Pushing major legislation through Congress this year will be tough, Murphy acknowledged. “What's different here is that state legislatures are going to act, and it will be a nightmare for college athletics if every state has a different law regarding the ability of students to be compensated. So there's going to be an imperative for a federal solution here that might create the aperture for a bill to get done.”

The NCAA men’s and women’s college basketball tournaments kick off in a few short weeks, with March Madness serving as a marquee money-making season for the association and its schools. Tournament television and marketing rights fees, plus championship ticket sales, supply the nonprofit NCAA with hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue.

The spectacle only emphasizes how much is at stake for the college sports machine.

Top administrators and athletics officials gathered in Anaheim, Calif., in late January to debate internal rules on player benefits for the NCAA’s three divisions, which organize more than 1,000 participating schools based on the number of sports and levels of financial aid available to athletes.

Meanwhile, the powerful association, which rakes in about $1 billion in annual revenue that’s largely shared with schools, hinted at a lobbying blitz among states to stop patchwork laws from governing how college players can profit off their so-called names, images and likenesses.

But the tone inside Anaheim’s conference underscored the soul-searching about the role college athletics should play in higher education. The question is whether the NCAA can keep pace with a social justice movement led by former players, knowledgeable attorneys and sympathetic lawmakers to let big-time college athletes earn far more than the value of scholarships and modest living stipends.

“I don’t think college sports are irretrievably broken. But I think the basic feeling that I have is just a basic question of fairness,” said Mark Lewis, a former NCAA executive vice president who once supervised the association’s lucrative championships and business initiatives.

“I think the problem has just become too complex, and with too diverse a number of constituents. It takes external forces to drive change sometimes.”

A growing congressional chorus also suggests something must change.

A Senate subcommittee hearing set for Tuesday will bring NCAA President Mark Emmert, Big 12 Conference Commissioner Bob Bowlsby and University of Kansas Chancellor Douglas Girod to Washington to lay out their views.

Rep. Donna Shalala, an experienced former university administrator and Florida Democrat, has sponsored legislation to create a 17-member commission dedicated to investigating the anxious relationship between college sports and higher education.

Murphy along with Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), David Perdue (R-Ga.), Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) are part of the recently formed working group to study student athlete compensation. Murphy’s office has excoriated the NCAA in a series of reports published this past year.

“There’s more Republicans on that list right now than there are Democrats!” one Senate staffer exclaimed to POLITICO about that working group’s roster.

Such momentum has fed anticipation that Congress could soon act to intervene in an enormous private market. New rules must apply not just to Division I revenue-generating juggernauts, but also smaller schools where sports are subsidized by student fees and fill an entirely different role in campus life.

“It’s a historic time,” said Ramogi Huma, a former UCLA football player who now leads the National College Players Association advocacy group.

“The NCAA is going to have a choice. It’s either going to embrace the change, or it’s going to plunge into irrelevance on this issue.”

Time is limited. California’s law won’t take effect for three years, but Florida is weighing a player pay bill that would launch in July. In Michigan, state lawmakers recently amended their proposal to begin in 2021.

Huma’s group suggests a 2020 effective date in model legislation it pitches to state governments, and demands that any national law at least match California’s sweep.

“Our perspective for federal legislation is ‘do no harm.’ If Congress is going to act, it should act in support of the rights and freedoms that states are moving to provide their college athletes,” Huma told POLITICO.

“I would say federal legislation is possibly the greatest threat to the push towards these rights and freedoms, but it can facilitate it.”

New NCAA rules granting players the potential to benefit from their names, images and likenesses aren’t anticipated to land until 2021, and will align with boundaries set last year: Athletes can’t be handed a check just for playing in a game, they won’t be university employees and colleges will be barred from offering athletes “inducements” to enroll at a given school.

But rehashed NCAA policies won’t resolve competing state laws. New York’s proposal would require colleges to split 15 percent of athletics ticket revenue among athletes. Nebraska’s doesn’t. Association officials argue uneven regulations could challenge scholarships’ status as non-taxable income or even threaten low-income athletes' access to Pell Grants.

The NCAA argues the furor puts an essential college sports trait at risk.

Student athletes do not get paid for playing, beyond tuition and living expenses they sometimes receive. They’re barred from signing sneaker deals or autographs to make money on the side. That enforced concept of “amateurism” forms the core of the college sports product. Today’s debate promises to alter that idea in huge ways.

"It’s an existential threat to the NCAA, and I would say to collegiate sports altogether,” Daemen College President Gary Olson said of the environment to a packed room of college administrators in Anaheim.

“I think at the end of the day, if we could get a favorable bill through Congress that settles a lot of this, and it’s something that we’re allowed to participate in creating, I think that’s the best way forward.”

John DeGioia, president of Georgetown University, told POLITICO that preempting state laws is a key element of the NCAA’s federal wishlist. “Just because if the state laws went into effect, it’s going to be chaos,” he said.

One university president, speaking on background, said the NCAA ideally needs some kind of exemption from federal antitrust laws. That promises to be a hot topic. Federal courts have so far ruled NCAA amateurism rules don’t violate antitrust law, but securing a federal carve-out for the association would require a big lift.

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“We find ourselves in this constant state of antitrust litigation, where anything that we do ends up being scrutinized by someone, by a court that's got a case brought by someone against the association alleging an antitrust violation,” one NCAA official speaking on background told POLITICO. “And so we've got to find a way to be able to modernize and not have to worry that our efforts to modernize will put us in court over and over and over again.”

Lewis, the former NCAA executive vice president who is now advising Huma’s college players group, said today’s predicament is the product of a college sports industry that spent more than 30 years focused on maximum monetization.

“The challenge with college sports is you’ve made everything else professional, except the labor model,” he said.

“Do we really not want kids to benefit from a system that generates billions of dollars a year, and can afford to pay people millions of dollars a year?”

Organizations, including the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and The Drake Group's higher education think tank, have outlined potential solutions in recent years.

The NCAA has also suggested it might pursue litigation, based on an argument that conflicting state laws illegally interfere with interstate commerce in a way that only Congress can authorize.

“It’s a threat to their hustle,” Huma said of the NCAA. “It’s a threat to how they’ve been able to monopolize every commercial dollar, and then keep the players who are sacrificing their bodies away from participating in any of those spoils.”

The association plans to offer some updates by April. Emmert, meanwhile, says he’s talking to elected officials.

“Whether or not Congress is the right forum in which to resolve this will have to wait and see,” Emmert told reporters in Anaheim. “But I think that we're going to absolutely need their help in getting there. What that looks like is still to be determined.”

“We’ve got to move this along. It's a difficult time in Washington, D.C., obviously. But people are listening and they’re thinking, and there's a lot of good ideas being brought forward.”