College Sports

Floor Speech

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Ms. STEVENS. Mr. Speaker, after Monday's college football national championship, I rise to express my concern about the trend of private equity firms attempting to buy up college sports. These deals will be bad for athletes, students, and fans.

We have seen this play before. Media corporations' pursuit of college football and basketball viewers created nonsensical conference realignment that destroyed the regional nature of college sport. For generations, the Big Ten was known as the Midwestern Conference. In recent decades, that identity has slowly been eroded as coastal schools were admitted in the name of more revenue and higher profits.

Now private equity is looking to buy college sports revenue streams. If these deals are normalized, it is only a matter of time before private investors demand control over our university athletic departments. This creates the risk of further conference realignment, cutting nonrevenue sports, and expanding for-profit influence over universities.

This is why I have sent a letter with my Republican colleagues to end the NCAA.

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