That whooshing sound you are hearing? It’s the sound of the 365 D-I schools and their agencies taking to market the ad patch rights granted them by the NCAA six months ago. Keep in mind that the college football season begins Aug. 29, and you can account for that cacophony.
Never before has so much new inventory been available in the college market simultaneously. Even before you address pricing (we’ll get to that), there are divergent opinions on how to best sell college uni patches.
Should those rights be packaged across every university sport? Should basketball and football be bundled or sold separately? Would a separate women’s sports platform be more saleable, or perhaps a package of Olympic sports, or sports with something in common, like baseball and softball or men’s and women’s soccer, or the like?
“It’s a difficult space to navigate right now, because, like a lot in colleges, new rules and structure are developing,” said Paul Archey, president of JMI Sports Properties, which represents schools including Harvard, Kentucky, Pitt and Penn. “The most obvious thing is the opportunity, because it’s inventory no one’s had before.”
As for the packaging questions? Some of that will be dictated by the strengths and weaknesses of particular schools. Nonetheless, there are contrasting opinions.
Matt Yonan’s Tigris Marketing is assisting a Big Ten school on a patch sale. “It’s early, obviously, but today we’re thinking that there are 10-15 schools that can sell basketball and football separately and have success,” Yonan said. “We think most schools will bundle all sports.”
It’s a time for novel ideas, and we’ve come across two schools looking to sell patches on cheerleader unis, but as an asset in a larger deal.
“We’ve done the math and our projections are that it definitely makes more sense to separate basketball and football at most schools,” said Dan Griffis, president of global partnerships at Oak View Group. “Unbundling the two will give you 140% more.”
Griffis said Oak View will shortly sign two or three “geographically disparate” majors to sell patch inventory. “A blueblood school could get $3 million to $5 million for a basketball patch alone,” he added, “but there are schools that will find it easier to activate with one partner, so ...”
Playfly Sports is in the market with more than two dozen of the 75 colleges, universities and conferences it represents for multimedia rights.
“We’re trying to sell those bundled — you don’t want anyone cherry-picking the best sports at any school,” said Paul Asencio, the EVP/global partnerships at Playfly who assisted on one of the first big deals, LSU’s seven-year-agreement with Woodside Energy.
“The college market is already crowded, and across sports there’s lots of jersey patch inventory, but the interest is there, because other than the NFL, college sports are the last to allow this,” Asencio said. “Our conversations have been good, and so far, it’s not so much of the staple brands in sports, it’s new money. ... We’ve had a lot of conversations with CEOs and COOs who are alums or have kids at the school or both. That makes it different than the other patches.”
A growing appetite
The new NCAA rules allows teams as many as two 4-by-4 sponsor logos on uniforms and apparel. In case it gets oversaturated, the new regs allow for even more: an additional logo is allowed on equipment during preseason and regular-season play.
Other than LSU, some of the largest patch deals consummated so far include Arkansas with Tyson Foods, UNLV with Acesso Biologics, Memphis with FedEx and Michigan State with the MSU Federal Credit Union.
Uniform ad patches are just a portion of a growing commercial appetite among colleges and universities, catalyzed by NIL. According to Sponsor United data, within the Power Four (ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC) and the Group of Five mid-majors (American, Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West and Sun Belt), there were 141 brands with visible logos, up from 101 brands the prior year and up 75 the year before that. Financial services brands accounted for 33% of the most recent deals, followed by health care at 11% and auto at 8%.
Looking at ad-patch revenues across the big five stick-and-ball leagues as a comp for where colleges might get to: Jersey patch revenue among them was $775 million for the most recently completed seasons for an increase of 5%. As a percentage of total revenues, figures patches account for 9% of revenue.
“You’ll hear about a lot of patch deals between now and September,” said SponsorUnited Founder/CEO Bob Lynch, “the incremental sponsorship revenues is what will be the most telling.”
As for the brand side, aka the (potential) buyers?
“We continue to see a lot of interest from our clients in the collegiate landscape,” said Momentum WW EVP/Partnerships Sampson Yimer (also a member of SBJ’s 2025 Forty Under 40 class). “They’ll just have to be sure inventory is in line with demand. But those large alumni bases of the big schools add a lot of value to these.”
