There are two principal college reform bills before Congress: the Democrat-backed Student Athlete Fairness Enforcement Act, or SAFE Act, and the bipartisan Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements Act, or the SCORE Act.
The college sports industrial complex largely supports SCORE for a few reasons: it would ban collegiate athletes from becoming employees, federalize NIL rules that are now different state by state, and grant limited antitrust immunity. The SAFE Act has no antitrust or athlete employee status provisions.
“We’ll get (legally) challenged,” Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti said of the recent House antitrust lawsuit settlement.
Take the new NIL overseer, the College Sports Commission, which can reject endorsement deals as proscribed by House. That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Speaking at a Columbia University sports business conference, Petitti, like others in his position, has come to terms with the details of House, accepting that there are now direct payments to athletes and the CSC to regulate NIL. But demands for change continue apace, whether it’s unionizing collegiate athletes or more freedom for collegians to switch schools.
The SAFE Act does not address employee status or antitrust protections, leaving it a non-starter for the powers in the college space.
“So, we have to help in DC,” Petitti said. “That’s the focus right now is getting this consistent, off and running, but also trying to protect it so we can actually operate at least a little while.”
Petitti said he has visited Washington 16 times since becoming commissioner two years ago.
One criticism of the House settlement is that it will cause schools to spend more on football and men’s basketball, and less on women’s sports and Olympic sports. In the Big Ten, Petitti said, the conference’s 18 teams will spend $680 million on athletics. As a result, he indicated that all sports are being funded, and he said women’s volleyball is growing so much it could secure its own media deal in a few years.
Petitti had little to say about reported negotiations between the Big Ten and the University of California pension fund over a 10 percent investment in the conference’s commercial assets. As an aside, it’s humorous to see the UC pension fund described as private capital. This stems from initial misreporting that this was a private equity investment, so the reporting switched the term to private capital. Drop the private, just use capital. It need not be distinguished as private versus public; it’s not as if state governments or the feds are competing to invest in college sports (of course, with the government taking a stake in Intel, who knows). But really, it’s sufficient to write that the UC pension fund is negotiating investing capital– one could argue that the UC is a mix of state public universities; if anything, it’s a public capital investment. But capital investor suffices.
It became quite clear a few hours after Petitti spoke why he was reluctant to sound conclusive notes about the negotiations, when several University of Michigan regents spoke out against selling equity in the Big Ten.
U-Mich regent Mark Bernstein: The board is opposed to the Big Ten’s proposed deal.
“We spent a lot of time thinking about this as a board,” and said that he believes Michigan took more time to talk about it than others “from our conversations with colleagues on those boards”
— Amanda Christovich (@achristovichh) October 16, 2025
Whatever unnecessary adjectives are used to qualify the term capital, there may be no capital in the end, in any event.
“At some point, we’ll conclude the process and make a decision about what’s the right thing,” Petitti said.
That point could be a long way off.
About Daniel Kaplan
Daniel Kaplan has been covering the business of sports for more than two decades. A proud founding reporter of SportsBusiness Journal, he spent the last four years at The Athletic.