One of my favorite questions when talking to college sports leaders is some variation of “what’s the issue that keeps you up at night?” While the answers vary, gambling almost always comes up.
Monday’s news about Texas Tech QB Brendan Sorsby’s gambling shouldn’t come as a surprise. Everyone has a bookie in their pocket these days thanks to the proliferation of online sports betting and prediction market apps. It was all too predictable that we’d have a high-profile player in the middle of something like this.
That said, it’s worth commending Sorsby for taking the time away to enter treatment for his gambling addiction. Eligibility questions aside, that’s a positive step for someone dealing with a complicated problem.
What Hollywood says about college sports’ business model
As I was putting the finishing touches on my story about Learfield’s sale to TPG for this week’s SBJ cover, I kept coming back to one idea: How can the multimedia rights business continue to grow in college sports?
That thought coalesced over the weekend as I listened to The Ringer’s “Big Picture” podcast. During the April 17 episode, Puck’s Matt Belloni distilled the movie business, its relationship with theaters and how these operations intertwine.
Belloni said the following:
“Imagine you’re the CEO of a theater company and your entire business is dependent on something you do not control. The amount of movies and the quality of those movies and the marketing … when it hits, it’s easy money, and you can charge $10 for popcorn that costs you 20 cents.
“… But then if you’re [Sony Pictures Chairman and CEO] Tom Rothman, and you spend $250 million-$300 million on a Spider-Man movie and put that kind of effort into making it something that people are going to love. And then they show up to the theater, and they’ve got 30 minutes of ads, and the floor is sticky, and the seat is broken, and it’s not a good experience. He doesn’t control that. He has no ability to control the actual environment in which his movies are consumed.”
Stay with me. I promise there’s a college sports angle here.
One source I spoke to recently boiled down the opportunity in college sports to two pillars: the games, and the television broadcast.
Multimedia rights companies own neither, leaving them beholden to the schools and TV networks that drive the broader growth of the enterprise. (See the parallels?)
The business of college sports is built on outsourcing responsibilities to operators outside athletic departments. Multimedia rights. Ticketing. Food and beverage. All have seen cottage industries crop up over decades, taking those operations away from the institutions themselves.
But with schools looking to take more control over their intellectual property to, in theory, drive more dollars, what might that portend for companies capitalizing on playing middleman?
Learfield CEO/President Cole Gahagan pointed to the fractured nature of college sports and the lengthy deals Learfield has in place as to why there is no reason to think the company can’t continue to grow that business.
“We have 365 Division I schools alone in college athletics,” Gahagan said. “In the absence of those leagues or governing bodies that bring those capabilities and resources to the table, in my observation and in my experience, our schools have needed — and now need more than ever — an operation at scale that delivers best practices, that delivers centralized capabilities, [so] that they can continue to do what they have to do on an everyday basis.”
Professional sports teams largely sell corporate sponsorship in-house. The New York Giants and Texas Rangers, for example, don’t pay a third party to staff and sell those assets for a cut of the profits. And yet, that’s how college sports have operated for decades.
Almost every AD I’ve spoken with in the last two years about multimedia rights has said they’ve at least considered bringing those operations in-house. For all that talk, only a few schools actually have — Arizona and Cincinnati chief among them.
Don’t grab your popcorn just yet. We’re still likely years away from a reckoning on how companies like Learfield, Playfly, JMI Sports play in the MMR game.
But for all the struggles the movie and theater industries are facing, perhaps there may be lessons about asset ownership and the parallels facing college sports.
RallyTown combining media and NIL to schools’ benefit
College sports programs are trying to take control over their content — and one company is already building out the infrastructure to do so.
RallyTown, a self-funded startup spearheaded by college sports attorney Jay Ezelle and ex-Comcast executive Chris Reynolds, is developing websites that double as information providers and NIL activation avenues for athletes and schools amid pressures to drive outside marketing dollars.
“It doesn’t require a ton of operational burden from a university or from an athletic department, and [it’s] something that you can kind of scale,” Reynolds said. “We work really shoulder-to-shoulder with [the schools] on every aspect, but we’ve really designed the platform for them to be kind of very low touch, easy to use, easy to manage, and a very effective way to engage with our fans.”
The idea is fairly straightforward. Consider RallyTown’s sites at Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi State as an NIL initiative crossed with the usual online message board landscape that runs so fervently within the SEC.
The sites themselves are based on exclusive content — player interviews, AMAs (Ask Me Anythings, for the non-millenials among you readers), message boards and so on. All of it is designed to give users access to players and coaches in a way that isn’t normally available in a buttoned-up world that treats football programs as if they’re hiding state secrets.
Each varies in size, but they have largely focused on hiring established media figures in the markets they operate. Yea Alabama, the first of the sites, pried Director of Content Aaron Suttles away from The Athletic. The recently launched Mississippi State site, State 1878, brought in touted scribe and prominent Bulldogs podcast host Robbie Faulk from the local On3 affiliate.
RallyTown is also on the verge of adding another handful of Power Four programs outside the SEC, efforts that it should finalize in the coming weeks.
“What we came up with was the idea of doing this in a way where we scale it across schools so that there was a benefit there, that as you built the platform and scaled that and you shared the cost, you could do this in an efficient way and lower your cost,” Ezelle said. “I looked around, and I didn’t see anybody out there doing this, and certainly nobody that I felt comfortable with that would protect the reputations of the university and do this in a way that it needed to be done. Because it’s fan-facing, it needed to be done in a first-class way.”
There’s more to it than content, of course. NIL merchandise is also available to participating athletes and fans who wish to add collectibles from their favorite players to their mantles.
How it works
The business model, too, is fairly simple. RallyTown operates as an independent licensee of the universities it’s associated with. The sites generate returns off subscriptions that vary by market. The new Mississippi State site that launched earlier this month ranges from $8 to $78 per month. The company also caps its own earnings on NIL memorabilia at cost plus 5%, meaning roughly 90% of every dollar generated goes back to athletes.
The goal is to continue to grow steadily, as Ezelle and Reynolds note the company does not have any outside backers. Could it be sold or take on investment? Sure, Reynolds said, but that’s not the strategy.
“We’re not writing potential investments off in the future by any means,” he said. “But if we go down that path, the more partners we have on the platform and the more things that we’re doing, the better we’ll be served. Right now, we’re in good shape.”
College speed reads
- SBJ this week launched its College Jersey Patch Deals Directory, a database that shows who’s buying and who’s selling these uniform assets.
- A record 339 million people traveled to participate in or attend a sporting event in the U.S. in 2025, generated 191.8 million hotel room nights and spent $111.2 billion while in the host destinations, which includes fans traveling for college sports (such as bowl games, CFP matchups or March Madness), reports SBJ’s David Broughton.
- SBJ Facilities writer Bret McCormick checks in on the progress for Northwestern’s New Ryan Field, with a video showing how the 35,000-seat stadium defies traditional college football stadium development.
- In the latest SBJ Tech newsletter, SBJ’s Ethan Joyce writes about Paciolan’s integration with Wicket to speed up entries into college sports venues with facial integration.