The bill before the Senate would make it illegal to cut bowling
A provision buried in the Protect College Sports Act would freeze scholarships and roster spots for nonrevenue sports at 2024–25 levels. Schools are eliminating those programs right now.
The Congressional Budget Office cost estimate for S. 4668, published July 31, 2026.
In May, Stephen F. Austin State University eliminated beach volleyball, bowling, and men's and women's golf. Prairie View A&M — a historically Black university with an athletic operating budget of roughly $15.4 million — cut men's and women's tennis, citing what it called the evolving landscape of collegiate athletics.
Maryland Eastern Shore has said it will opt into the House settlement for men's and women's basketball only, its two revenue-generating sports.
Those decisions are legal. A bill that cleared the Senate Commerce Committee eight weeks ago would make them illegal.
The provision
S. 4668, the Protect College Sports Act of 2026, advanced out of committee on June 18 by a vote of 19 to 9. The bill runs 230 pages. Most of the reporting on it has concerned name, image and likeness rules and an antitrust exemption for conference media rights.
Inside it is a requirement that has drawn almost no coverage at all.
According to the Congressional Budget Office's cost estimate, published July 31, the bill would require institutions
to maintain the number of scholarships and roster spots that were available in the 2024–2025 academic year for athletes in nonrevenue intercollegiate sports.
Nonrevenue sports are bowling, golf, tennis, swimming, rowing, volleyball, track and field. They are, at most schools, every sport that is not football or basketball.
The provision would freeze them in place at a fixed historical baseline.
What it would cost
CBO could not put a number on it.
The office writes that it cannot determine the aggregate cost of the requirement, but expects it to run in the tens of millions of dollars each year across affected institutions.
The reason it could not produce a figure is worth stating plainly, because it is its own finding: no comprehensive data exist on what institutions currently spend on nonrevenue sports.
Congress is preparing to vote on protecting programs that have never been counted.
Who this reaches
The schools most exposed to program elimination are not the ones in the national conversation about revenue sharing.
They are institutions where the entire athletic budget is smaller than a single Power Four football program's coaching payroll — where dropping four teams is a line item, and where the students in those four teams are simply told the season is over.
A roster floor is not a windfall. It is a stop. It does not fund a bowling team. It prevents one from being deleted.
The rest of it
The same bill contains other provisions that have gone similarly unreported:
Conferences with annual revenues above $700 million would be prohibited from acquiring the assets, media rights or membership of another conference or institution. Those acquisitions are legal today. CBO estimates the prohibition could cost the largest conferences hundreds of millions of dollars a year in forgone profit.
Conferences and associations would be required to provide comparable services at championship events for similarly situated men's and women's programs. CBO could not price that one either.
Athletic associations would be required to seat student athlete representatives and representatives from mid-sized conferences on their governing boards and committees.
What we are doing next
We are going to build the number CBO said does not exist.
Every institution with an athletics program — public and private — files an annual report under the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act listing revenues and expenses by team. The data are public. They have never been aggregated for nonrevenue sports.
We will report what these programs actually cost, school by school, and publish it.
Sources: Congressional Budget Office cost estimate for S. 4668, published July 31, 2026 · U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation · Associated Press reporting on program eliminations.
Corrections and additions: whnn@willieherman.com
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