The Protect College Sports Act Finally Has Its Suitably Off-Putting Mascot

College football fans who tuned into ESPN’s College GameDay this Saturday were forced to encounter the alarming visage of Texas Senator Ted Cruz. To make matter worse, he monopolized nearly 10 minutes of air time in order to stump for the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA), a bill that is like a lot of things Ted Cruz stumps for, in that it is explicitly designed to make workers’ lives worse.

Proponents of the PCSA rely on a familiar set of talking points when hyping up their pet bill, which could be voted on by the Senate this month. They are quick to point out that college sports are in “chaos,” and they have plenty of material to support their case. They can point to the ludicrous number of player transfers that happen every offseason, constant conference realignment, ballooning NIL budgets, an endless flow of lawsuits, Lane Kiffin trying to bring ex-NFL players onto his team, and the NCAA barely being able to prevent a quarterback who bet on his own team’s games from staying in the sport. Take a quick glance at the current headlines about college sports, and it’s hard to argue that there is not indeed some level of chaos present.

None of this chaos arrived by itself, of course. Any sense that college sports are suffering from a lack of control is down to the fact that the NCAA refuses to accept its own obsolescence. After decades of successfully cheating college athletes out of enjoying any share of the billion-dollar industry they make, the organization has been doing nothing but getting its ass kicked in court. Every problem that the PCSA claims to be a solution for is downstream of the fact that ever since O’Bannon v. NCAA, Charlie Baker’s boys haven’t been able to find a judge anywhere in the country who will agree that the restrictions they’ve long placed on players’ eligibility and earning power are anywhere close to legal. That’s how you end up with the NCAA agreeing to pay $2.7 billion to the athletes it defrauded, with Kiffin going shopping for players in the NFL bargain bin, and with Brendan Sorsby only being prevented from returning to the field by his school’s late-arriving sense of shame.