Rep. Michael Baumgartner wants to keep college football from turning into ‘a second NFL’

WASHINGTON – When the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish meet in Atlanta on Monday, the college football championship won’t be the only thing on the line.Since a 2021 Supreme Court decision allowed student-athletes to be compensated for the use of their name, image and likeness, a star turn for a college player on the national stage could mean life-changing sums of money in endorsement deals before officially turning pro.Ohio State’s star-studded roster has earned about $20 million in NIL deals, and the “collective” that manages Notre Dame’s NIL money raked in roughly that same amount in 2023.

Over the same time period, universities have fled what were once regional conferences in search of greener pastures in the form of lucrative TV deals, even if that requires frequent cross-country flights for athletes. Despite many hearings and much hand-wringing in recent years, Congress has failed to regulate the new college sports landscape.

Rep. Michael Baumgartner wants to change that. The Spokane Republican said in an interview Wednesday that he plans to make reforming college sports a major focus of his first term in office and he is preparing ambitious legislation that would rein in what he sees as an out-of-control system that’s bad for student-athletes.

“We are going to roll out a pretty significant piece of legislation that attempts to bring common sense back to college athletics in such a way that opportunities are abundant and that we don’t create a second NFL when we already have one,” Baumgartner said.

Although House lawmakers often spend their freshman term on the proverbial bench, learning the ropes from more seasoned legislators, Baumgartner said he’s ready to hit the ground running.

Two of the three panels on which he sits – the Judiciary Committee and the Education and Workforce Committee – have jurisdiction over elements of college sports and student-athletes’ compensation.

“College sports have a really important place in American fabric of society,” Baumgartner said, explaining that as the nation has grown more divided along political lines and Americans participate less in religious services, civic organizations and other community-building experiences, sports have become even more important for social cohesion.

The congressman said his bill will also address conference realignment, during which West Coast schools joined the Big Ten conference, whose members are mostly in the Midwest and on the East Coast.

“It is insane to have student-athletes flying across the country twice a week to compete in sports,” he said. “Taxpayers don’t subsidize public universities – and even private universities through loan eligibility – to such an extent to have the volleyball team from the University of Washington flying to Maryland. That is not a good use of public funds.”

The United States has made important strides in college athletics, Baumgartner said, pointing to the opportunities for women guaranteed by the federal civil rights law known as Title IX. But he said the sudden influx of cash into college sports has had a range of negative effects.

“There’s more money in college sports than ever before, but there’s less opportunities right now,” he said. “We’re on a track right now where, with this current era, stemming from the Supreme Court decision on NIL, with everything having essentially unfettered free agency and no salary caps, all of the money in college sports is now going to get directed at what makes the most money, which is football, and it risks destroying what’s important about the social fabric, important about the opportunities for student-athletes.”

Baumgartner said his voting record in the Washington State Senate should leave no doubt that he’s “a free-market guy,” but he said Congress can and should influence universities – largely by imposing conditions on access to federal student loans – because they are “highly subsidized public goods.”

“It’s not a free-market arena in universities, and there’s a reason why the public subsidizes,” he said. “We want specific public outcomes.”

Baumgartner pointed out that Congress grants antitrust exemptions to professional sports leagues, allowing them to impose salary caps for the sake of competitive balance, and he suggested that lawmakers should do the same for college sports.

“There’s a need, there’s precedent and there’s a way,” he said.

The night before talking with a Spokesman-Review reporter in his D.C. office, Baumgartner said, he had dinner with Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, a Wisconsin Republican who leads the Antitrust Subcommittee, to discuss the legislation they intend to introduce. Baumgartner declined to share details of the bill on the record before introducing it.

When he met Jordan last summer, Baumgartner brought up his “interest in trying to bring common sense back to college athletics,” he said, adding that the Ohio lawmaker was interested because of his own background in college wrestling. Jordan was an assistant coach at Ohio State University from 1987-94, and several former wrestlers have accused him of failing to act on allegations of sexual abuse by a doctor who treated student-athletes, but Jordan has denied that he knew about the allegations at the time.

Earlier on Wednesday, Baumgartner met with Rep. Burgess Owens, a Utah Republican and former pro football player who leads the Higher Education Subcommittee. The Spokane lawmaker will have the No. 2 position on that panel, and Owens asked him to lead hearings on the NIL issue, Baumgartner said.

The other House committee with jurisdiction over college sports is Energy and Commerce, which was led until the end of 2024 by Baumgartner’s predecessor, former Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Spokane.

Eastern Washington’s new congressman said he plans to get to work on his legislation soon, for the sake of all student-athletes. But like so many Americans, he’s picked a side for Monday’s championship matchup.

“As a Catholic kid who went to Gonzaga Prep,” he wrote in a text message, “Go Irish.”