SBJ College: Baker, NCAA to settle postseason patches this summer

As the son of two Michigan grads, you can imagine my family group chat blew up when the Wolverines hoisted their first national championship trophy in almost 40 years.

It’s been a good year for our family between my parents’ alma mater and Indiana, where my middle brother and I did our undergrad. Maybe one day, my youngest brother (a Wisconsin grad) will have something to cheer for, too. He’s not holding his breath.

In other news, I was greeted by dozens of Masters patrons on my early morning flight back to Columbia, S.C., on Monday. This time of year is always fun around town as people come from all over to make their pilgrimage to Augusta National.

I was lucky enough to cover the event a couple times. To me, this is still the most special story I’ve ever written.

Now, onto the Final Four. ...

NCAA President Charlie Baker has been a busy man.

He spent the last week bouncing between the Women’s Final Four in Phoenix and the organization’s home base in Indianapolis for the men’s tournament.

Throw in President Donald Trump issuing his long-awaited executive order on college sports legislation Friday afternoon and it’s quite the stretch for Baker and his staff.

“The first thing I’d say is that we appreciate the attention that he’s brought to this issue. There’s no question that the conversations in the House and the senate both picked up after we had our big group meeting in D.C.,” Baker said. “A number of the issues that he raises in the executive order, which are things certainly that we’ve been dealing with, we’ve either moved to solve or are currently working on.”

One interesting sports business nugget out of Baker’s talk was that a handful of NCAA committees are working on a solution to the postseason jersey patch conundrum.

Corporate patches can see use during regular season play, but the NCAA’s corporate partner program — and potential conflicts there — has made sponsored patches during the postseason a complex matter. Baker said the hope is to have something approved to allow corporate patches during the postseason “before we get too far into the summer.”

It’s also worth noting what the College Football Playoff does with its corporate partners. Sources told SBJ in recent weeks the expectation is schools that have sold such assets ahead of their postseason berths will be allowed to maintain them, though exact machinations are still being worked out.

It’s fair to assume the NCAA and CFP would benefit from similar policies.

Here are a couple of other news and notes from Baker’s spiel with reporters ahead of Saturday’s Final Four games in Indianapolis:

• Baker was asked about Trump’s executive order off the top. Following in line with what he told my colleague Rachel Axon and others in Phoenix, he was encouraged, though plenty of discussion is still to come.
• Men’s and women’s NCAA tournament expansion was the topic du jour throughout the weekend in Indianapolis. Baker deferred on that, though industry buzz suggests that a decision is expected to be made on whether to grow the field to 76 teams in the days/weeks after the Final Four.

It’s been some couple months for the Big Ten.

The conference became the first to have three different schools hoist the football and men and women’s basketball national titles in a single season. Couple that with the Big Ten winning the last three College Football Playoff’s via three different schools, and that kind of run brings a level of cache Commissioner Tony Petitti has salivated over.

“Resources matter. You have to be honest about it,” Petitti said as confetti fluttered about Lucas Oil Stadium on Monday night. “But you still need great coaching. You still need a commitment to winning and support at high levels, coming together and building and developing players. ... We’ve seen that across pretty much everything we play.”

By every major measure, the Big Ten is the super-league college sports leaders are so quick to dismiss as necessary or needed. The titles are part of the equation. So, too, is the league’s seven-year, $7 billion television deal — a mark that’s more than double what the SEC is earning from its own deal with ESPN ($3 billion over 10 years).

Schools with the most resources have an inherent advantage in winning championships in the era of player movement.

The Big Ten has positioned itself to take its seat atop the ecosystem, where the SEC had lorded for much of the last decade-plus. What does that mean in practice? We’ll see.

Petitti hasn’t been shy about pushing unpopular ideas. He won’t be able to work with unfettered freedom. But his voice ought to carry weight. Winning at the clip the Big Ten has over the last three years grants him that authority.

“What’s the old saying? Iron sharpens iron?” said Michigan AD Warde Manuel following Monday night’s victory. “That’s what the Big Ten does for each other. ... My AD colleagues are working hard to do the same thing that I’m doing tonight — talking to you guys, being here with the confetti, having our team cut down the net. All that stuff is really good.”

In my personal view, Indianapolis is as good a host city as there is for the men’s Final Four. The walkability, hotels, convention center and stadium are an awesome combination for an event of this magnitude — and the weekend’s party circuit reflected as much.

Thursday night, SeventySix Capital Managing Partner Wayne Kimmel hosted people from in and around the college sports industry. Those at gathering included National Association of Basketball Coaches Executive Director Craig Robinson, Delaware State AD Tony Tucker, Hawaii booster Michael Kawazoe, Scout CEO Michael Haddix, NJIT AD Lenny Kaplan, Sports Tech HQ execs Jeff Hintz, Brian Alkire and Wyatt Wells, along with Purdue Fort Wayne men’s basketball coach Jon Coffman, among others.

Next Level Sports also hosted dozens of senior industry people Thursday evening. I ran into at least a half-dozen athletic directors, a handful of consultants and a number of other people who do work in and around the industry.

Friday morning brought the first ever CBS-TNT Sports, Tech and Innovation Summit. CBS’ David Berson and TNT’s Luis Silberwasser were both in attendance, as were speakers Mark Cuban and Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Jeff Jordan. Other dignitaries in attendance included Commissioners Keith Gill (Sun Belt), Robin Harris (Ivy), Jennifer Heppel (Patriot), Bernadette McGlade (Atlantic-10), Judy MacLeod (C-USA), Michael Cross (Southern Conference), Joe D’Antonio (Coastal Athletic Association) and Tom Wistrcill (Big Sky). ADs Lee Reed (Georgetown) and Greg Byrne (Alabama), both members of the NCAA men’s basketball selection committee, were also in attendance, along with Playfly Sports Properties President Christy Hedgpeth.

Learfield also hosted its annual get together at the men’s Final Four on Friday night. The event, held at the Heirloom at N.K. Hurst, featured a slew of power brokers from around the industry. Those in attendance included ADs Michael Alford (Florida State), Tom Theodorakis (Army), Nathan Pine (Air Force), Damon Evans (SMU), Gene Taylor (Kansas State) and Ed Scott (Memphis). New Providence men’s basketball coach Bryan Hodgson — who was hired at Arkansas State by Learfield EVP Jeff Purinton — also swung through.

The Final Four also serves as a massive gathering of men’s basketball coaches, while plenty made their way to the games on Saturday and Monday night. Saturday’s semifinal between Illinois and UConn saw Mark Few (Gonzaga), Nate Oats (Alabama), Brian Dutcher (San Diego State), Chris Beard (Ole Miss) and Jamie Dixon (TCU) sitting front row behind the press. Ex-Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim and longtime colleague Tubby Smith attended Saturday and Monday night’s contests, while former Michigan coach John Beilein was there to see the Wolverines’ hoist the championship trophy.

Michigan won the national title game, but it won’t finish atop the final March Madness edition of the College Sports Pulse Rankings. That honor belongs to UConn.

The Huskies generated nearly six million social media engagements throughout the full NCAA men’s basketball tournament window (March 19-April 7), outpacing second-place Duke by more than 1.5 million engagements.

“UConn clearly had big moments during the tournament, but what’s more impressive is how they owned the entire conversation from start to finish,” said South Carolina professor Clay Owen. “Sponsors, NIL collectives and conferences need to understand the power of a brand if they are to compete in today’s marketplace.”

UConn’s No. 1 ranking comes amid a constant social media presence throughout the NCAA tournament, including leading all programs in performance during Final Four week. The Huskies generated five times more engagement than Michigan during the championship game, despite their loss.

That UConn was able to generate the buzz it did came through a significant amount of activity in the New York metropolitan area. Michigan, by contrast, generated more regionally concentrated engagement from Detroit and the Midwest.

College Sports Social Pulse Top 10 (March 19-April 7)

1. UConn
2. Duke
3. Illinois
4. Michigan
5. Nebraska
6. Houston
7. Purdue
8. UCLA
9. Vanderbilt
10. Michigan State

Explaining the College Sports Pulse Rankings

The College Sports Pulse debuted following Selection Sunday through a partnership between the University of South Carolina and Sports Business Journal.

The Pulse analyzes millions of posts across major social media platforms to measure how much attention each team is generating in the national social media conversation and how fans are reacting to it (positive or negative).

Three key measures — net sentiment, volume (number of posts) and engagements (likes, shares, etc.) — are gathered through the process before being run through a proprietary formula that determines overall influence on a 0-100 scale.

• SBJ’s Rachel Axon offers her top takeaways from the Women’s Final Four in Phoenix in this week’s SBJ Women’s Sports newsletter. It also reports on data on women’s flag football in college sports.
• Axon also writes about the financial boost UCLA is hoping to see from its women’s basketball championship as it seeks to reload a roster packed with seniors and grad students.
• With industry buzz in Indianapolis throughout Final Four week suggesting that NCAA tournament expansion to 76 teams could arrive in the coming weeks, there’s a real question as to the viability of tournaments like the NIT.
• Campus Ink, the parent company of NIL Store, is among the limited number of licensees allowed to print apparel for NCAA championships with official slogans like “March Madness” and “Frozen Four.” This, at least in part, is why there’s been a frenzy around the company’s HQ just a stone’s throw from Illinois’ campus ahead of the Final Four.
• Wisconsin athletics expanded its sponsorship deal with UW Health to include the company’s logo on Badgers uniforms in women’s basketball, hockey, volleyball and softball.
• Another school is jumping into the jersey patch sponsorship world, as Wyoming signed a five-year, $4.5 million deal with Tallgrass, an energy infrastructure company. It’s the largest corporate contribution in school history.
• President Trump weighed in on college athletics again on Friday, signing an executive order that sought to address everything from transfer limits to protecting women’s and Olympic sports from cuts, as Axon and I report.
• As performance technologies have proliferated all levels of college sports, working groups within the NCAA issues a set of guidelines to schools, particularly around the responsible use of such devices and their impact on student athletes’ physical and mental health, writes SBJ’s Joe Lemire.