SBJ College: Teall Capital Acquires Colonnade Group

Ben Sutton’s private-equity firm, Teall Capital, has acquired Birmingham-based Colonnade Group, a fan experience and hospitality shop that has relationships throughout college sports, including the CFP, NCAA, 14 schools, the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten and SEC. In its 30 years, Colonnade has created and sold hospitality packages, run fan fests and built the stage and seating for the Final Four basketball court.

Colonnade will be rolled into a new company called Revel XP, a gameday-oriented business for college and professional properties. Revel will combine Colonnade with Tailgate Guys and Complex Sports, two companies Teall already owned, plus PRE, a recently acquired event rental and hospitality business.

Revel will be led by CEO Ray DeWeese, who joined Teall at the start of the year. The new company has designs on what it called re-imagining gameday with a higher level of sales and service. Its capabilities will include premium seating sales and management, temporary structures at sporting venues, interactive fan events and VIP hospitality experiences.

Colonnade, which was doing roughly $20 million annually in total revenue before the pandemic hit, industry insiders say, will take on the Revel name. Founder Robbie Robertson will stay on as Revel’s vice chair, while his wife, Lori, will become Exec VP/Premium Hospitality Experiences.

Sutton and DeWeese, who worked together at IMG College, have extensive experience in the college space, as do the Robertsons. Colonnade also has some business ties to the PGA Tour and NASCAR.

“We’re uber-focused on providing premium hospitality game-day experiences so that we can serve the next generation of fans,” Sutton said.

We’ve got plenty of time to talk about what kind of commissioner Jim Phillips will be before he starts at the ACC in February. Here are some of my favorite stories from his almost 13 years at Northwestern.

When I went to Chicago in 2018 to profile Phillips, the most memorable conversation I had was with Clayton Thorson, the Wildcats’ QB. He told me about suffering a torn ACL in the 2017 Music City Bowl and that it was Phillips who walked halfway around the stadium to Northwestern’s locker room, gathered all of his gear and brought it to him in a training room. Thorson a year later was still moved that the AD broke away from watching Northwestern play to tend to the injured QB.

Almost all of the stories about Phillips are wrapped in his enthusiasm and willingness to take on any task. He’s not too proud to be the Wildcats’ biggest cheerleader, whether he’s encouraging the student section to be louder or he’s following the women’s golf team during a match. “He claps four or five more times after everyone else has stopped clapping,” coach Emily Fletcher said with a laugh. “The girls always know it when he’s out there.”

Phillips had a couple of go-to sayings. He became known for telling athletes, coaches and staff that “there’s a better destination” for Northwestern athletics, a program that didn’t have a great tradition before Phillips arrived. He also liked to say that the Wildcats were a “white-collar school with a blue-collar mentality.”

Phillips never brings it up, but he almost didn’t live beyond the eighth grade. At 13, Phillips was hit by a drunk driver while he rode his bicycle and suffered two broken femurs. He couldn’t walk for almost a year. As only he can, Phillips found a way to put a positive twist on his near-death crash, saying that it changed his life for the better. “God was with me then, and has never left my side,” Phillips said.

Phillips will be on the sideline in Indianapolis on Saturday for the Big Ten football championship game against Ohio State. It is a fitting send-off for Phillips to see the Wildcats playing for a title. It appears that they’ve arrived at their “better destination.”

Phillips has described Duke AD Kevin White as one of the most important people in his professional life. They worked together at Arizona State in the 1990s and at Notre Dame in the early 2000s -- White was the AD at both schools before Duke.

When I caught up with White, who affectionately calls Phillips “Jimmy,” just as he did 25 years ago, White wrote in a text message:

“It was abundantly obvious that Jimmy enjoyed immense talents and gifts, particularly as it related to straightforward communication, empathy for all others, adaptability, relationship acumen, utter intelligence, and well beyond that, Jimmy had integrity, as they say, for days! When we were in South Bend, Jimmy clearly demonstrated, by his very nature, his extremely competitive and task-oriented demeanor."

“Finally, I am not sure that there is anyone within our wacko business that is more student-athlete centric, which may indeed be his strongest asset. Jimmy will be a supreme rock star as he leads the ACC into the next iteration of college athletics.”

• The Army-Navy game took a viewership hit on Saturday as the matchup had college football competition for the first time since 2008, notes SBJ's Austin Karp. CBS averaged 4.91 million viewers, down 36% from 7.72 million viewers for last year's matchup. It's the smallest audience for the game since it last had competition 12 years ago (2.88 million viewers). Despite the decline, Army-Navy was the most-watched CFB game of the day. The second-best game of the day was LSU's primetime upset of Florida on ESPN (4.62 million).

• The Texas Bowl has its fourth title sponsor since the game at NRG Stadium was founded in 2006. ESPN Events has brought on Mercari U.S. as the new sponsor. The company is the domestic division of the Japan-based e-commerce marketplace. Denver-based Impression Sports & Entertainment brokered the deal. Mercari replaces Academy Sports + Outdoors, which held entitlement the last three years.

• AAC Commissioner Mike Aresco is excited about the exposure on ABC for this week's Cincinnati-Tulsa conference title game. He told the Cincinnati Enquirer: "Prime time, yeah, that's a great slot." UC AD John Cunningham also noted that the university's request to the state of Ohio for an attendance variance for the game, allowing more fans inside the stadium, was "denied." Capacity for the game will be limited to 1,500 fans, "including player guests for both teams and coaching staffs, band and spirit squads."
  
  

• San Antonio has “begun conversations with the NCAA about the possibility of hosting the entire” women’s basketball tournament next spring, per the Express-News. The NCAA announced that it “intends to hold all games of the 64-team tournament in one area to minimize the risks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.”