Now that it has passed the Senate, what comes next with the Protect College Sports Act?

It took more than four months for the Senate to pass a bill that backers concede is far from perfect, but still the best chance to control runaway spending and a raft of other problems across college sports.

One of the bill's authors, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, wants to parlay the 77-22 bipartisan victory Monday night into the House returning to Washington to pass the same bill in the span of four weeks. If that happens, Cruz proposes capping off the legislative flurry with President Donald Trump signing it into law on a football pre-game show this fall.

“I think it would be a win-win for everybody,” Cruz said after the Senate passed the Protect College Sports Act.

Currently, though, the House isn't scheduled to return until the week after the midterm elections, the results of which could change opinions in a chamber that failed repeatedly to bring its own college-reform bill up for a vote.

“I've seen a lot of stories out there about what's going to happen in the House,” said Randy Levine, the president of the New York Yankees and the vice chair of Trump's Roundtable on Fixing College Sports. “I think what's out there is all rumor.”

Here are some of the hurdles the bill faces in the closely divided House:

Both Republicans and Democrats in the House have issues with the bill

Some Republicans feel the bill doesn't offer enough antitrust protection for the NCAA and that it's a classic case of government overreach. Another issue, as House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., told Politico in June: “For the House to be able to take anything up, you got to prevent employment status of the student athletes.”

The bill is neutral on the employment matter, which some argue would solve problems and others say would place schools under even more financial stress. Levine says turning college players into employees would require a massive rewrite of American labor laws.

The House's struggles in passing college sports legislation have been laid bare for more than a year with the failure of its own bill, known as the SCORE Act, which was considered far less friendly to athletes.

Still, it had a few Democratic supporters and was on the House calendar for a vote in May until the NAACP — responding to a Supreme Court ruling that weakened the Voting Rights Act and opened the door to redistricting that could favor Republicans — came out against the bill. The Congressional Black Caucus agreed with the NAACP and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared: “If the SEC schools are for it, we are against it.”

Quickly, Democratic co-sponsors Janelle Bynum of Oregon and Shomari Figures of Alabama withdrew their support.

The Southeastern Conference also supports the Senate bill, which is viewed as more favorable toward athletes but still provides some antitrust protection for the NCAA and places into law a revenue-sharing cap that has already been approved by the courts.

NAACP President Derrick Johnson released a statement Tuesday opposing it: “Sharecropping is over, and this bill will only serve to harm student-athletes,” he said.

Given the pockets of Republican resistance, the bill would likely need at least a few Democratic votes to pass. Another possible factor could be pressure from Trump, who also supports the bill and has made solving the problems in college sports a priority.

What happens if the bill passes?

Among the key elements in the bill are the lawsuit protections it offers to the NCAA, which has been sued repeatedly and spent millions on attorneys. Over the past month, an attempt by LSU to land two football players who had spent time in NFL training camps led to litigation that overshadowed the start of the season.

Lawsuits currently in play — many of them over the NCAA's new rule allowing athletes five seasons of eligibility over five years — would not be impacted by the legislation.

The bill would also increase the amount of revenue schools are allowed to share with athletes from $21.5 million to $48.8 million thanks to a new “retention pool” that would devote the new money to keeping current players.

Those who crafted the bill hope that new pool of money shifts third-party NIL — marketing deals between athletes and entities related to the schools that have long been seen as the key culprit in runaway spending — to under that spending cap.

“It's no longer this shell game where we're moving multimedia-rights money or shoe-dollar money around ... and playing these cap-circumvention games,” said Cody Campbell, the chairman of the Texas Tech board of regents who helped craft the bill.

What happens if the bill doesn't pass?

According to a Booker interview with CBS Sports, if the bill doesn't become law before Jan. 1 and Democrats win the House,it would give them "a chance to really author a bill that corrects for a lot of the failings in this bill.”

In the meantime, the conferences have been talking about a self-governance model for months, a plan with rules they could enforce that wouldn't be dependent on Congress passing a law and somehow avoid being subject to antitrust challenges.

Among the ideas floated would be for them to independently adopt the higher revenue-share cap, though without a law to back it, that would involve what would likely be a monthslong process of altering the $2.8 billion House settlement that set the initial terms of the cap.

The conferences could also look at establishing their own rules about transfers — rules that would likely look like the five-for-five regulation the NCAA has already passed.

What the conferences can't do is stop all the lawsuits, which have driven most of the change in college sports for decades and certainly recently. Those who oppose the bill are reluctant to limit what players can sue over, while backers say the lawsuit protection affords the NCAA, the conferences and their schools to plan for the future.

“It's insane to me that, at this point, we're still having this conversation when they all should know that they're going to have the same legal difficulties in enforcing (conference-based) rules that the NCAA does,” Campbell said. “The antitrust law is still there, and they don't have a way around it.”

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