SBJ Unpacks: Celebrating 30 years of the National Sports Forum

Tonight in Unpacks: The National Sports Forum begins Feb. 22 in St. Louis, its first gathering under the SBJ banner. This week’s magazine looks back at its beginnings and the important place the event holds in the industry.

Also tonight:

• NBC leveraging operational success for complex Milan Cortina Games
• Mavs tap CAA Sports to find future arena sponsors
• Bringing cap management on campus
• Op-ed: College athletics is facing a Jordan-Nike moment

Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where Abe Madkour examines Super Bowl LX’s incredibly strong viewership numbers, the San Francisco Bay Area prepping its bid for the 2031 Women’s FIFA World Cup, how Wrexham’s amazing turnaround shows the ways new ownership can invigorate an organization and more.

Ron Seaver led sponsorships and promotions for the San Diego Padres in the 1980s when he began seeking ideas from other teams about how to get fans to visit the ballpark. He loved attending MLB’s fall business meetings and started planning trips to other teams.

“I’d pick a team every year … spend two or three days going to the Phillies, going to the Dodgers, going up to the Mariners, and just being a fly on the wall. … What could I take back to my team and we could start to do in San Diego? After a while you start to hear the same ideas,” he said. “I was always thinking somebody ought to put on a meeting, and just get rid of the egos, sit down, let’s talk about what works. Let’s sit down and talk about what doesn’t work.”

Seaver took that idea and held the first National Sports Forum in 1996. Thirty years later, Seaver and the NSF are gearing up for the first event under the Sports Business Journal umbrella, Feb. 22-24, in St. Louis.

SBJ caught up with Seaver recently to discuss NSF’s history and traditions.

Comments are edited for clarity and brevity.

What were you doing when you came up with the idea for the National Sports Forum, and how did the idea come to you?

Ron Seaver: I started working on this in ’94, tried to launch the first one in the middle of March of ’95 and … I was going to take it to Colorado Springs. … We had 10 great speakers and with a week to go, we only had three attendees. … I had to pull the plug on it. … It was a mess, a hot mess.

We stuck with it, came back and did it in January of ’96. We had 32 people that year. We had a lot of our speakers come back, including Jeffrey Pollack, who was then starting this publication, Sports Business Daily, and he brought out David Abrutyn with him. Jeffrey pulled me aside after the first day and they were believers. They said, ‘You got to keep going here. This doesn’t look like much now, but someday this is going to be something. What you’re doing here is really, really valuable.’

How did it build? How do you think word of mouth spread?

Seaver: The Forum is a very different kind of conference. It wasn’t like any league meetings in those days, or anything of that nature. There was definitely a lot more camaraderie built in this right from the very beginning. Don’t get me wrong, we lost money putting this thing on for the first six years. But when it finally started to grow, when it finally started to click in, the secret sauce has always been the steering committee. It’s made up of people from within the industry — teams, agencies, corporate sponsors, product and service providers that will help us get the word out. … Keep in mind, this was long before social media, long before the internet had started. We just needed that word of mouth. We needed people to kind of get people involved, [to] come out there.

How are Steering Committee members chosen?

Seaver: They’re usually nominated by other Steering Committee members. … And it’s only a one-year term every year. David Brown’s on his 23rd one-year term. If they have been to 15 Forums and they’ve spent at least 10 years on the Steering Committee, when they do retire, they become an emeritus member. Those are people that have really put their DNA on the Forum.

How did you program the Forum?

Seaver: We knew that we were going to do this in the sports industry, but if we weren’t careful, it could really get away from us. There’s so many different facets. … Initially, we decided we were going to build the Forum around four pillars: ticket sales; sponsorship; marketing; and business development. We have added one more pillar to it and that’s diversity, equity and inclusion. … So all of the topics that we have in a typical Forum, we’ll have up to 32 breakout sessions, super panels, tracks. But the common theme amongst them all is that they all touch on one or more of our five pillars.

Over the years you’ve added elements, such as the Case Cup competition for college programs, and you mentioned the diversity. What was the progression of the program, and how did those ideas come up?

Seaver: In 2003, Rick Welts [then Phoenix Suns president/CEO] is up on stage and he is talking about something very business-related. He gets about, I don’t know, 10 minutes in and he just stops dead and looks around the room. And he says, ‘Boy, as I look around this room here, it’s good to be a middle-aged white guy in this business, isn’t it?’ And of course, there was kind of that nervous laughter, but he wasn’t wrong. Afterwards that started a lot of conversation. … We’re more of a mirror of what’s going on [in the industry]. … But it all started with Rick really calling us out on it. It wasn’t until years later when Mike Boykin, Jim Kahler, Andy Dolich and I all got our heads together and started talking about how we could actually do something constructive. And out of that came what we now call BDSE, which is the Business of Diversity in Sports and Entertainment. It’s a program that we first launched in 2013 as a way to try to give more opportunities, focused opportunities, to people of color and women of any color. … It’s a program that’s now sponsored by Legends. We put the call out to impanel a cohort and we get applications by the dozens. We have a BDSE selection committee made up of alums from the BDSE and from Legends that goes over it and they select the top candidates to bring to the Forum.

Case Cup got started because Paul Swangard and Bill Sutton (see column, Page 16A) pulled me aside one time and said, ‘We noticed that you don’t allow college students at the Forum.‘ And I said, ‘No, that’s a Steering Committee decision that we have made.’ There were a couple of league meetings that didn’t have that policy that in those days were really getting overrun by people from colleges looking to graduate and hanging out in the lobby and lobbying and jockeying for for interviews and jobs and things of that nature, and it was becoming a problem. So we just made the decision very early on that we’re not open to college students. Paul and Bill wanted us to reconsider that. So the Case Cup was born as a way to open the door to a limited number. Twelve schools are able to send their teams and those participants get a chance to, after the competition, hang out with all of the people from the industry for the rest of the conference.

How do you pick cities and what do those cities bring to the Forum?

Seaver: That actually goes back to the very first year we were in Colorado Springs. Jerry McMorris, who was then the original owner of the Colorado Rockies, which in ’96 was a new franchise, came down and while he’s doing his presentation … he’s showing slides on the walls. ‘This is what we’re doing. This is our rock pile.’ We all just felt it would be really cool to get on a bus and literally take us over there and point this out to us, really take us around and see it. … [I said], ‘If we were to come back next year and come to Denver, would it be all right if we brought everybody over there and you could literally take us on a tour?’ And he looked at me and he goes, ‘Well, it is January.’ And I go, ‘You know what, I don’t really think they care.’ And that became the next year we went to Denver. We teamed up with the Nuggets. … They were going to build this new facility called the Pepsi Center. So they took us on a tour of the buildout that they were doing and we talked to the architect. One day for lunch we went over to the Rockies and they gave us a tour and showed everybody what they were doing. … Every time you take a tour, you see something you’ve never seen before. … The people with the team, they’ve had it for [say] five years.… It’s not new to them, so they don’t really think about it, but it’s stuff we’ve never seen before. You get on these tours and you start to see how they did different things. If you can’t take back a notebook of ideas, you’re not trying.

What was your favorite city?

Seaver: It was Seattle in ’05. I just remember that there was this little watering hole called Von’s … I remember going, walking into it one night and we just owned this place. It was all of our guys. They had the wheel of drinks in one corner that they use for happy hour, and one of our vendors was standing up there taking bets and they’re spinning the wheel. Scott O’Neil and Steve Dupee are teaching our college interns how to play quarters. And I’m sitting in the corner with John Spoelstra and Amy Latimer. And we’re just looking at this going, you couldn’t draw this up. This was like “Brigadoon” had come to life. And I just remember it was so much fun.

So the next day everybody’s gone. I take my interns out for dinner with Dave Mullins. … We got to go to Von’s. We walk in. The place is absolutely dead. Whereas the night before it was like Vegas, it’s absolutely dead. And it’s just the owner and one lady just doing her nails. … We walk through that door and he takes one look at us and he points at me, ‘You, you stay right there.’ … He comes up to us and he looks at me and he said, ‘You all drink for free tonight. I made so much money off of you this week. Your money is no good here.’ So we basically closed that bar. Seattle was beautiful. I can’t wait to go back.

How did the tradition of having an official bar come about?

Seaver: These folks have now been around each other for so many years. They very much look forward to seeing each other every year. And of course, we decided to kind of channel that energy at the end of the night; let’s keep it going. Let’s designate a different spot. Sometimes it’s the same bar for three days. This coming year [in St. Louis], we’re actually using three different bars. So Sunday night is one bar in the [Union Station Hotel]. Monday night is going to be across the street at Maggie O’Brien’s. And then Tuesday will be The Pitch club, which is adjacent to the hotel. And each night we tell everybody, ‘Hey, that’s where it’s going.’ It’s really a great time.

Any special people you want to recognize?

Seaver: I would be remiss, obviously, if I didn’t recognize Christy, my wife of 39 years. … I couldn’t have done it without her staying in my corner on this. … I remember we finished up in Cleveland in ’01 and getting ready for Houston in ’02 and then 9/11 happened. And nobody wanted to travel. Our audience was down 44% that year in Houston. And we still did it, and I’m glad we did. But honestly, I was ready [to quit] at that point. And Christy’s like, ‘Nah, nah, you can’t quit on it. You’ve got to go on.’ People like Andy Dolich and Mario Alioto, and my first team guys, Kurt Katz and Dominic Giammarinaro. These guys, they helped get us started.

I’m proudest of the guys that have come out of here and where they’ve gone on in the industry. I think that’s the thing that I can point to with the most amount of pride is just knowing that I hope, in some way, that I was able to positively point them in the right direction.

What does Forum family mean?

Seaver: The Forum family is bigger than each of us individually. Together we can do some amazing things. I expect a different level of connectivity amongst our attendees. Not everybody gets this. And I’m sure some people just go, ‘You’re full of it.’ And that’s fine. But there’s that build of people out there that will give as well as get. And those are the people we’re going after, the part of the family. So you can reach out to somebody and always know that long after the conference is over, I can pick up the phone and call. … You’re there for each other and you help out as you can.

MILAN -- Over 16 Olympics, Gary Zenkel has seen NBC’s coverage evolve and grow.

To illustrate this point, Zenkel walks over to a map showing the number of paths sending feeds of video from Milan Cortina venues to their production space in the International Broadcast Center and then on to NBC’s Stamford, Conn., studios where most of the coverage is being produced. The mattress-sized sheet of paper looks like a metro map on steroids. In a reflection of how operationally complex these Games are, it contains a record 492 paths, which is more than even the 355 it took in Paris two years ago.

When Italy last hosted the Winter Games, in Turin in 2006, Zenkel was a year into his role as president of NBC Olympics. Those Games had 36 paths, making what the longtime Olympic broadcaster is pulling off here something that would have seemed unimaginable at the time.

And yet, it works.

Those paths to Stamford take feeds back to Molly Solomon, executive producer and president of NBC Olympics and Paralympics production, and a team of around 1,800 producing the Games. By comparison, NBC has around 1,000 people on the ground here -- with staffing somewhat determined by making its central hubs in Milan, Cortina and Livigno self-sustainable.

“Olympic television and Molly and the team and our tech folks and operations team, we’re really clicking,” Zenkel said on the opening weekend of the Games. “There’s nothing about this that isn’t extremely complicated with three separate clusters, all of which need their own expertise and attention. ... These are just too far and we’re so meticulous in our program planning and that pays off.

“We were very remote in Paris. We had moved a lot of our control rooms and venue production home,” he added. “We’re even more [remote] here and it’s working.”

Years of experience are helping as NBC takes on the most regional Games ever done. It has broadcast every Winter Games dating back to 2002 and every Summer Games dating back to 1988.

Zenkel, who has been with the company since 1990, said concerns about unfinished venues here have yielded to operations that “exceed expectations.”

Early returns show a viewership boost for the Winter Games similar to the one NBC enjoyed in the summer. It debuted its Peacock streaming platform before the Tokyo Games but with COVID impacting those Olympics and the Beijing Winter Games six months later, it didn’t hit its stride until Paris.

Gold Zone, its popular whip-around show, and tech innovations like multi-view have made their Winter Games debut.

“I’ve been working on Olympic digital since we turned that on, and Peacock Paris felt like this was the dream,” Zenkel said. “It was all there and it has been all there for a while, but it was incredibly intuitive as to how to find what you wanted, and we’ll continue to get better at that.”

After Zenkel spoke with SBJ, NBC released viewership data showing it averaged 28.5 million viewers in its afternoon and primetime windows across NBC, Peacock, NBCUniversal Digital Platforms and Versant’s CNBC and USA Network. That mark from preliminary Nielsen and Adobe Analytics data represented the most-watched Winter Games day since 2014.

Zenkel said the company continues to evolve its social media approach. It saw a record 6.55 billion impressions across NBC Sports social accounts in Paris, and it has deals with Meta, Overtime, Reddit, TikTok and YouTube.

NBC sees a continued evolution on how to monetize the content, which varies by platform, outside of linear and streaming viewership.

“In some it’s great, some it’s less great, but we continue to work with each other and continue to distribute,” he said. “We think we cast the widest net, we bring the greatest possible audience to the Games, we present it to them in a way that we believe that they want to consume it, and then we extend to them the activation and the advertising and marketing of our advertisers, which is important to them. And it feels like that works. And we haven’t cannibalized the Olympic audience.”

Indeed, the reach feels greater than it ever has.

NBC has worked closely with LA28, forming a joint venture in 2019 to sell sponsorship and media sales together. With the movement mobilizing toward two domestic Games in the next decade, Zenkel last year negotiated a $3B, four-year extension with the IOC to keep the Games through 2036.

Walking away from the map of the hundreds of paths undergirding NBC’s work here, Zenkel quipped they’d probably have 600 in L.A. Operationally challenging, to be sure. But nothing NBC and Zenkel haven’t seen in decades with the Games.

“We are in and out of this city and those mountain clusters as much as we’ve ever been, and probably actually more,” he said, “and it’s expensive to produce several thousand hours of coverage and presented, distributed 25 different ways.

“The efficiencies of this technology and what we’re doing and others in the industry are doing, it’s allowed us to continue to invest and invest and reinvest in the storytelling, in the actual product in Peacock and its platform, and that’s exciting,” he added. “We are incredibly bullish on the love of the Olympics by the American audience, however it is they want to experience it. And our rights give us the opportunity and the ability to meet that audience where their interests and expectations for the Olympics lie.”

The Mavericks have aligned with CAA Sports to pursue the naming rights and founding partner deals for their future arena, an early and exclusive arrangement that team CEO Rick Welts said was “priority No. 1” and the likely result of strong relationships from two previous Bay Area projects.

When current Mavs President Ethan Casson was CRO of the 49ers, CAA Sports handled the naming rights for Levi’s Stadium, and, when Welts was president & COO of the Warriors, CAA did the same for Chase Center. That ultimately laid the groundwork for this agreement -- negotiated in-house -- to pursue high-end packages for the Mavs venue when it is scheduled to open in 2031.

“I am proud that they chose us because they have their pick of projects and they only take what they consider to be the most prestigious, potentially most successful [ones] in the world,” Welts said. “Look at their list: They went from Levi’s to Chase to Intuit and now to the Mavericks in terms of NBA and they really have the choice of who they work with because a lot of teams seek their services.

“I think we have that super advantage here in the relationships that they have with Ethan and with me and ... they’ve done some work for [Mavs owner] Patrick Dumont’s Sands Corporation, too. So we had a familiarity with them and a comfort level with them. This is unusual to announce this [now]. We’re talking about a building that doesn’t open until 2031.”

Considering CAA generally collaborates with one team per league at a time, Welts said they will be the only NBA franchise tied to the agency for the next five-and-a-half-years, or until the new arena opens.

“It’s unusual to be able to consummate a deal like this, but it was super important to us that we have them and we have them exclusively devoted to the NBA during the next ramp-up period to our building,” Welts said. “I think you’re going to see us getting out in the marketplace earlier than has ever been done in these things before. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re announcing deals within the next year.”

As was the case with the 49ers and Warriors, the Mavs and CAA will meet and be in strategic alliance throughout.

“CAA just expands the aperture of possibilities in terms of who we can touch,” Welts said. “An example of that when I was at Golden State was no one in the United States had ever heard of Rakuten [the Japanese e-commerce and tech company]. And that was a CAA introduction that developed into the amazing program that’s still ongoing.”

The new Mavs venue is projected to include a 50-acre mixed-use district with hotels presumably to be developed and designed by Dumont’s Sands Corporation, alongside restaurants and retail. Potential sites, still yet to be decided, are reportedly downtown Dallas or in North Dallas at Preston Road and I-635.

“Our goal is that when people walk into that arena in 2031 for the first time, their reaction is these people really get Dallas,” Welts said. “So while we love a lot about Chase Center, this is going to be very different from that. And I think the thing that’s going to be exciting for partners is bringing the Sands hospitality experience to an NBA environment.”

Cliff Stein spent a lifetime around the inner workings of salary cap management. Now he’s bringing his NFL expertise to college sports.

Stein, the former SVP and general counsel for the Chicago Bears, is launching Front Office 360, a cap management program designed for college sports’ front offices.

How does it differ from others? It focuses on evaluating players as much as organizing paydays.

“I really think the biggest opportunity is the evaluation piece because cap management is not just a spreadsheet with a list of players’ names and a contract,” Stein said. “That’s just your payroll. But cap management takes into account a very strategic process where you’re projecting values on players, not just now that are under contract where you know the number, but in the future.”

Over Stein’s two decades with the Bears, front office management evolved dramatically. Spreadsheets were eventually traded for more automated modes of ensuring accuracy in the numbers. The idea is to expedite that process on the college side.

“It became unnecessarily a very long process because of dealing with a lot of spreadsheets that had to talk to each other and making sure there was no mathematical errors or no cells wrong,” he explained.

In the time since leaving the Bears, Stein consulted for schools around revenue sharing and how to structure salary cap management. The operations felt familiar, a ground-up production where there was little infrastructure in place to efficiently manage the millions of dollars flowing to athletes.

Stein continued speaking with schools about either hiring developers to build their own software or if other service providers might fill the need.

Instead, he figured he could design something himself.

Front Office 360 came about through a partnership with developer RockDaisy, which already worked with NFL, NHL and NBA clubs on data management. Stein also brought on Charlotte-based lawyer Matt Kelly, who serves as an adviser of sorts to a number of athletic departments and ADs across the country, to help tailor the product to universities.

Deals with a slew of Power Four programs followed, including Michigan State, Wisconsin, Clemson and Cal, along with Miami men’s basketball team. Each pays an annual licensing fee for the software.

“An athletic director, a chancellor, a president, someone that’s responsible for the budget can see that, ‘Look, this is how we’re doing it. This is how we’re managing our cash,’” Stein noted. “Now it’s more accountability, run more like a business. Like an NFL front office that’s dealing with $300-$400 million versus $20-$30-$40 million. I mean, it’s nothing. That’s two or three players on an NFL team. But bringing that kind of mindset to how you budget and manage the money was really part of the genesis of having the system.”

Stein isn’t the first to enter the front office software suites for college programs. Teamworks, Dropback and Opendorse are among the handful of players already out there.

Yet Stein wants Front Office 360 used not just for football but any sport. The software is set up so that coaching staffs or GMs can adjust the program to statistics they deem the most important for talent evaluation. So far, that’s been applied to women’s basketball and volleyball and men’s hockey.

“We wanted to create a system that’s modeled after a pro grade model, but with your metrics, your data points that are important to you, and then assign a grade value to that, which ultimately you could assign a monetary value based on [that],” Stein said. “It’s kind of frustrating when someone says, ‘Oh, the quarterback market is $2 million.’ Well, is he a low-grade starter? Is he an elite player? Not every starter is made the same. So when you just start getting numbers based on the position and you ignore the evaluation, you’re missing out on the value.”

Forty years ago, Michael Jordan’s mother insisted her son receive a share of every shoe sold with his name on it — not just a standard endorsement deal. Despite that such an arrangement would give the athlete an unprecedented stake, Nike saw the value in a true partnership with Jordan. It signed the deal, starting what became a billion-dollar empire for both Jordan and Nike and a new world order for professional sports.

College sports is now staring at the same choice. The NCAA first allowed athletes to make money from name, image and likeness in 2021, and the House settlement allowed universities to become financial partners in NIL.

What comes next will define college sports for the next generation. Will university and business sponsors follow Nike’s example to create an ecosystem that makes athletes owners of their own future like never before?

New Mexico State University secured a major partnership with Chevron to sponsor youth basketball clinics across southeastern New Mexico. At one of these clinics, star guard Jemel Jones sought out a quiet 10-year-old attendee during a break to mentor the youngster on discipline, setbacks and the choices that carried Jones from Chicago to a Division I scholarship.

That mere 10-minute interaction is a poignant example of the opportunities available to all stakeholders in a system that allows athletes to fully pursue meaningful partnerships, as well as serve as ambassadors for their school and sponsors. Everyone benefits: Chevron expanded its brand presence; the university deepened its community footprint; and Jones, by exercising his autonomy, has influenced many young people in positive ways.

Two institutional constraints remain in the way of making these mutually beneficial activities the norm across college athletics: the revenue-sharing caps and the punitive NIL GO clearinghouse, which hampers athletes’ abilities to fully capitalize on their brand value.

The NCAA’s new model technically allows schools to share revenue with athletes but caps it at $20.5 million per year — no matter how much value a program generates. Coaches negotiate without caps. Development officers fundraise without caps. Universities build entire wings of campus without caps. Yet the athletes, who are the foundation of the entire operation — and who produce hundreds of millions of dollars in brand exposure — are the only ones facing arbitrary limitations on making business decisions.

The current market cap incentivizes universities to invest in the two sports that generate the most revenue and most often are profitable year-over-year: football and men’s basketball, which receive 90% of NIL revenue-sharing allocations. This leaves other sports with a dearth of resources when they are already often struggling to stay alive.

Consider former Iowa women’s basketball phenom Caitlin Clark. How much bigger could her already-sizable impact have been if she could have capitalized, beyond third-party endorsement deals, on the national attention and revenue she brought to her school? Things have changed since the House settlement, but the artificial limitation still prevents a true marketplace from enabling schools to pursue the next Clark in minor sports such as golf, tennis and volleyball, in addition to women’s basketball. The benefit is clear: Eliminating the ceiling will create more opportunities for every athlete.

Furthermore, it will eliminate the need for the cumbersome endorsement approval process by the NCAA’s clearinghouse — the last dregs of the old system. Right now, an athlete is required to submit paperwork showing that his private-sector investors will profit from sponsoring him. The old regime claims that this is oversight to prevent boosters from using NIL as a pay-for-play scheme, but it actually acts as a barrier that prevents small businesses from competing with corporations to partner with athletes.

The NCAA and member institutions place no such burden on the big businesses that buy naming rights for stadiums or shell out for television commercial spots during March Madness. Yet the clearinghouse process forces alumni and local business owners who want to invest in athletes to jump through compliance hoops. And the only logical reason for this double standard is that it protects the traditional revenue flows that the NCAA has historically enjoyed.

Everything else flows from these two reforms. A fair, functional and durable system will support the other essentials for a robust college sports economy, including financial literacy, academic alignment, entrepreneurship education and brand coaching. But these only make sense inside a system where athletes can actually benefit from the value they create.

Forty years ago, the right question wasn’t whether Michael Jordan should sign the deal offered to him. It was whether Nike would recognize his value and share in the upside. College athletics is living its own Deloris Jordan moment. Does this billion-dollar industry share in her wisdom?

Jordan Banegas is director of strategic projects at Proven Media Solutions. He previously led the NIL collective at New Mexico State University where he worked with athletes, universities, and corporate partners to build sustainable NIL models focused on community impact and long-term athlete development.

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• After spending nearly three decades with the Diamondbacks, Kenny Farrell left the organization to become the COO of the Royals, reports SBJ’s Mike Mazzeo.
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