopped in September. If the season continues in this direction, Venables will enter 2027 on the hot seat, mere months after Oklahoma awarded him a superfluous extension.

Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), a libertarian-leaning senator who voted against the bill, said this of his opposition: “As important as college sports are to students and institutions, they aren’t something Congress should micromanage. ... This bill manages to interfere with college athletics at nearly every level.”

But, the bill doesn’t interfere with loser coaches' ability to cash in on their incompetence.

I tend to agree with Paul that Congress should stop sticking its "nose where it doesn’t belong.” I’m against Congress capping athletes’ earning potential. This reeks of capitalism and free markets for me, but not for thee. If College Sports Inc. desires a cap, then bargain for one, like the professional leagues do.

I don’t actually believe Congress should regulate coaches’ salaries or buyouts, either. Instead, force university presidents and chancellors to do their jobs. If schools can't pay the athletics bills, then make them rein in spending and stop the contract stupidity, instead of awarding them a bailout.

This PCSA only pretends to curtail athletics spending. It greenlights gluttony, enables contract lunacy, and allows for gobs of failure money to go to bad coaches. By restricting athletes’ transfer freedoms and capping what schools are allowed to spend on player compensation, this legislation would clear the way for athletics departments to flush even more money on raises and bonuses for the fat cats, buyouts for the failed cats, and nap rooms for the sleepy cats.

Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network's senior national college football columnist. Listen to his podcast, "College Football Unfiltered." Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.

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