SBJ College: South Carolina elevates women’s basketball

The power of the South Carolina women’s basketball brand was on full display on Super Bowl Sunday in Columbia. Here’s how:

• The No. 1-ranked Gamecocks’ defeat of No. 3 LSU drew a TV audience of 1.5 million viewers at 2pm on ESPN, which was more than the men’s game between Michigan State and Ohio State on CBS at 1pm. Not bad up against the Super Bowl pregame show.

• The sold-out crowd of 18,000 was a season high and it lifted the season average to 12,898 at Colonial Life Arena with two home games remaining. Every one of the 13 home games has drawn more than 11,000 fans. By comparison, UConn’s 12 home games have averaged 10,539.

• Need further evidence that all eyes were on the unbeaten Gamecocks and Tigers on Sunday? South Carolina’s media relations department ran out of press credentials last week, several days ahead of the game.

Not only was LSU-South Carolina big this past weekend, but the 1.5 million viewers for the game on ESPN was the best audience for any women’s college basketball regular-season game since Dec. 30, 2010, when ESPN2 drew 2.11 million viewers for UConn-Stanford, notes my colleague Austin Karp. 

The LSU-South Carolina game was the third-best college hoops game (men's or women's) all of last week, behind only Duke-Virginia and Indiana-Michigan on Saturday. The ESPN audience peaked at 1.6 million viewers in the thick of Super Bowl pre-game coverage.

Two of the five best women's regular-season hoops games since 2010 have now come this season. On Feb. 5, Fox drew 1.1 million viewers for South Carolina-UConn, with that audience setting a record for any women's hoops game on Fox.

Learfield launched its new NIL program called Allied+ last year so that the company could match up athletes with sponsors, while also integrating the school’s IP into deals. Arizona and Wisconsin are the two most-recent Learfield schools to join Allied+, along with Oklahoma, Ohio State, UAB, Western Kentucky and Alabama.

The way Allied+ works is that Learfield puts a sales and NIL staffer on each campus. Their job is to focus on finding NIL opportunities for the brands and athletes on that campus.

Allied+ is helping schools cut through the confusion. Remember, when NIL launched 20 months ago, schools were not using their IP the deals with athletes. But as NIL has evolved, school IP rights have been more integral to these deals, because combining the athletes and the schools creates more value.

Solly Fulp, a Learfield Exec VP who sets the NIL strategy for the company, said Allied+ is getting the attention of brands now that “we’re embedded on campus.”

Zips Car Wash in the Southeast was one of the first brands to see the value. Zips combined 13 universities and their IP rights with athletes from three schools for the brand’s foray into college sports marketing. Fulp: “We’re serving a greater role for our multimedia rights partners. There’s a lot of work to be done, but we’re on campus, and that makes us the trusted resource. What we’re seeing is that schools, brands and athletes are having more conversations about creating opportunities.”

The SEC dropped its own version of a Super Bowl ad on Sunday in Glendale, highlighting the wealth of NFL talent that has come from the conference on a billboard near State Farm Stadium.

• Remember to catch Bill Carter’s NIL Corner inside SBJ College next week.

• Former Penn State AD Sandy Barbour, former Duke AD Kevin White and other top former athletic administrators like Jim Delany are giving Huron Consulting extra firepower in the college space.

• Robert Morris has extended its apparel deal with Under Armour and Natale Sporting Goods. The agreement was brokered with assistance from Leona's Dan Gale.

• Condolences to the East Carolina community on the death of longtime play-by-play voice Jeff Charles, who passed away Friday from a heart attack. Charles, 70, had recently called his 1,000th ECU game.

• Gus Manning, who worked nearly 50 years in Tennessee athletics administration, died Sunday in Knoxville at age 99. The Volunteers described Manning as the last administrative link to Gen. Robert Neyland. Manning served eight different ADs over those five decades.