The provisional House v. NCAA settlement is still at least months away from a court’s final approval, but the reported agreement among parties has already shifted the policy-making plans for one key California legislator.
On Tuesday, state Assemblymember Chris Holden announced that due to the “significant progress toward athlete compensation” outlined in media reports about the House settlement, he planned to ditch the revenue-sharing component of his pending bill, The College Athlete Protection Act.
While an amended version of Holden’s legislation, AB 252, had already passed the California state assembly last summer, it faced a steep climb to clear the Senate and get Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature. Still, given California’s prior role in instigating the modern era of college sports reform, it had captivated the attention of those inside and outside the NCAA.
In February 2019, California state Sen. Nancy Skinner introduced the Fair Pay to Play Act (SB 206), granting current college athletes in her state the right to earn money from their name, image and likeness (NIL). Skinner had, for a time, considered an even more ambitious college athlete protection bill that would have included direct compensation provisions. However, she chose to go for what was viewed at the time as the low-hanging fruit in achieving bipartisan support. And notably, even after SB 206 was signed into law in September 2019, Skinner still opted not to try to piggyback off its success with a subsequent legislation pitching revenue sharing.
With Holden abandoning the distributive part of his bill, California has arguably now ceded the policy-making vanguard for college athlete economic rights to states like Virginia, which last month adopted a bill (HB 1505) that allows its college athletes to receive direct NIL payments from their schools. That law is due to go into effect July 1.
Holden, meanwhile, plans to carry forth with AB 252’s other non-revenue provisions, including those that address college athlete health and safety standards, Title IX compliance and the preservation or protections of athletic scholarships and sports.
Initially proposed in Jan. 2023, AB 252 would have mandated that California universities generating in excess of $10 million of annual athletics media rights revenue would be required to pay $25,000 to certain of its athletes through a “degree completion fund.” Athletes were entitled to accessing up to $25,000 of those monies each, but could only obtain the remainder after graduating.
To oversee the payment process and its other measures, the bill called for the establishment of a new state subagency–first proposed for the Department of Education, then later the Office of Planning and Research.
Championed by the National College Players Association, Holden’s bill originally stipulated that the athlete funds go to those players who do not receive “fair market value compensation” and provided a formula for calculating those that qualified. Effectively, this limited the pool of revenue-sharers to football and men’s basketball players. In the face of criticism from female athlete advocates—the Women’s Sports Foundation called the legislation an “extant threat—the bill was amended to stipulate that one-half of a school’s degree completion funds go to female athletes.
Last week, the NCAA and Power 5 conferences approved a proposed settlement that would end the House v. NCAA, Carter v. NCAA, and Hubbard v. NCAA antitrust cases in exchange for $2.7 billion in damages and the implementation of a new college sports system enabling schools to pay their athletes as much as $20 million per year.
Holden, in a statement, said that such a resolution would “put our young people in a place that more fairly reflects the unique position they are in and set them up for success post-college.”
Holden had originally introduced the concept of a degree-completion fund in his 2017 Student Athletes Bill of Rights. An amended version of that legislation, which included the completion-fund language, passed two Senate committees before dying on the “suspense file.”
In early 2021, former California Assm. Sydney Kamlager-Dove introduced the College Athlete Race and Gender Equity Act (AB 609), which required schools earning over a certain revenue threshold to pay their athletes an NIL “royalty fee.” In addition to revenue-sharing, Kamlager-Dove’s bill contained an aggressive gender-equity component that put the onus directly on athletic directors, who faced a three-year suspension from intercollegiate athletics if their schools weren’t Title IX compliant by Jan. 1, 2025. AB 609 ultimately died of inactivity in February 2022. Kamlager-Dove, for her part, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2023.
Upon AB 609’s failure, Sen. Steven Bradford—who, along with Nancy Skinner, was the joint author of SB 206—took a second crack at passing the College Athlete Race and Gender Equity Act, this time through the upper chamber first. Bradford’s version of the bill, despite its name, quickly jettisoned its gender-equity provisions in an effort to pass stripped-down revenue-sharing legislation. The bill successfully hurdled the Senate Judiciary and Appropriations committees but was, nonetheless, relegated to the suspense file in May 2022.
The National College Players Association, which is based in California, had been a driving force behind each of these bills, including the 2017 Student Athletes Bill of Rights.
In an interview with Sportico, NCPA executive director Ramogi Huma said he had no particular affinity for continuing to force the NCAA’s hand from the Golden State.
“At the time, I didn’t see that other states were more likely to go forward” with bills, Huma said. “Virginia was a welcome surprise.”
Huma doesn’t count out California’s contribution to the cause of expanding athletes’ earning opportunities, especially given that the House settlement has yet to receive even preliminary approval.
Then again, Huma added that there is a “big picture” benefit to having national forces promoting direct compensation coming from all directions.
“When you have multiple states pressing, it becomes even more clear that this is the right way to go,” Huma said, “and I think that carries a lot of weight—whether it be in Congress, the media or the courts.”
(This story has been corrected in the 13th paragraph with the right spelling of Sydney Kamlager-Dove.)