WASHINGTON–U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Tuesday spoke at the LEAD1 Association’s Annual Fall Meeting to discuss the future of college sports.

“I think big time college sports is professional sports, and it is professional in every way except for one – that the workers aren’t paid. The product looks professional. The athletes immediately excel when they move into the pro level. The stadiums are bigger. The revenues are similar. The folks who are making lots of money are making just as much in college sports as they are in pro sports,” Murphy said. “And so I think the horse is out of the barn at least when we're talking about the big revenue-making sports. I think there was a decision, a collective decision made some time ago to turn college football and high level college basketball into a professional sport because it was a means for people to make a lot of money. And we just forgot to do one part, which was to share the revenue with the most important people – the  athletes who are sacrificing their body and their health to put the products on the field.”

On the path forward, Murphy said: “I don't think that the NCAA nor the conferences have shown that they have the students’ best interests at heart, and so I'm not interested in giving the power over rule setting back to those entities. I  think that would be a big mistake. Neither am I interested in pulling back on the rights of students. I think students should be able to make money off their name, image and likeness. I frankly think that students should be able to move from school to school, just as many other high value employees are.”

Murphy, lead sponsor of the College Athlete Right to Organize Act, highlighted collective bargaining as an important solution to consider: “The deeper I get into this question, the more attracted I get to the idea of having this be a direct conversation between student athletes and schools or conferences or the NCAA. I do get worried about Congress micromanaging the rules of endorsement deals or transfer portals or compensation. And so it doesn't have to be a labor union like the Teamsters, but the idea that we find a means to step out of the way and have students speak for themselves in conversation with their employer, and you might disagree, but I think it feels and smells and sounds a lot like employment at the highest level of sport, is I think increasingly attractive to me as a potential way to move forward here.”

On establishing a revenue-sharing model, Murphy said: “I would argue for the industry to be much more forward thinking in terms of revenue sharing, to be talking now about how you can come to some agreement with students, with athletes about how to share some of the revenue. It's a super complicated question. I understand how fraught it is. And sometimes the argument was made to us ‘Well, there'd be no way to figure out how to share revenue. There’d be no way to understand which sports should be in the bucket, which schools should be in the bucket, which should be out.’ I don't buy that that's an excuse for all of the money to be continually captured by the adults and none of it to be shared.”

“I would argue for the NCAA to be convening a conversation right now about what a revenue sharing system would look like, to be thinking about, if not collective bargaining, a model where students actually got power. And instead of just being reactionary, which is where the industry and where the NCAA has been for decades, sort of understand that the courts are coming for the existing paradigm,” added Murphy.

On the ability for college sports to bring us together, Murphy said: “There is something unique and special about college sports that we need to desperately preserve, right? It is one of the greatest things about this country. And I would argue that, at this moment, it's maybe more important than ever to preserve college sports because we're in a world today where people are sort of searching for identity, right? People are searching for meaning and grounding, and they're finding it these days in a lot of unhealthy places. More people are finding their identity, sort of through political affiliation, which can be healthy, but can sometimes be unhealthy and polarizing. And college sports, right, it's this thing that pulls us together. It's this thing that allows us no matter our political affiliation, our religion, our ethnicity to all sit together and be part of something common. And so the scenes of 20,000, 50,000, 100,000 people in college stadiums, it's really wonderful.”

Earlier this year, Murphy and U.S. Representative Lori Trahan (D-Mass.-03) reintroduced legislation that would establish an unrestricted federal right for college athletes to market their Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL).

###