When the college football playoffs kick off this weekend, they’ll confirm the game’s status as one of the hottest tickets in all of American sports, its popularity continuing to surge even in the face of recent rule changes that make traditionalists cringe.
Controversial pay-to-play “name-image-likeness” rules now allow star players to make millions of dollars while they compete as student-athletes.
Then there’s the new “transfer portal,” which allows players to shop their talents and jump from school to school to play for the highest bidder.
It’s created a lot of turmoil for sure, but so far it hasn’t ruined the sport, as many feared.
The grand pageantry and traditions of college football, played at on-campus stadiums crammed with as many as 100,000 crazed students, remain intact.
One of the big worries — that rich and powerful schools like Michigan and Louisiana State University would spend their way to domination — has definitely been put to rest.
Sure, traditional powerhouses like Ohio State and Alabama are near the top of the standings, but this 2025 season has been full of wonderful surprises, with the upstart Indiana Hoosiers — the losingest team in college football history — now the No. 1-ranked team.
Even little James Madison University has crashed the playoffs party. How’s that for parity?
But thorny problems persist: College football means big money and big business.
TV rights to games now bring in billions of dollars, soon to be tens of billions.
The Big 10 just became a $1 billion organization, and the SEC is right behind it.
Remember, the NCAA and its hundreds of member schools are technically “nonprofit” organizations.
Really? They’re about as nonprofit as ExxonMobil.
Their paid athletes are anything but amateurs; their loyalty to the Old U is highly questionable when they follow the money and transfer from school to school.
It’s a heady gold rush right now, and usually I’m all for that kind of thing.
But the lack of oversight means that college football could soon devolve into just another professional sport — with the athletes wearing the jerseys of educational institutions, but not being part of them, stripping the game of its treasured traditions.
What can be done to save the NCAA from itself?
Washington politicians have some diametrically opposed ideas.
Republicans in Congress, led by House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana, have proposed a law called the SCORE Act, which they say is “the free market, individual liberty, limited government fix” to college athletics.
I’ve joined with the heads of about a dozen other free-market groups in signing a letter of support for many of the SCORE Act reforms.
The law isn’t perfect by any means, but it would require colleges to share the wealth with the players, keeping schools from hoarding all the money rolling in from the talents of their “student athletes.”
It also protects the players from being required to join a union and pay union dues, and prevents trial lawyers from suing the schools under archaic antitrust laws.
The alternative “fix” is much, much worse.
Senate Democrats’ bill, called the SAFE Act, could force players to be labeled as “college employees,” which would mean they could be required to join their universities’ unions and pay mandatory union dues.
For what, exactly?
The Democrats’ bill gives nosy regulatory agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general the right to sue the NCAA.
Why should this be the business of government?
With the college football money machine spinning faster and faster, every interest group in Washington — from the unions to the lawyers to the bureaucrats — wants a piece of the pie.
But that money rightly belongs with the amazing athletes who entertain us and the schools who recruit and now pay them — not the economic parasites in Washington who want to ruin this great game.
Stephen Moore is co-founder of Unleash Prosperity and a former Trump senior economic adviser.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
