Summary#
The Protect America’s Game Act is a bill to amend the federal Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. It would exempt certain joint college sports broadcasting-rights agreements from antitrust laws, but not agreements that allow postseason Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) football to be broadcast during the protected Army-Navy Game window. Its stated goal is to protect that game’s exclusive broadcast window.
- Colleges and conferences could receive antitrust protection when they jointly form and operate an entity to transfer some or all of their rights to broadcast intercollegiate competitions.
- That protection would not apply to a covered agreement that permits anyone to sponsor, broadcast, or authorize a broadcast of a postseason FBS football contest during the protected window.
- The window would begin one hour before the Army-Navy game’s scheduled kickoff and end 30 minutes after its telecast officially concludes.
- The bill does not itself ban overlapping broadcasts or require the game to be scheduled at a particular time. It would leave agreements permitting those broadcasts without this bill’s antitrust exemption.
What it means for you#
- Colleges and conferences: They could use the exemption for qualifying joint arrangements to transfer broadcast rights. The exemption would not cover an agreement that permits the specified overlapping postseason broadcasts.
- Broadcasters, sponsors, and rights entities: An agreement covered by the exception would not receive this bill’s antitrust protection for the relevant broadcasts. That does not by itself make the agreement illegal; it means antitrust laws would apply.
- Viewers: The bill would not give viewers a new right to watch the Army-Navy game, or guarantee that other games would not overlap with it.
- Everyone: The bill is not law. It was introduced in the Senate and referred to the Judiciary Committee; passage is uncertain.
Money#
No publicly available information on estimated public costs.
- The bill does not specify an appropriation, fee, fine, or amount of funding.
- It would create an antitrust exemption for certain agreements, subject to the broadcast-window limit. The materials give no estimate of costs or financial effects for colleges, conferences, broadcasters, or the government.
What is unclear#
- The bill does not set out how the exemption would be applied or resolve disputes about whether a particular agreement permits a broadcast during the window.
- It does not specify an effective date.
- The supplied material does not include the full Sports Broadcasting Act, so the bill’s interaction with the Act’s existing provisions and current law could not be verified.
- The bill refers to the annual Army-Navy game as occurring on the second Saturday in December, but does not require the game to be scheduled then.
- No funding, staffing, reporting, or new review process is described.
Case for#
- The bill appears intended to protect a defined period around the Army-Navy game from overlapping postseason FBS football broadcasts.
- A possible argument for the approach is that it sets a specific limit on the antitrust protection for joint college broadcasting-rights arrangements, tied to that broadcast window.
- The broader exemption could make it easier for colleges and conferences to jointly transfer broadcast rights, while withholding that exemption from agreements that permit the specified overlap.
Case against#
- One concern is that the exemption covers joint rights-transfer agreements broadly, while the bill does not describe limits beyond the Army-Navy broadcast window.
- The bill does not prohibit overlapping broadcasts. It only removes this bill’s antitrust exemption from agreements that permit them; whether such an agreement violates antitrust law would depend on that law.
- It is unclear how the window would work if the game’s telecast ends unusually late, since its end is tied to the telecast’s official conclusion.
- The bill does not explain how it fits with the existing Sports Broadcasting Act, which makes the scope of the change harder to assess.