SBJ College: Teppers create legacy at South Carolina

This weekend brought a nice reprieve in the middle of the college football season after being on the road six of the last seven weeks.

Sunday, I popped over to an event honoring a friend of mine here in Columbia.

Unless you’re a diehard Gamecocks fan, you almost certainly haven’t heard of Perry Lancaster, but he’s one of the nicest guys in town. We met probably five years ago at Shane Beamer’s radio show and have remained friends. What I didn’t know at the time was Lancaster has been tailoring and clothing South Carolina football coaches since the Lou Holtz administration.

This week, Lancaster celebrated 50 years at his store, Brittons. Fifty years doing anything is impressive, but what a ball it was to bring a bunch of folks together from the local community for a few bites and cocktails to honor our friend.

Cheers, Perry. Here’s to a few more Gamecocks wins in your future.

South Carolina’s foremost decision-makers gathered in Columbia on Tuesday to announce a $5 million gift from the David and Nicole Tepper Foundation.

The donation, for which the Teppers were on-site to discuss and celebrate, will see South Carolina’s department of sport and entertainment management take on the couple’s names.

Those in attendance included members of South Carolina’s board of trustees, AD Jeremiah Donati, President Michael Amiridis and former AD Ray Tanner.

“The student success is the university success and that goes unmatched [at South Carolina],” Nicole said. “I’ve been to a lot of different places, a lot of different universities, and they really put time and effort into it. That just draws people like Dave and I in to say, ‘We want to invest, and we want to be a part of it.’”

The Teppers have long been involved with South Carolina on varying levels. For one, Nicole’s daughter is a graduate of the school.

The couple have also supported the “Tepper Scholars Program,” placing multiple cohorts of students in internships and jobs at places like ESPN, the NCAA and the Carolina Panthers since 2020.

The gift announced Monday will create an endowment to sustain the Tepper Scholars program in perpetuity, along with establishing the Tepper Professors of Practice within the school.

“As Nicole said, success builds on success and you want to invest in success,” David said. “Nicole’s the driving force on some of the things that we have done in the past that have helped lead to the current success. The doubling down, so to speak, will lead to more and bigger success in the future.”

There was a solemness to the way James Franklin looked around Beaver Stadium following Saturday’s 22-21 loss to Northwestern.

Franklin entered the season as a man destined for a referendum. He’d come a drive away from playing for a national title a year ago after so many near-misses against the sport’s elite. Penn State backed him this offseason, rejiggering its resources and investing in a roster that included its share of potential NFL talent.

And then the actual games started.

Penn State lost three straight, including to then-winless UCLA and perennial Big Ten cellar-dweller Northwestern, and Franklin is out after 12 years as head coach.

The only thing that should turn that frown upside down? The $49 million Franklin is owed as part of his buyout.

“This is an athletics issue,” Penn State AD Pat Kraft said when asked about the buyout. “This is not the institution’s issue, so we in athletics are absorbing all the costs associated with this.”

College football coaching buyouts have long made for fun fodder. Patience in the internet age has worn thinner. Administrators are under increased pressure to win press conferences, along with eventual on-field results. Keeping a coach happy and in place are of paramount importance.

But amid a college football ecosystem in which the cost of doing business continues to more closely mirror the GDP of a small country, one thing remains certain: There’s always cash in the coffers.

The $49 million Franklin is owed over the next six years is the second-largest buyout in the modern era -- a drop in the bucket compared to the $75 million Texas A&M paid Jimbo Fisher to go away. It’s also more than double the $21 million Auburn paid Gus Malzahn in 2020, the next closest figure.

The figure Penn State will eventually pay Franklin is genuinely astounding -- even if the decision to move on has merits. We also shouldn’t be surprised there are more buyouts to come.

As The Athletic’s Stewart Mandel presciently pointed out, not one of the 30 highest-paid coaches in the country have a buyout of less than $20 million, per USA Today’s coaching salary database. Again, we’re just getting started here.

The college football coaching carousel is already running at the speed of a Lamborghini following an offseason when it soldiered about like a horse and buggy. Nine head coaching jobs are open, six of which are Power Four gigs (Virginia Tech, Penn State, Arkansas, UCLA, Oklahoma State and Stanford). They won’t be the last.

Wisconsin and Luke Fickell seem destined for a $25 million divorce after Saturday’s debacle against Iowa. Billy Napier’s Florida tenure has gone about as pleasantly as a visit to Sweeney Todd’s barber shop. That plug should be pulled sooner than later.

Considering what Penn State is willing to pay Franklin, along with the increased pressure to win now, are we sure there aren’t a few other coaches who ought to be looking over their shoulder as well?

Florida State’s brass are spending tens of millions of dollars this year to right the wrongs of a 2-10 season. Is their patience weighing thinner to the point Mike Norvell’s $58.6 million buyout doesn’t become cost-prohibitive if the ‘Noles’ three-game slide continues?

Brian Kelly and LSU’s marriage hasn’t exactly melded like a gumbo roux concocted in the parking lots outside Tiger Stadium. Perhaps there’s a conversation there depending on how things go through SEC play.

Like anything in college sports, there’s a hypocrisy to all of this.

Administrators nationwide have called on boosters to help bankroll their programs during the NIL era. The Big Ten, meanwhile, is far from the only league considering a colossal dip into the cookie, errrr, I mean, cash jar via private equity.

And yet, for all the calls pleading about being cash-strapped, buyouts like Franklin’s continue to get paid.

Where does the buck actually stop with these massive buyouts?

To borrow from Lindsay Lohan’s “Mean Girls” dialogue, the limit does not exist.

The ACC is adding another exec to its conference office staff.

The league is set to announce the hiring of former Detroit Tigers VP and Assistant GM Jay Sartori as its VP/sport technology and innovation.

Sartori’s role will include overseeing varying technological integrations across the conference, including those used by ACC staff, game officials, coaches, players and team support personnel, as well as facets designed for fan engagement.

Prior to his time in Detroit, Sartori spent two years at Apple, in addition to front office roles with the Blue Jays and Nationals.

He also worked with MLB’s Labor Relations Department from 2006-09 as the manager of salary and contract administration, along with time in investment banking at Robertson Stephens and Pacific Growth Equities.

No search firm was used in Sartori’s hiring.

The ACC has made a handful of hires for its executive team in recent weeks.

The league previously added Anthony Macri, the head of commercial in the U.S. for the BWT Alpine Formula One Team, as its first chief revenue officer.

It also brought on Marques Zak, head of multicultural marketing at American Express, as the conference’s chief marketing and brand officer.

In case you missed it, I sat down for an hour-long live chat with Cory Moss, Learfield’s president of brand management and marketing, on Thursday as part of the National Sports Forum.

Cory is one of the best and most knowledgeable guys in the business. Considering everything his role touches these days, there was no shortage of things to discuss.

Here is a sample of Thursday’s conversation for those who missed it:

Answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

SBJ: You’ve been part of the college sports business for about 30 years at this point. Can you walk us through your path a little bit?

Cory Moss: “My dad was a college athletic director, so I grew up around it. He was at probably four or five different schools over his 40-year career, so I was a ball boy at football games and basketball games. I knew nothing about the business side of it. Went to Hampton University and when I got out of school, there was probably about a two-to-three-year window where I was not around college athletics at all. I decided I wasn’t going to do whatever it was I thought my dad did or even be in the business. And so I became a pharmaceutical and medical equipment sales rep up in the state of Connecticut, would come down and visit my dad when he was the AD at Georgia State and just realized that wasn’t what I wanted to do.

“I found this opportunity in Atlanta with CLC a little over 30 years ago. Bill Battle took a chance on me then, and I’ve had different positions within the companies throughout the years in different departments -- oversaw our school relationships, oversaw our marketing and our operations, oversaw our relationships with the BCS and the CFP back then and the NCAA. ... So in a nutshell, I’ve been around it my entire life and really excited to still be in it and super energized about all the things that are going on. It’s really exciting time to be in the college sports space.”

SBJ: Learfield touches so many different facets of the college space these days. What do you think is the role of a company like that in today’s ecosystem?

CM: Well, first [schools are] asking us to make more and more money. Obviously, that’s a key driver because there’s so much pressure on revenue right now. Budgets are expanding -- coaches, facilities, all the things are just more and more expensive. The budgets are ballooning, and so they have to uncover new revenue opportunities. We have to help them uncover new NIL opportunities for their student athletes, because that helps them retain and attract student athletes.

“... When I talk about technology or the ground game -- putting content people on campus to help produce some of these things -- that’s really important. That pressure is even more, but it’s really around revenue and making it easier as possible and new opportunities are open up every time we turn around.”

SBJ: It comes up just about every time you and I talk, but can you walk us through a bit of Learfield’s involvement in the new college football video game and how that’s gone in year two of bringing that back?

CM: “To get back in front of those gamers now to showcase traditions and all that college football is about, that’s where a lot of people learned what college football really was. The success of that has been tremendous. More recently, we haven’t gotten the full reports, but the sophomore year of it seems to be doing really, really well, much better than maybe we had anticipated.

“... I go back to [our] Compass platform. One of the reasons we built that Compass platform is to make it easy for student athletes to individually [sign up], because there isn’t collective bargaining. There is no group you go to for the college football game. You’ve got to go to 14,000 individual student athlete and say, ‘Here’s an opportunity, are you interested? Give us your headshot, give us your attributes and we’ll make sure you’re in the game.’ And if you say no, EA has the ability to put a generic avatar in your place. But to be able to have develop a piece of technology like that to make that easier was tremendous. I don’t think it happens without it, because just imagine going to a bunch of different places to try and aggregate 14,000 individual teenagers. Let’s not forget its teenagers into this opportunity. To have it run fairly smoothly and now hopefully being able to take that to basketball and other sports is really, really a great opportunity.”

• Learfield and Iowa State extended their nearly four-decade multimedia relationship another 10 years, as the two sides renewed their deal through 2038.
• In this week’s SBJ Media newsletter, my colleague Austin Karp looks at the big gains Indiana is seeing on its athletics website and mobile app as it climbs the AP Top 25 rankings.
• The Heisman Trophy Trust hired its first CEO, tapping veteran sports marketer Jeff Price, my SBJ colleague Terry Lefton reports, who also analyzes the reasons behind the move in his latest SBJ Marketing newsletter.