College GameDay broadcast live from Austin, Tex., on Saturday morning, in preparation for the huge top-five clash between the Longhorns and Ohio State. It should've been a celebration of everything that makes college football great amid a big-game backdrop that's becoming all too rare in this era of mega-conferences and an expanded College Football Playoff (and the Big Ten and SEC trying to take their ball and go home).
Instead, we got Ted Cruz getting nearly booed off the stage in front of his home state. And while that might spark joy in the hearts of millions around the country (guilty as charged), it's actually a perfect encapsulation of the bind college football finds itself in right now.
Ted Cruz got showered with boos during College GameDay appearance ahead of Ohio State-Texas
An hour in to Saturday's broadcast, GameDay brought the senator from Texas out to stump for the Protect College Sports Act, a comprehensive bill that would bring sweeping, top-down changes to college football — everything from an actually enforceable revenue-sharing cap to real NIL guidance to codified five-year eligibility and transfer limits. It's the sort of guidance that such a decentralized sport desperately needs, and yet it continues to languish in the Senate after a series of failed votes.
Not that anyone in the crowd at UT would know, because it was almost impossible to hear anything Cruz had to say amid the boos and chanting to get him off the stage.
Ted Cruz getting booed way worse than Ohio State or Oklahoma down in Austin pic.twitter.com/IwinNIKANV
— Chris Marler (@Vern_Funquist) September 12, 2026
Look, let's just lay our cards on the table here: I'm not about to begrudge anybody for taking the opportunity to boo Cruz to his face. He's one of the least popular Senators in the country for a reason, and lord knows he hasn't earned much of any sympathy from anyone about anything. He's gotten booed just about everywhere he's gone publicly for a while now, whether that's an Astros game or the Final Four or a line at the airport en route to Mexico while his state is in the middle of a deadly energy crisis.
In this one specific instance, though, that's part of the problem. Because for whatever you want to say about Cruz — and lord knows you can say a lot — college football needs adults in the room to create some order out of the chaos that overflows right now. And instead, Cruz is all they have.
College football can't count on Congress to save it
I want to be clear that I'm not advocating for college football revanchism, a sepia-tinted return to a halcyon age when the sport was Great Again. College football has always been more or less a wild west of lawlessness, petty grievances and a whole bunch of cash; it's just happening out in the open now.
Still, bonkers TV ratings aside, it's clear that something has to change if the sport is going to sustain itself into the future rather than driving over a cliff in which NFL players can return to campus whenever they want. Regional specificity is a large part of what makes the college game so great, but at some point you need some sort of central authority — and lord knows that's never going to be the NCAA, an organization which wouldn't want to hold that kind of responsibility even if it were legally allowed to do so.
And, absent some sort of college commissioner (a nonstarter for the power conferences), what you've got is Congress. The problem there is that it's hard to think of an institution more manifestly unfit to lead college football into a future in which guardrails are in place while athletes are still allowed to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Just look at what happened the last time the bill came up for a vote in the Senate: It got shot down from both sides, with prominent Democrats (including the all-important Congressional Black Caucus) rightfully objecting on the grounds that it unlawfully restricted athlete freedom of movement and association and prominent Republicans objecting on the grounds that it didn't restrict those things enough.
It's going to be almost impossible to thread that needle; well, at least it's going to be almost impossible without allowing players to collectively bargain, but that's a different conversation for another day. The situation demands someone with preternatural charisma, the ability to get disparate parties to fall in line. That's no one's idea of Cruz, as Saturday morning reiterated for the umpteenth time.
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