Clouds pass over Tiger Stadium on March 20, 2023, on the campus of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (Matthew Perschall for Louisiana Illuminator)
WASHINGTON – A U.S. Senate panel added to the fierce debate over student-athlete compensation on Tuesday, with senators and experts agreeing that the current system isn’t working but having differing ideas on how to move forward.
Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican from Louisiana and chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, hosted a roundtable with experts, leaders and former college and professional athletes to discuss “fixing college sports.”
Cassidy stated that “the current system actually harms student-athletes.”
“Our focus will be: What are we doing to protect the student-athlete?” – he continued, adding that this approach would also protect universities.
Two of the five panelists Cassidy brought in were from here Louisiana State Universityincluding Collis Temple Jr., a member of the LSU Board of Trustees and former college basketball star, and Julie Cromer, associate executive athletic director and director of operations for LSU Athletics.
This event occurred shortly after Last week’s White House roundtablewhere President Donald Trump pledged to immediately issue an executive order to reshape college sports.
Debate on athletes as employees
The world of college sports continues to grapple with the impact of 2021 NCAA guidelines that allowed student-athletes to benefit from their name, image and likeness.
A federal judge in June 2025 approved the terms of a antitrust settlement worth almost $2.8 billion this paved the way for schools to pay athletes directly.
Rules regarding name, image and likeness transactions vary by state.
The college sports landscape also grapples with gender inequality in NIL contracts and the controversial NCAA transfer portal, among other issues.
Bipartisan bill during a recess in the US House of Representatives aims to create a national framework for compensation for college athletes. It would also prohibit college athletes from being classified as employees while providing broad antitrust immunity to the NCAA and college athletic conferences.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, expressed optimism about the bill’s fate during a White House roundtable, saying that “we are on the verge of passing the bill in the House and we now believe we have the votes for it.”
However, the bill would face a dismal path in the Senate, where Senate Democrats opposed it.
Meanwhile, A bipartisan proposal Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington state would provide “a new antitrust exception allowing college football institutions to jointly sell media rights” and make it “optional for conferences and schools to pool their media rights.”
A conversation is needed between schools and athletes
Jim Carr, president and CEO of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, said that “the employment consequences of student-athletes, or the many court decisions that make it difficult to enforce our policies around what we call education-based athletics, are actually – I don’t think this is an exaggeration or an overly dramatic statement – critical to not only the NAIA but any of our institutions that can sustain operations over the long term.”
Carr, whose association includes about 250 institutions, says that at the average NAIA school, 36% of the students are also athletes.
Sen. Chris Murphy has called for collective bargaining in which athletes can “speak for themselves,” noting that Congress should not “micromanage” the relationship between universities and college athletes.
“We should just allow universities, conferences and athletes to be able to talk to each other,” the Connecticut Democrat said.
Bernard Dennis III, principal of Jackson Lewis PC and an expert in labor and sports law, said that if students are classified as employees, “they then become covered by several statutory programs, the most important of which would be the (Fair Labor Standards Act), which would allow them to receive compensation for time and overtime, and then figuring out what that constitutes becomes a challenge.”
He added that “by law, that would be all that is required for their job, so if there are eligibility rules about maintaining a certain grade point average and things like that, not only does that become time spent on the field, but does going to class become compensable work time? How do you track that?”
