College athletics leaders are begging for federal takeover. Another sport warns of ‘world of storms’

The sky is allegedly falling in college sports. Roster costs are skyrocketing, players are transferring far too much for the tastes of leadership, eligibility rules are under constant assault from lawsuits and realignment has eliminated classic rivalries. College sports leaders are desperate to quell what they see as chaos across their domain. So much so that they’re going to the federal government for help. Even Nick Saban has urged congressional action, most recently while praising a presidential executive order that asked federal agencies to limit player movement, establish eligibility rules and more. “Nothing really works long term without some kind of regulations,” Saban said during an appearance on Fox & Friends. Commissioners, athletics directors, coaches and others have supported efforts in Congress to implement a federal authority. The most popular proposal: The SCORE Act, which would federalize the NCAA and College Sports Commission, essentially making the House v. NCAA settlement into law. The act still hasn’t made it out of discussion though. Nor have any competing bills, at least one of which would create a new federal authority for college sports under the Federal Trade Commission. But the idea of federal authority over a struggling sport isn’t new. The government did that with horse racing earlier in this decade. And according to many in that industry, if stability is the goal, federal intervention might not be the right answer. “The people within the industry, they need to fix it,” horse trainer JR Caldwell told AL.com. “If they don’t fix it and the government gets in it, then they’re in for a world of storms.” In 2020, horse racing was dealing with chaos of its own. The sport was battered on the public relations front by a 2019 rash of horse deaths at Santa Anita Park, high-profile drug scandals and a general lack of unity. Nothing was getting fixed. States individually ran a collection of fiefdoms that created a mishmash of rules. The solution was supposed to be a federal takeover, handing over control of everything from drug testing to track surface safety. It was intended to offer enforceable, nationwide standards to level the playing field and boost confidence among the betting public. According to many in the industry, it has done the opposite. “We’re less uniform than ever,” said Eric Hamelback, CEO of the National Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association, which represents horse owners and trainers. In August of 2020, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell introduced the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act. The bill got tacked onto a COVID-19 relief bill, creating the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, known as HISA. A chief complaint in college sports is that when the NCAA attempts to enforce rules, it winds up in court, something proponents say a federal takeover would fix. However, after HISA’s implementation, it has been the subject of multiple federal lawsuits. The court system has still not ultimately decided whether the Authority is even legal at all, with three cases still in the appeals system that could see it ruled unconstitutional. Hamelback’s group of owners and trainers in multiple states have challenged the Authority, arguing that a non-government entity is not allowed to hold that sort of federal power. It’s a legal problem that Sam Ehrlich, an assistant professor of management at Boise State and am expert on college athletics legal issues, said could impact college sports legislation as well. “It’s hard to see any kind of situation where the same principals wouldn’t apply to the NCAA if it’s the SCORE Act, or any other organization that may be created by the statute, if you’re going the same route as HISA,” he told AL.com. Racing’s federal fix also still hasn’t gone totally nationwide. Multiple states opted to operate outside of the Authority, something that has meant their betting signal is unavailable beyond state lines. Some of those states have gone to court and won at least temporary victories, with Louisiana and West Virginia getting a court order temporarily allowing them to continue taking bets from elsewhere. However, others, like Texas, have taken what Hamelback called the “death penalty.” In Texas, where the racing commission has claimed it is legally unable to comply with the federal authority, tracks are having trouble. Before HISA, business was on the upswing, with a tax on horse-related goods helping increase purses. Since the betting signal went down, the tracks are hanging on for dear life, with betting dollars down precipitously and the tax money virtually the only thing funding racing. And unable to see their horses run from outside elsewhere, some owners have abandoned the Lone Star State. “The ball was rolling in our direction, and we had a lot of favoritism in Texas racing, ” said Caldwell, a Texas-based trainer. “It just put a hurting on us.” Trainers have found other reasons for anger as well. Racing had, at the very least, a perception of a drug problem. But as the authority took over testing, many felt they were getting crushed by positive tests for inconsequential amounts of substances legal for use, but not allowable on race day. “Common sense needs to be a coupled entry with any regulation,” trainer Ron Moquett said. “When I say, if we don’t have levels of effect, testing thresholds and we’re shooting ourselves in the foot, it’s not that I started saying that five years ago. I’ve been saying it for 20 years.” Rather than adopt thresholds that wouldn’t punish horsemen for trace amounts that could have been the result of contamination, HISA has instead dug in. During a recent meeting with horsemen, Lisa Lazarus, the CEO of HISA, argued for the importance of harsh limits.“Races are won in less than a second,” she said. And even in states fully operating under HISA, the authority hasn’t brought the one thing most trainers have clamored for: a nationwide license. Horsemen still must go through a different process in each state in order to get approval to do their jobs. “People that are in the industry, but they didn’t read the bill, just took it on its face of ‘Oh, this is going to be good, this is going to create uniformity,’” Hamelback said. “And a lot of us who did take the time to dig deep into knew it wasn’t going to work, but, unfortunately, it still passed.” It’s a bad time to be the little man, whether in college athletics or horse racing. Congressional press releases surrounding the SCORE Act often include a who’s who of the power brokers in college sports. The Power 4 conference commissioners all support it, along with various athletics directors, top coaches and school presidents who have lobbied for the bill. But the lower levels of college athletics, especially the Group of 6, have been less vocal. That’s in part because they’re already feeling the financial squeeze. The G6 schools were not part of the House settlement, but found out later on that they were going to still receive a bill to help run the CSC and its NIL Go platform. One athletics director told AL.com his school’s bill was less than $100,000, but not an insignificant amount for a program without the revenue streams of the SEC and Big Ten. The expanded College Football Playoff also did not come with the windfall many ADs at that level expected. “All of the sudden we don’t get the money from the CFP that we were told we were going to get,” the G6 AD said, “And then we had to participate in a lawsuit we’re not even named in. “So we got cut out of the revenue and included in the expense.” Athletics directors and commissioners are looking after their own teams and conferences. Programs have always been divided into haves and have-nots, but in recent years, the gap between the monied power programs and the rest of the sport has become wider than ever. In racing, it’s a similar story. The authority was supported through its implementation by some of the sport’s power players, including top tracks and The Jockey Club, an organization that, among other things, runs the stallion registry for Thoroughbred racing. But smaller trainers and tracks say much of the authority’s impact has fallen on them, including its cost, which will run $77.2 million for 2026. Congress created HISA but did not come up with a way to pay for it, so the authority bills tracks, with ownership and purse accounts splitting costs in most states. Previously, HISA included purse size when calculating what tracks owe, meaning the biggest businesses, like Churchill Downs, Keeneland and Saratoga, paid more. After a lawsuit from Churchill Downs Inc., that practice is now illegal, and fees are tallied based on starts. That hasn’t helped small tracks, many of which were already fighting for survival. Tom Ludt, general manager at Turf Paradise, said the state of Arizona pays the entirety of his track’s fees. However, should that support go away, it would create major problems that small tracks in other states have already faced. “I understand Churchill’s argument,” Ludt said. ”They’re the big boy. But, it had a formula that was dates and purses. And it’s gonna sound like I’m whining, but being a small track, it makes more sense to me than just straight dates, because it really hurts the track like us that’s so much smaller.” Another large expense can add to a vicious cycle for the tracks: when purses are stagnant or decrease, trainers and owners are less likely to run their horses, which leads to smaller fields, which leads to a worse gambling product and lower handle, which leads back to weakened purse accounts. Austin Reed, executive director of the the Finger Lakes horsemen group, said the track was paying the state of New York around $200,000 per year to handle track safety and drug testing. Under the purse-based calculations, Finger Lakes’ racetrack bill jumped to $900,000. With the new model, Reed said the total will be $2.3 million. “If it’s not deemed unconstitutional this year or next year, we don’t have any money left in our till to actually fund any more of the HISA expenses,” Reed said. “We can’t afford to cut our days. We’ll just be going out of business. You have to raise purses every couple years. We haven’t raised them in five years, since HISA started.” Tracks in states thriving from other forms of gambling, like Kentucky’s slot-like historical horse racing machines, can afford to pay HISA. In areas where racing is already struggling, the fees are more arduous. “Their average purse is $120,000,” Reed said. “Ours is $14,000. So no doubt it is devastating the little tracks. The big tracks know it, but they also are happy with the new ruling.” It’s not just tracks. Trainers who were already struggling with shrinking purses and rising costs are getting out of the game in record numbers. The game has been consolidating for years, with the sport losing, on average, 3.6% of its trainers annually from 2000-2023, according to Equibase data. Since 2022, the first year of the authority’s implementation, that average has jumped to 5.1% and the number of trainers to register a start fell from 4,548 in 2021 to 3,684 in 2025. The lower classes of the sport felt disenfranchised by the implementation, despite the later addition of HISA’s horsemen’s advisory board. With more horses than ever consolidating in the barns of “super-trainers” like Brad Cox, Steve Asmussen and Todd Pletcher, the reasons for staying in the business are disappearing. “We don’t take care of the smaller trainers, the smaller owners,” Caldwell said. “We’ve got to take care of them. They’ve got to take care of themselves and feed their families and keep the ball rolling. “We can’t all have Kentucky Derby horses to run. We got to have the little guys to make the show go.” Everyone agrees there needs to be rules. Somebody needs to be in charge, whether in horse racing or college sports. And schools truly are facing real problems, ones that need to be solved if the sport is to thrive. “Transferring all the time, that’s an issue,” Saban said last week before playing in a celebrity pro-am golf event in Birmingham. “Guys playing for more than five years and being 26 years old. There were more players in the (NFL) draft this year that were 25 and older than ever in the history of ball. Like 50 guys. So, now they’re competing against 18-year-old guys. “Having some sort of fixed eligibility requirement. Something to make name, image and likeness authentic in terms of marketing value and not being able to rob Peter and pay Paul to put money in collectives.” But other sports haven’t solved those problems through federal legislation and authority. The professional leagues deal with compensation and player movement through a combination of collective bargaining and legally enforceable employment contracts. And if the goal was to stop having to fight lawsuits every time rules are enforced, inviting the federal government might not be the way to do it. Even for the NCAA, the SCORE Act might not achieve the desired result. “You’re asking for a level of federal oversight that’s way beyond even what HISA offers,” said Ehrlich, the college sports legal expert from Boise State. “That would essentially require the NCAA putting all of its rule-making through the FTC, and that is something I can’t imagine the NCAA would want. It’s something that would completely change the governing structure of the NCAA and really, very much federalize it. “It would potentially open up the possibility of due process issues as well. If you look at the other parts of constitutional law, there’s just a lot of questions created there. But, I think there’s a lot of people in college sports who may be issuing it as an out, because it’s a rock and a hard place situation.” Horse racing has shown that asking the federal government to fix a sport can be a move that leaders could come to regret, whether due to a new barrage of lawsuits, rising costs, unwelcome rule changes or other unintended consequences. If stability is the goal, racing professionals recommended finding another way. “If the smarter people with power would have said ‘Hey, we got a problem in the industry, we need to do this.’ And we all, whether we liked it or not, would have collected and got it done … then we’d have fixed it,” Caldwell said. “And saved us a lot of headaches.”