The Protect College Sports Act has been stuck in limbo for weeks, stuck between senators who want it passed and the two conferences with the most juice in college athletics who keep saying not yet. Tony Petitti made that crystal clear again today, and his message hasn't really changed: show me the actual bill language before you ask me to sign off on it.
Petitti told reporters he's still waiting on amended bill language before the Big Ten budges.
Tony Petitti said that the Big Ten and other leagues could see amended language from the Protect College Sports Act as early as this afternoon. He calls it "imperative that we see the amended bill language. We cannot change our opposition until we see the amended bill and have an opportunity to share it with our leadership."
That's not a small ask. The Big Ten and SEC have spent months pushing back on this legislation, which was originally pitched as a fix for the chaos of the NIL and transfer portal era but has turned into a slog of committee hearings, joint conference statements, and now behind-closed-doors negotiating. Petitti isn't slamming the door, though. He's leaving it open a crack, which is new-ish for a guy who's been pretty consistently skeptical of this bill since it landed.
Petitti laid out the bar the Senate needs to clear to flip the Big Ten's position.
Petitti acknowledges the Senate bill won't be perfect. He says the bill needs to provide "more help than not." He adds: "If we can get to that place, then we can move into a position very quickly to support the bill. But again, until I see where we are, we're not quite ready to say that."
"More help than not" is a low bar on paper but a real one in practice, because the Big Ten and SEC have spent this entire process arguing the bill, as originally written, would trigger more lawsuits than it prevents and hand too much power to the smaller conferences and the federal government over how the two biggest leagues run their business. Petitti isn't promising anything. He's saying the door's open if the language actually moves.
And it sounds like it's moving. According to On3's Pete Nakos, senators are floating real, specific concessions to get the Big Ten and SEC to yes — not just vague promises.
Nakos detailed the specific concessions senators are reportedly offering the Big Ten and SEC.
An extra $25 million for retention, a hard block on any entity buying up media rights to spin up a rival super league, and a ban on paying recruits before they even enroll — those are the kinds of line items that can actually move a commissioner off the fence. It also lines up with prior reporting that the anti-super league revenue threshold in the bill has already been lowered from $1 billion to $700 million, pulling the ACC and Big 12 into that same restriction and, notably, softening one of the Big Ten and SEC's biggest complaints that the bill was written specifically to target them.
None of this means the bill is a lock. Petitti's stance today was the same one he's held for weeks: wait for the paper, run it by leadership, then decide. But the fact that senators are now negotiating specific dollar figures and carve-outs instead of just defending the original text is the clearest sign yet that this thing is closer to a deal than a standoff. Whether the Big Ten actually flips to support probably comes down to whatever language shows up this afternoon.