Congress can end college sports’ courtroom season. It should measure what comes after, too

College basketball tipped off this week with a new kind of box score. According to the NCAA, about 200 eligibility lawsuits involving roughly 850 athletes have been filed since June. By the Associated Press‘s count, 171 men’s and 30 women’s basketball players have won some court relief to play. Arizona coach Tommy Lloyd watched forward RJ Godfrey sit out the opener after a Texas judge signaled he wouldn’t grant an emergency order. “Somebody,” Lloyd said, “has to explain to me why that’s OK.”Congress can. The Protect College Sports Act passed the Senate 77-22 in September. The House returns Monday, and if it doesn’t act, the bill dies on Jan. 3.The House should pass it. The bill would put a five-year eligibility window into federal law, so a season’s roster is decided by coaches and athletes, not judges in a dozen states. It would require the highest-revenue schools to keep their overall number of roster spots and scholarships in non-revenue sports, which matters after dozens of Olympic-sport teams were cut in the wake of the House settlement. It would let schools spend up to $5 million more on athletes in women’s, Olympic, and other non-revenue sports. And it would let former athletes come back to finish their degrees. Those are real protections. But almost all of them measure what happens while athletes are on campus. The bigger question is what happens after.In football and men’s basketball, fewer than 2% of college players go pro, according to the NCAA, and in most Olympic sports there’s no pro league to go to. For nearly everyone else, the return on college sports is the degree, the habits, and the people they met along the way. Yet no one is required to report how those athletes are doing a year after their last game: whether they graduated, whether they’re working, and whether they’re still involved in the sports that shaped them as coaches, officials, or players.That’s a gap that can be closed at almost no cost. Every school covered by the bill should publish, by sport, its athletes’ graduation rates, how many are employed or in graduate school a year after eligibility ends, and how many are still involved in sport. Schools already collect much of this for their own alumni and career offices. If amending the bill this late risks the Jan. 3 deadline, the NCAA and the conferences can adopt the same standard on their own the day it becomes law. Publishing it would let recruits and parents compare programs on the outcomes that last, and it would reward the schools that develop people, not just rosters.FROM ‘WHITE PRIVILEGE’ TO ‘TRANS INCLUSION’: THE WNBA IS RELEVANT FOR ALL THE WRONG REASONSIt would also help with a problem the bill doesn’t touch. Youth sports across the country are short of coaches and officials, and the best candidates are walking off college campuses every spring. A school that has to report how many of its former athletes stay in sport has a reason to connect them with the youth leagues, high schools, and officials’ associations that need them.None of this should slow the bill down. The chaos in the courts is reason enough to pass it before the Jan. 3 deadline. But if Congress is going to write the rules for college sports, it should make sure those rules measure what college sports is supposed to deliver. For most athletes, that isn’t a pro contract. It’s a good start on the rest of their lives, and a reason to stay in the game.Alex Versen is Executive Director of The NOVA Foundation, a national nonprofit that helps former college athletes stay in sport, and a business-school lecturer in sport management.