Yes, coaches should face the exact same restrictions this bill throws at athletes. Pay cap, NIL vetting, a year on the shelf for switching jobs, a leash on the buyout. All of it. The reason that's an easy answer is that the U.S. Senate just told you, on the record, why it won't happen.
Cory Booker and Chris Murphy filed an amendment to the Protect College Sports Act that would have done the obvious thing: taken the limits the bill imposes on 19-year-olds and pointed them at the grown men who coach them. Cap coach compensation at $5 million a year. Run their endorsement deals through the same NIL Go clearinghouse athletes get funneled into. Make them sit a season after their second job hop, the way the bill treats a transferring player. Cap their buyouts at a single year's salary. It applied only to contracts signed after enactment, so nobody's existing deal was getting clawed back. This was as gentle as a mirror can be.
The Senate voted it down, 52 to 47. Then it turned around and passed the underlying bill 77 to 22.
The same chamber that decided a college athlete's earnings need a federal ceiling and a compliance review looked at applying one dollar of that logic to the coaching class and backed off. Booker put the trap in plain language on the floor: if supporters believe these rules are necessary for athletes, they should apply them to coaches too. Nobody had an answer, because there isn't one. No version of "we must protect the sport from runaway compensation" survives contact with a buyout market where fired coaches walk off with more guaranteed money than most athletic departments spend on their entire non-revenue rosters. If the spending is the disease, the coaches are patient zero. The players are the ones who finally got a cut.
So when Booker says this bill sells out college athletes, he's describing exactly what the vote count shows: a cap on the people with no leverage, and a market left alone for the people who already have all of it.
Nick Saban stepped in to defend the split, drawing a line between limiting what a student-athlete can make and capping a coach. That's the honest version of the opposition, and it's still wrong. That distinction only works if you believe a coach's pay is set by a free market while a player's isn't, which is the precise inversion of what this bill does. The bill is the government reaching into the market to hold athlete compensation down. Booker's amendment just asked the government to reach the same distance in the same direction for everyone standing on the field. You can't cheer the reach and then call it tyranny the second it points at the sideline.
A better objection exists, and it isn't Saban's: Congress has no business setting anyone's salary in college sports, athlete or coach, and a courtroom or a bargaining table should be doing this work instead of a Senate floor. Fine. If that's your position, be consistent: you should have wanted the whole bill dead, not just the amendment. The people who voted 52-47 against the coach cap and 77-22 for the athlete cap chose convenience over principle.
A separate Booker measure that would have boosted compensation for athletes suffering catastrophic injuries also got rejected on the way through. Cap the kid's earnings, decline to help the kid who gets hurt earning them, protect the coach's eight-figure exit package.
Coaches should live under every rule this bill invents, or the rules shouldn't exist. The Senate just picked a third option, and it's the ugliest one available.
