U.S. Senators Jerry Moran, Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) announced a bipartisan legislative proposal to reform college athletics and prioritize athletes’ health, education and economic rights.

The “College Athletes Protection & Compensation Act” aims to set national standards for name, image, and likeness (NIL), establish a Medical Trust Fund to provide care to injured athletes, prioritize athletes’ educational outcomes and safeguard athletes’ health and wellness.

With student-athletes now able to benefit from NIL and states responding with a patchwork of rules and regulations, the bipartisan framework would set national standards to give athletes more economic and educational opportunities.

The College Athletes Protection & Compensation Act would:

• Establish National NIL Standards & Protect Athletes’ Economic Opportunities: The measure would establish the College Athletics Corporation (CAC), a central oversight entity that would set, administer, and enforce rules and standards to protect athletes who enter into endorsement contracts. Athletes would be allowed to have representatives assisting them with contracts, finances, marketing, and brand management, and institutions would be prohibited from punishing athletes for receiving food, rent, medical expenses, insurance, tuition, fees, books, and transportation from a third party.
• Establish a Medical Trust Fund & Cover Injured Athletes’ Out-of-Pocket Costs: Schools and the Medical Trust Fund would cover the out-of-pocket expenses for injuries and other long-term conditions resulting from athletes’ participation in sports. The Trust Fund would cover medical expenses for college athletes diagnosed with significant long-term conditions related to their participation in college athletics, including chronic traumatic encephalopathy and any other traumatic injuries.
• Prioritize Athletes’ Educational Outcomes: Athletes would retain their aid covering tuition, books and other fees until they graduate. Institutions would be required to continue offering the aid in the case of suffering a career-ending injury and being cut from a team.
• Safeguard Athletes’ Health and Wellness: The framework would establish health, wellness, and safety standards to protect college athletes from serious injury, mistreatment, abuse, and death. These standards would focus on conditions such as cardiac health, concussion and traumatic brain injuries, illegal performance enhancers and substance abuse, mental health, overuse injuries, heat-related illnesses, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and interpersonal violence. It would also protect the trainers, physical therapists, and other medical personnel by prohibiting coaches and other nonmedical personnel from attempting to influence or disregard decisions that put athletes’ health and safety first.
• Bring Transparency to College Athletics: Schools would be required to report revenues and expenditures of each athletics program, the average number of hours college athletes spent on college athletic events, and academic outcomes and majors for college athletes.
• Set Athletes Up for Long-Term Success: Athletes would be required to take financial literacy and lifestyle development courses where they would be taught personal budgeting, debt, credit, interest rates, contracts, tax liability and other issues relating to their endorsements and income.
• Ensure Gender Parity in Tournaments: Athletic associations must provide men and women college athletes access to the same facilities and services during tournaments.

Full text of the discussion draft can be found here. A one-pager can be found here.