SCORE Act: College Athletes, You’re On Your Own

I'll save you the suspense: there is still no federal NIL law. (Phew!)

The SCORE Act, the most recent attempt at comprehensive college sports legislation, was pulled from the House floor in December 2025.

It didn't lose a vote. It never got one.

Rep. Diana Lynn Harshbarger asking questions at the CMT Subcommittee Legislative Hearing on SCORE Act to Standardize NIL in College Athletics.

Bipartisan opposition killed it before it reached that point, which is actually a harder thing to do than it sounds. Getting members of both parties to agree on anything these days takes real effort. Agreeing that a bill is bad enough to stop it before the vote? That's something.

Now lawmakers say they're going to try again in 2026. Trump floated an executive order in early March to address what he described as the NIL mess. No order has been signed.

I want to be direct about what this means for athletes right now: the absence of federal law doesn't mean the absence of rules. It means there are 50 different state laws, a patchwork of NCAA bylaws, an ongoing legal settlement, and a compliance oversight body -- the College Sports Commission -- that's still working out the edges of its own authority.

That's a complicated legal environment. Navigating it without understanding what applies to you is how athletes end up in bad situations.

The athletes who get hurt in this space almost never know they're in a gap. They sign deals assuming someone checked the fine print. They transfer assuming the compliance office has it handled. They take on agent representation assuming the person across the table has legal obligations to them.

Sometimes those assumptions are right. Often they're not.

Congress will keep trying to fix this. But they really should stay out of it -- not much good comes out of federal oversight. But until some all-encompassing law actually passes and gets signed, the rules are what they are today -- complicated, inconsistent, and heavily dependent on the state you're in and the school you play for. Athletes need to know that going in, not after the fact.