During an appearance on ESPN’s College GameDay Saturday morning in Austin, Texas Senator Ted Cruz was booed for nearly ten minutes straight, with the crowd repeatedly chanting “Ted, you suck” throughout his segment.
He’d arrived in a burnt-orange blazer with a Longhorns pin on his lapel, sat across from host Rece Davis, and started talking about a bill.
The setting itself was always going to be a stretch.
GameDay had set up on the LBJ lawn ahead of the top-five showdown between Texas and Ohio State, a broadcast built for tailgates and mascot bits, not Senate committee talk. Cruz was there to promote the Protect College Sports Act, legislation he co-authored aimed at setting federal rules for NIL payments and the transfer portal. He got a few lines out despite the noise, calling college sports “an amazing institution” and arguing that “what we have right now is chaos, there are no rules.”
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He also referenced specific flashpoints driving the bill, pointing to coaches recruiting NFL veterans back into college locker rooms and ongoing legal fights over athletes betting on their own games.
None of it mattered much once the chanting took over.
He stayed on camera for roughly ten minutes, and witnesses at the scene said he was barely audible for most of it, which is a rough way to pitch federal legislation on live television.
Ted Cruz is aggressively booed in Austin, Texas: “Ted, you suck!” https://t.co/BZypXwdtUR
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) September 12, 2026
Austin’s political lean likely played a role here. The city sits as a liberal pocket inside a deeply red state, and college crowds have never been shy about making their politics known during nationally televised broadcasts.
Away from the noise in Austin, the bill has actually been building real momentum. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has backed the effort publicly, saying “college sports is something that needs to be fixed” and pointing to the bipartisan bill as a workable answer. Co-sponsor Maria Cantwell has been just as vocal, calling it “how we protect women’s and Olympic sports” and saying she’s looking forward to “its passage in September.”
A Senate cloture vote is now scheduled sometime between September 15 and September 23, and the bill cleared the Commerce Committee earlier this year by a comfortable 19-9 margin.
Featured image via X screengrab
