Greg Byrne voices strong support for SCORE Act after vote postponement: 'This is good for college sports'

After multiple conference commissioners and NCAA officials headed to Washington, D.C. for a scheduled vote on the SCORE Act, the bill was pulled from the schedule. The college sports legislation was on track for the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives prior to the postponement, and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) offered some pointed criticism of the bill on Thursday.

However, Alabama athletics director Greg Byrne continues to voice strong support for the bill. He shared his hopes for the bill to “get back on the tracks” at said it would be good for college athletics.

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Byrne noted the amount of support the bill generated in college athletics, including many NCAA conferences and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee. However, multiple professional players associations – including the NFLPA and NBPA – spoke out against the legislation. But Byrne blamed the politics of the discussions as a reason why the bill did not make it to the House floor as scheduled.

“The SCORE Act, for instance, is really good,” Byrne said on The Paul Finebaum Show. “Thirty two of the 33 conferences support it. The student-athletic advisory committee supported it. The USOPC, the United States Olympic Committee supports it. It had bipartisan support going into it. Like you and I talked about, that’s hard today. Politics got in the middle of it, and when you get politics in the middle of it, they look for a reason to blame. And the reality, we are so committed to wanting to have broad-based programming and great experiences. I’m in the middle of it, right? I’m proud of what we do for our kids. All you’ve got to do is come be around our kids and you’ll see that.

“So I hope we can get this back on the tracks and find a way – We have been very active, Coach [Nick] Saban and I have been to D.C. multiple times together. He’s been a couple of times without me. Whether it’s our football coaches, whether it’s our Olympic sport coaches, this is good for college sports as a whole at every level. Unfortunately, some narratives have tried to disrupt that. And they all have interests that aren’t really in the broad-based interests of college athletics as a whole, and we need to get through that.”

More on the SCORE Act

The Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act was on track for the House floor following a close, 210-209 procedural vote on Tuesday. Introduced in July, the bill would codify the House settlement and grant liability protection, as well as preempt state NIL laws. It would also include an anti-employment clause and usher in regulation for agents.

Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger reported that a vote will not take place this week, and it could be some time before any more action takes place. However, Hakeem Jeffries questioned why Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) were pushing so hard to bring it to a vote.

“The organized labor unions were strongly opposed because it undermined the freedom of athletes to negotiate and took away collective bargaining rights and, of course, the players’ associations across every sports league – led by the NFLPA – because they concluded that it would actually hurt college athletes, not help them,” Jeffries said during a Thursday press conference.

“Why would Mike Johnson and Steve Scalise agree to bring the ‘Lane Kiffin Protection Act’ to the floor of the House of Representatives? Legislation that would do nothing to benefit college athletes and everything to benefit coaches like Lane Kiffin, who got out of town, abandoned his players in the middle of a playoff run to go get a $100 million contract from LSU, the home state of Mike Johnson and Steve Scalise.”