ARLINGTON, Va. — A lawmaker sponsoring a key piece of federal legislation on college sports said he believes the bill likely has the support it needs to pass the upper chamber.

“We probably have 60 votes,” Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., said Friday at the Associated Press sports editors’ meeting.

Schmitt called the next two weeks critical for the College Sports Protection Act.

He said leaders of the Southeastern and Big Ten Conferences, who oppose the bill as written, have met with the main sponsors: Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. — negotiate changes to the bill in an effort to gain their support.

Without the bill, Schmitt said “the trajectory of this in three years will be even more unrecognizable,” predicting a scenario in which women’s sports teams collapse under financial pressure.

College sports have been struggling to find a fair way to pay players for their name, image and likeness since a federal court approved payments to players last summer.

The legislation introduced by Cruz and Cantwell offers the NCAA and conferences limited liability protection and acts to preempt the patchwork of state laws governing NIL payments. It also opens up the option for conferences to pool their media rights, a move that advocates say could generate billions in additional money but that the SEC and the Big Ten do not support.

In a letter to school presidents last month, SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey expressed concern that the bill could create more problems than it solves. Sankey suggested rewriting a section of the bill that allows athletes to file civil lawsuits in certain cases, saying that as written it could create more litigation rather than reduce it.

Even if the bill passes the Senate, it would face an unlikely race in the closely divided House of Representatives, where both Democrats and Republicans have found a series of flaws in another bill, the SCORE Act, which never came up for a floor vote.

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AP College Sports: https://apnews.com/hub/college-sports