BATON ROUGE — Louisiana lawmakers moved Tuesday to shield key college athletics revenue-share records from public view, as House Bill 608 cleared the House and Governmental Affairs Committee on a 9-3 vote after a hearing that laid bare the bill’s real effect: not just protecting individual athletes, but blocking the public from learning how much public universities allocate to specific sports and programs.
The committee vote sends HB 608 forward with language that leaves only one piece of revenue-share spending public — the total annual amount a university spends through its intercollegiate athletics revenue-sharing program. Everything more revealing is walled off: payments to specific athletes, allocations to specific sports or athletic programs, and documents tied to negotiating those agreements.
That is the heart of the fight.
Supporters cast the measure as a needed privacy and safety protection for student-athletes. Opponents argued it goes much further, creating a new secrecy shield around how public universities distribute money inside their athletic departments — including football, baseball, women’s basketball, gymnastics, golf, and every other sport.
Under the engrossed version, HB 608 specifically exempts from disclosure “the total amount, and any percentage amount” of revenue-share funds paid to any specific athlete and the total or percentage allocated to “any specific intercollegiate sport or athletic program.” It also shields any document related to negotiating a revenue-share agreement with an athlete.
That language became a central flashpoint in committee.
Speaking in opposition, representatives of the Louisiana Press Association and the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana warned lawmakers that the bill would hide far more than personal athlete details. They argued the measure would keep the public from seeing how much a school is spending on football versus baseball, women’s basketball, gymnastics, golf, or any other program.
Scott Sternberg, appearing on behalf of the Louisiana Press Association, told the committee the bill would mean “we will no longer know” how much each university is spending by program if the underlying revenue-share breakdown is hidden. He said that goes beyond privacy for individual athletes and cuts off meaningful public oversight.
Dr. Steven Procopio of PAR Louisiana made the same point more directly, arguing that if public dollars touch these programs, the public should still be able to see how money is being allocated. He specifically pointed lawmakers to the bill’s language blocking disclosure of allocations to any specific sport or program and said he could not support a measure that prevents citizens from knowing how money is being spent at public institutions.
LSU, however, made clear that broader secrecy is exactly the point.
Julie Cromer, LSU’s executive deputy athletics director, testified in support of the bill and said the university believes it is important not only for student-athletes to have privacy, but also for allocations across teams and programs to remain private. Asked specifically about the bill’s language shielding allocations by sport or program, Cromer said LSU supports keeping that information confidential for reasons already discussed in committee.
Supporters repeatedly framed the bill around athlete protection.
Rep. Candace Newell, whose nephew plays for LSU, said she supports the bill because she does not want people to know what young athletes make, arguing that disclosure could expose them to manipulation, harassment, and danger. Other supporters argued public disclosure of program allocations could fuel roster poaching and create friction inside locker rooms and among teams.
But the hearing also exposed the weakness in the bill’s public pitch.
Several lawmakers and opponents acknowledged that protecting athlete-specific identifying information is a legitimate concern. The larger dispute was over why that protection must also extend to sport-by-sport and program-by-program allocations. That question grew sharper when opponents noted that the bill’s language does not stop at names or individual contracts. It also blocks disclosure of how much revenue-share money is directed to particular sports.
That matters because the bill arrives amid intensifying scrutiny of how LSU and other schools plan to divide revenue-share resources across their athletic departments. If HB 608 becomes law, the public would still be allowed to know only the top-line annual total spent on revenue sharing. It would not be allowed to see how that money is distributed among sports, what share goes where, or what records were created during the negotiation process.
In other words, the public could know the size of the pie, but not how the slices were cut.
That is why the committee vote was more than a routine step in the legislative process. Wednesday’s 9-3 roll call moved forward a bill that would sharply narrow what citizens, reporters, watchdog groups, and even future litigants can learn about revenue-share decisions at public universities in Louisiana.
The committee secretary announced the final tally as nine yeas and three nays before the bill was reported favorably.
With committee passage secured, HB 608 now advances with its core structure intact: one aggregate annual number for public consumption, and nearly everything else sealed off.
That is not a narrow privacy fix.
It is a legislative move toward secrecy over how revenue-share money is distributed inside Louisiana’s public college athletic programs.
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