Student-athlete Protections and Opportunities through Rights, Transparency, and Safety Act

The Sports Act (H.R. 3847) creates a comprehensive national framework to protect and regulate student-athletes’ name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights. It aims to ensure student-athletes can enter into NIL agreements with transparency, while limiting risks to the institutions and conferences involved. The bill establishes rules on disclosure, representation, and market-value assessment for NIL deals; modifies the Sports Agent Responsibility and Trust Act (SARA) to bolster disclosures by athlete agents; and creates roles for intercollegiate associations to register NIL representatives and maintain a public database to help determine fair market value. It also ties certain U.S. Department of Education funding to required education for student-athletes about NIL opportunities and broader student welfare, provides a pathway for medical costs post-graduation, and creates a federal preemption regime to standardize NIL policy nationwide. Overall, the bill seeks to balance student-athlete opportunities with institutional interests, while increasing transparency and uniformity across states. Key components include a prohibition on institutions unreasonably restricting NIL deals except for specified justifications, a 60-day disclosure window to the athlete’s institution, and written agreement requirements for NIL contracts. It also creates a centralized NIL market-value database (with anonymized data) and requires regular reporting by institutions to interstate associations. The act designates liability protections for compliant institutions and preempts conflicting state laws, while clarifying that student-athletes are not employees under this framework.