SBJ College: What to make of the Big 12’s Monster deal

My wife and I are headed to Chicago for the next couple days to see some old college and high school friends, catch Noah Kahan at Wrigley Field and perhaps enjoy a rooftop bar or three.

It’s been a few years since I’ve been to a show at Wrigley, but for my money, it’s one of the best places in the country for a concert. Can’t wait.

The NASCAR-ification of college sports has begun.

OK, not really, but that sentiment has crossed my timeline recently as jersey patch mania broke contain — particularly around the Big 12’s deal with Monster Energy.

The Big 12 deal is unique. Credit is due to Commissioner Brett Yormark and his team for a first-of-its-kind sponsorship in college sports that includes conference-wide patches, field logos and naming rights to the Big 12 football and men’s and women’s basketball regular seasons.

“I said four years ago we’d be ‘open for business’ — and I certainly think we have been,” Yormark said in an interview with SBJ last week. “We want to partner with big brands that not only come with the appropriate financial resources but can activate us and help grow the Big 12 profile and narrative. It’s critically important that we do both.”

Naturally, there are detractors.

I did a bit of calling around after our story broke last week. The biggest complaint that I’ve seen and heard is around the price — $20 million annually (about $1 million-plus per year for each member institution).

How much these deals are worth is, on some level, subjective. Every athletic department, league, company, etc., has its ways of calculating sponsorship deal value. That said, not everyone buys what the Big 12 is selling (or sold).

There are more than a few Power Four schools getting $3.5 million or well north of that for school-specific jersey patches. Those deals include varying asset classes and differ in the number of sports included. That is, however, a striking difference when considering what Monster is getting in this deal.

The rosier view is this brings in extra cash for Big 12 schools and it doesn’t preclude membership from selling its own patch (Oklahoma State and Kansas already have). After all, is anyone in the league this side of Texas Tech really in a position to turn down an extra million dollars?

Two developments I’m keeping my eye on:

Impact on pouring rights deals: Around half the Big 12 has deals with Pepsi. Monster is partially owned by Coca-Cola. Surely that won’t jive, right? There was some concern in my conversations that schools might lose cash on the back end when they go to renegotiate their pouring rights agreements given the exclusivity that had been negotiated. We won’t know for a while, but expect those conversations to be had.

What will multimedia rights holders have to say? The Big 12’s jersey patch was a noteworthy battleground between MMR companies and the league. Learfield, Playfly, JMI Sports, etc., generally sell patches for schools through their agreements. Yormark and the conference office effectively contended selling the confines of the Big 12 patch makes it their territory. See the rub? I’d anticipate this isn’t the last time we see a conversation around who owns what rights.

In less cynical sponsorship news, I had a ton of fun suggesting dream jersey patch scenarios in my previous newsletter. Be sure to check that out if you haven’t already.

Colorado State’s Canvas Stadium hosted a three-day “Bulls & Beats” event over the weekend, which was a collaboration between Professional Bull Riders and Learfield. My SBJ colleague Austin Karp took in the event Friday night, and it featured the debut Collegiate All-Star Rodeo, followed by a Brad Paisley concert.

Some takeaways:

• Even with half the venue closed off, over 13,000 fans were on the west side of it. And plenty of folks were hitting up the CSU merch store on the concourse. Concessionaire OVG likely had a good night as well for F&B between the rodeo and concert.
• There was ample premium hospitality, with “dirt suites” — holding around 25 people each — spread end zone to end zone. The football field was filled with 2,000 tons of dirt on top of the synthetic turf.
• Fox Nation aired the event, providing extra content for one of PBR’s media partners.
• PBR, a division of TKO Group, was in charge of booking the music talent, which also included Miranda Lambert and Bailey Zimmerman after the PBR events Saturday and Sunday.

The Learfield College Rodeo division launched in June 2023. Twenty-one schools in Learfield’s multimedia rights portfolio have rodeo teams.

“Even though rodeo doesn’t go the traditional route of college athletics within the NCAA, we have people in our company that enjoy rodeo, enjoy the Western lifestyle,” said Learfield EVP Andrew Wheeler. “We knew we could represent rodeo with the resources we already had because what they need is revenue.”

PBR has been getting in more college football venues, including recent events at Florida State’s Doak Campbell Stadium and Air Force’s Falcon Stadium for an America 250 event.

“More and more of these colleges have been looking for ways to activate their venues, and particularly their football stadiums,” PBR CEO Sean Gleason told SBJ. “I’m just shocked and surprised when, last year, this was the first event that wasn’t a graduation or a football game [at the venue]. ... It really takes a commitment from the university to build and create something unique and special.”

Wheeler said Learfield is “very interested” in doing more big events alongside PBR. “It’s a natural fit. It’s non-competitive. We work with many of the same sponsors. We also have access to these venues in a way in college that PBR doesn’t necessarily have those relationships in place,” he said.

The flurry of jersey patch announcements have kept me and plenty others in the college sports space busy. Here were a couple things that caught my eye:

Kansas partnering with a crypto company: When I heard KU’s jersey patch was going to be a cryptocurrency (Ripple’s XRP), my first reaction was some variation of “Wut?”

Crypto companies previously worked their way into college sports. Heck, Cal announced a 10-year field naming rights deal with FTX in 2021. That lasted all of about 13 months before FTX went bankrupt and the deal was suspended in November 2022.

The Kansas deal has inherent ties to the school. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse is a Kansas grad and former student body president. I still asked Kansas AD Travis Goff about the optics of partnering with a crypto company. His response was relatively insightful.

“I’ll call this more ‘emerging’ than I would call it ‘controversial’ or ‘risk,’” Goff said. “Is this a little bit of a leap of faith on both parties’ sides? I think it is. ... At the end of the day, you’re working with a space and a category that is very innovative and can rapidly change. I think college athletics sounds that way, too — pretty innovative and can rapidly change.”

Charlotte is getting in on the “XYZ Ventures” craze: This may have been lost in the shuffle of some bigger news, but Charlotte is the latest school to realign some of its commercial operations.

The school announced Wednesday that it would roll up its ticketing operations and corporate sponsorships into 49ers Ventures. The vertical will now house premium sales, annual fund collaboration, customer retention, business intelligence and revenue innovation.

New Charlotte AD Kevin White came from Clemson, which effectively created this model. If memory serves, this is one of the first Group of Six schools to take on this kind of approach.

Props to the Charlotte brass for a forward- thinking mindset.

There are roughly a million off-the-field announcements this time of year, but one caught my eye:

Every True Tiger, essentially Missouri’s NIL collective, was tabbed to help launch a new vertical for UMKC that will be dubbed, “Roo Champions.”

This is the first time I can remember a collective effectively working on behalf of two D-I schools within the same state (albeit at different levels of the ecosystem).

I caught up with Every True Tiger CEO Mario Moccia, the former AD at New Mexico State, to learn a bit more about the setup.

Answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

SBJ: Walk me through the genesis of this partnership?

Mario Moccia: “In my first week I was informed we needed to bid on the business again, and inside of the RFP, it also called for this. Every True Tiger, if they were selected, would also be the third-party marketing arm of Kansas City. ... We knew that going in.

“It was unique in so much that when I was the AD at New Mexico State, UMKC was in the WAC, so I knew [AD] Brandon Martin. I knew [Deputy AD/SWA] Ursula Gurney really well. So when we were awarded the business, that gave them a comfort level. And Mark Turgeon, the basketball coach, and I actually overlapped during his last year as head coach at Wichita State, which was my first year as AD at Southern Illinois, so we were both in the Missouri Valley Conference. So some commonalities there [helped].”

SBJ: How will this be set up within the ecosystem you already have with Missouri?

MM: “We took one of our staff members, Colleen Finney — a three-year volleyball student athlete at Clemson and then one year at Missouri — she’ll be the general manager.

“Toward the end of this month, she will officially be on-site in Kansas City, and she’ll manage their revenue-share program and then, quite frankly, assist them in drumming up additional support for their rev share.

“Obviously, the two schools are different. Missouri is maxing out their rev share. Any monies that Kansas City gets in would just be rev share, because it’s not realistic that they’re going to get to the $20 million number. So it’s different, but yet similar.

“She has a great handle on the mechanics of it and a great personality. So I think she’s really good, and I think that the leadership of Kansas City was impressed with her. So, hopefully it’ll be prosperous.

SBJ: Do you see this setup being something that might make sense elsewhere or might be trendy?

MM: “We’re part of the same system. All the campus leadership is under one boss. So it makes a little sense from that regard. But yeah, it’s certainly unique to be responsible for multiple properties. I’m glad we’re breaking ground in that area.

“... I look at the way the multimedia rights is set up and just leaning on Learfield, because that’s our current partner, but they have all these different properties. And then, you have a regional vice president who oversees those properties and so on and so forth. I don’t see why once our business matures and hopefully stabilizes that that couldn’t be replicated.

“If you went to the Oklahoma property and the Missouri property and the whatever, Wisconsin property, they probably don’t differ tremendously from a multimedia-rights standpoint. But they could from third-party marketing. ... It seems like everybody’s doing it a little differently on this side of the fence, whereas on the multimedia rights [side], you have different companies, obviously, but they’re probably all structured similar where our side of the fence is much more of a catchall.”

• The ACC has its first school-specific jersey patch deal, as Cal reached a multiyear deal for all 30 of its varsity sports with AI platform Dialpad. It’s believed to be the largest sponsorship deal in the athletic department’s history.
• The ACC also signed a multiyear deal with ReliaQuest, making the Tampa-based company the official cybersecurity sponsor of the conference, reports SBJ’s Austin Karp. The deal was struck in conjunction with Disney Ad Sales and ESPN.
• Sikorsky Credit Union acquired the first entitlement for Sacred Heart Univ.’s 7,500-seat football and lacrosse stadium in Fairfield, Conn, writes SBJ’s Terry Lefton.
• DePaul signed a 10-year multimedia rights agreement with Playfly Sports that runs through 2036.