SBJ Unpacks: The premium push in college sports

Tonight in Unpacks: West Virginia is pouring $151.5 million into a pair of venue projects at Milan Puskar Stadium and Hope Coliseum with a focus on fans, not athletes, a move that’s emblematic of where college athletic departments are looking for more revenue to cover revenue sharing and NIL, reports SBJ’s Bret McCormick.

Also tonight:

• NFL opens April without an official sportsbook
• Wendy’s dunks its dated March Madness playbook
• Proving the payoff for ad spend in women’s sports
• The lasting imprint of the 1999 USWNT

Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where Abe Madkour discusses the multiple bid proposals of over $1 billion for NBA Europe teams, NFL owners approving the Jaguars’ plan to play one season in Orlando, the Big 12’s exploration of women’s flag football and more.

In 26 years working on West Virginia’s athletic facilities, April Messerly has watched the priorities of college sports swing dramatically.

After decades of athlete-focused investment — the proverbial waterfall in the football locker room of the 2010s — NIL and revenue sharing have swung the pendulum toward fan-facing projects.

“Everyone is still trying to get their arms around how we make this sustainable moving forward,” said Messerly, WVU’s executive senior associate athletic director for capital projects and facilities. “What do we need to do to look at revenue generation pieces in this new age of college athletics?”

West Virginia has shifted its priorities toward revenue generation and fans’ experience in a big way, with simultaneous renovations of its most prominent athletics venues. The first is a $150 million reconstruction of 60,000-seat Milan Puskar Stadium’s West Tower, including a significant addition of premium seating options. The other is a humbler, $1.5 million project to create loge boxes and ledge seating in the 14,000-seat Hope Coliseum.

There was untapped demand for more premium seating, which generates the kind of revenue athletic departments need more of due to the $20.5 million annual revenue-sharing commitment required by the House settlement.

WVU reported $128 million in athletics revenue in 2025 against nearly $131 million in expenses.

Its West Tower rebuild is projected to produce $5 million in new annual revenue. The basketball project should generate roughly $250,000 more each year.

“For a majority of the Power Four schools, it’s not easy to just find 20 million bucks,” said Oliver Luck, a member of WVU’s board of governors and the school’s AD from 2010-14. “That was the first shock to the system, and that literally happened from one day to the next.”

For decades, student athlete-focused facility investment was the coin of the realm, one of the main ways schools attracted recruits. Other than ballooning stadium seating capacities, fans’ live viewing experience was relatively untouched.

The coin of the realm now, of course, is NIL and revenue share. Actual coin, in other words.

It’s forcing universities to rethink their aging venues, where bleacher seating remains common and concourses are often cramped with too few amenities.

“Every school is on the hunt for long-term, consistent revenue streams that can be developed now,” Luck said. “Maybe they take three or four years to materialize, but it’s all wrapped up in this notion that college athletics, at the top level, is going to require more dollars.”

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Laser focus

Wren Baker was hired as WVU’s AD in 2022 in a different era, the post-NIL, soon to be post-House period. He dusted off the university’s facilities master plan but added a new focus.

“One of his first priorities charged from the board was, ‘We need to increase revenues,’” said Rob Alsop, WVU senior deputy AD. “Definitely something that’s a laser focus for Wren.”

That led to the coliseum’s naming rights being sold to Hope Gas on a 10-year deal last fall, the first time sponsorship was sold in the venue’s 56-year history.

And it heavily influenced Baker’s presentation to the university’s board of governors meeting last November, during which he underscored the need to create more premium seating in its aging sports venues.

A CSL market study showed significant unmet demand for premium seating and outlined potential returns.

“We’re really intentional now about how things pencil out,” Messerly said. “You have to do that when you’re specifically trying to generate revenue.”

The response to the West Tower rebuild justified the university’s suspicions. Both projects, which are being overseen by Legends Global’s owners’ rep group, will be funded by private donations, though West Tower fundraising is ongoing.

“Once we announced, we’ve had several folks come to us and say ‘We’re in,’” said Alsop. “You make the presentation at the board of governors, you unleash a couple of RFPs and people who’ve said, ‘I’d really be interested in that’ say, ‘Let’s sit down and talk.’ I won’t say surprised, but really excited that what they saw in the market demand study turned out to be real.”

Egg in the snake

The Milan (pronounced my-lan) Puskar Stadium project is the more straightforward of the two, adding new club, founders and suite levels to the West Tower.

Over the years, premium seating was added to the 46-year-old stadium’s north, south and east sides, but the West Tower remained an eyesore, as described by Baker and Marc Clear, principal and architect with the SLAM Collaborative, which is designing the renovation for WVU.

CSL’s football market study showed demand across the entire premium seating spectrum, Clear said. “And now they’re getting into sales, it’s just going gangbusters,” he said.

Milan Puskar Stadium has 2,316 premium seats, all of which are sold out. But that inventory ranks just 12th among the Big 12’s 15 stadiums — roughly half the premium capacity of league leaders such as Oklahoma State, Kansas State, Colorado and Texas Tech. For WVU administrators, that gap represents a clear revenue opportunity.

The most recent premium seating addition to the stadium, the Hartley Club Suites in the south end zone, was added in 2008. Baker’s board of governors presentation noted there are 83 accounts on the waitlist for those seats.

“A lot of it is demographics,” said the 65-year-old Luck. “And the baby boomers have all this money and they’re huge fans of college athletics, and as you get older, you want a little more comfort. It’s the proverbial egg working its way through the snake’s digestive system.”

Construction is expected to begin after the 2026 football season, with the new tower opening in 2028. By then, the West Tower structure will include suites, loge boxes, ledge seating and a 1,000-person club.

Like many college athletics venues, Milan Puskar Stadium is the biggest live events venue in a state that doesn’t have a major league sports team. It’s the front porch of the state. And yet, other than John Denver’s brief singing of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” when the stadium opened in 1980, it hasn’t been able to host concerts for reasons best summed up as “it wasn’t designed for anything other than playing football.”

Arena conundrum

Hosting non-university events has become a clear and quick way to generate more revenue from athletics venues, leading universities to sign booking deals with content providers and tour promoters or host international soccer matches.

Like the football stadium, Hope Coliseum is hamstrung by its creation in an era when college arenas’ objectives were to host basketball games and winter graduations.

Opened in 1970, it has neither suites nor a loading dock, the access tunnel to its event floor is curved and its clam shell-shaped concrete roof is acoustically poor. The venue has hosted 150 shows, including a Boston concert Luck attended in 1979, but none since 2019.

The bones of the venue are in good shape, following a major upkeep investment before COVID. But its revenue potential is limited.

“As the entertainment industry has exploded, and concerts have gotten bigger, when is the last time you went to a concert that didn’t have a screen behind it?” Messerly said. “We’re trying to balance what we need to do facility-wise to make it — both our stadium and Hope Coliseum — as easy as possible to host those kinds of events as well.”

Hope Coliseum also houses several Olympic sports and athletics offices, leaving little available space.

The venue has The Peak Club for fans with seats on the court and the Clark Mountaineer Club, a more entry-level premium space. The $1.5 million project is adding loge boxes — similar to suites, but uncovered so as not to block the views of fans above — containing roughly 85 seats in total. Sixteen ledge seats — premium seats with a drink rail — will be added, too. Work has already begun; the new premium will be available for the 2026-27 season.

WVU faced a classic college arena conundrum: Adding significant premium seating would require major surgery on the building and likely lose upper bowl seats. In West Virginia, those sell well.

“They know there is a market for premium, it’s huge,” said Clear, but “it becomes a can of worms, and you end up with a $100 million project to address everything.”

Despite the challenges WVU’s projects illustrate, they also show a potential headwind: donor fatigue with NIL. Initial concerns that NIL would vacuum all facility donations have not materialized and the opposite seems to be happening in many cases. For donors, buildings feel like a much more solid investment than the fickleness of NIL funding, especially when the needs are so glaring.

“You just realize how much pent-up need there is in these venues,” said Clear. “For the most part, it’s been a doubling down. Donors realize they need to do that; people aren’t shying away from athletics, they know they need to invest.”

The NFL is without an official sportsbook sponsor for the first time since putting the category out for bid in 2021.

The final league option on deals with FanDuel, DraftKings and Caesars expired at midnight with none of them renewing, a surprising turn considering the estimated $30B in betting volume the NFL generated last season. Negotiations are ongoing, NFL EVP Renie Anderson said at league meetings Tuesday.

The sticking point for FanDuel and DraftKings, sources familiar with the negotiations said, stemmed from an increase in the price of official streaming data from Genius, the NFL’s exclusive distributor. Without a deal for official data, sportsbooks are ineligible to sponsor the league or its teams or advertise during games.

The NFL is Genius’ largest shareholder, with a stake of nearly 9%. In June, it renewed Genius as its exclusive official data distributor through the 2029 season. The NFL and Genius declined comment on the impact of data prices on sponsor negotiations.

Caesars was unlikely to return regardless of the data rates, at least under the structure of the previous deal, which bundled rights to promote both online and retail sports betting and included substantial committed advertising spends. Since dialing back an initially robust national ad campaign in 2022, Caesars CEO Tom Reeg has told analysts to expect those expenses to roll off the books as deals expired.

An NFL spokesman said the league is open to “various league partnership structures.”

Caesars had a casino sponsorship deal before signing on in the newly created sportsbook category in 2021, promoting extensively around Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas. The league announced this week that it plans to return the game to Vegas in 2029.

The NFL is now shopping the category in a dramatically different climate than the one it encountered in 2021. Along with a herd of suitors thinned by consolidation and cutbacks, leagues must consider the impact of the recent emergence of prediction market operators such as Kalshi and Polymarket, flush with cash and eager for broader acceptance.

Facing a stack of lawsuits from state regulators and attorneys general, those also face an uncertain future unlikely to be resolved before the start of the next NFL season.

“Five years ago, all the leverage was sitting with the leagues and the media companies, because there were so many operators active with deep pockets and high, oversized share prices,” said Eric Foote of sports betting consultancy VIG Partners, a former PointsBet executive who struck deals with the NFL and NBC. “They knew the money was there. Spin it forward five years, and share prices have tanked, there aren’t as many operators, most states are live that are going to be live and most markets are mature. Supply-demand has completely flipped. So who is in the driver’s seat? It’s the operators. It’s not the NFL.”

The rise of prediction markets inevitably will muddy the waters. Kalshi and Polymarket have signed NHL sponsorships. Polymarket recently signed an exclusive deal with MLB. FanDuel and DraftKings have their own prediction market offerings.

“[Sports betting] definitely is a softer market, but the NFL will do what it has always done -- sit back and wait,” said Jason Miller, EVP/Commercial Revenue and Head of Properties at Excel Sports Management. “And generally, they win.”

Staff writer Terry Lefton contributed to this report.

Wendy’s is leaning into the dunk.

Yes, the basketball-themed dunk, of course, but also the combo of slamming a French fry into a Wendy’s Frosty.

“We took a completely different and fresh approach this year with our message,” Wendy’s Chief Marketing Officer Lindsay Radkoski told Sports Business Journal of its March Madness advertising approach. “... There’s a lot of people out there talking about hamburgers at this moment. And we were in a hamburger wars thing a couple weeks ago, and that’s a lot of fun. But one of the things that’s super unique to Wendy’s is that our customers dunk fries in Frosties.

“We saw this opportunity where dunks are the most epic energy-giving moment of the game, and it’s something that people love about our brand, we just realized, ‘How did we not see this synergy in the past?’”

Wendy’s has long been involved in college sports, with participation in the NCAA’s corporate champions program is entering its eighth year. That’s seen the company advertise and activate in myriad ways around March Madness, but this year is a bit different.

A new playbook

Radkoski noted the company shifted its focus away from broadcasters, former players and other stalwarts to current athletes, thanks to the advent of NIL. Its first roster of college athletes for March Madness includes Michigan’s Yaxel Lendeborg, Illinois’ Keaton Wagler, Arizona’s Breya Cunningham and UConn’s Sarah Strong.

“This is the first year we’ve really played that card in a big way,” Radkoski said. “Part of that was just for us first watching the NIL landscape to figure out what’s going to stick, how long is it going to stick? Where are people going to stub their toe? How can we learn from others?

“As the social and influencer world has also evolved where there’s subcultures and micro-influencers, and people want to see their local celebs on social media, the idea of it doesn’t have to always be the ‘A++ person.’ It allows a lot more people to get in the conversation.”

These efforts have been matched in real time — part of the rationale for Wendy’s approach this year and planning to sign players during the tournament.

Take St. John’s G Dylan Darling, who propelled the Red Storm to the Elite Eight thanks to a buzzer-beating layup that downed Kansas.

A group of Wendy’s marketing reps were tuned into the games when Darling’s shot fell, beginning a swift process of matching the company with Darling through its creative agency of record, VML, and Postgame, an NIL and sports marketing-centric group, that is helping wade through the logistics of signing college players to endorsement deals.

Darling had a deal signed and posted a Wendy’s promo video a day later.

“This approach allows us to learn so much about a different playbook,” Radkoski said. “To me, it feels more modern that it’s tied to using athletes as influencers on a micro level and getting more of them involved.”

Editor’s note: The following excerpt is from “The Great Game: A Tale of Two Footballs and America’s Quest to Conquer Global Sport,” by Andrés Martinez (April 2, 2026, Bloomsbury Publishing)

Summer of 1999 (Giants Stadium, New Jersey): Julie Foudy, the gifted and thoughtful midfielder who would go on to become a gifted and thoughtful sportscaster, podcaster, and author, described the moment when she visited one of our classes at ASU and recorded one of our Great Game Lab Set Piece conversations:

“First game against Denmark of the Women’s World Cup. We had been trying to sell it to big stadiums and convince FIFA like this is the way we should go. And we had journalists and FIFA representatives telling us we were crazy. You shouldn’t do it. No one’s going to come. It’s going to be an empty stadium. So, Andrés, you can imagine our excitement when we get stuck in traffic trying to get to that game, and we have no idea why there’s traffic. Then we realize, oh my gosh! It’s because they’re coming to our game. What. And then we walk out of the tunnel. And it’s like the perfect movie scene, you know. Tunnel. You see the light at the end of the tunnel, which is the field. You walk out, and the whole place gets on its feet, you know, and they said, it’s the second largest crowd at the time, besides the pope … because, the pope.”

My mom and I were at the end of that tunnel, with tens of thousands of other fans, cheering our heads off. Mom had given me so many opportunities to be connected to sport, and anything else I was ever passionate about, including her country — I wouldn’t have my blue passport if it weren’t for her. She’d always been an agent for the fulfillment of others — her husband, kids, students, charities she volunteered at; in another time and place she should have been in charge, like of everything, but throughout her life she never thought she should be at the center of things. We all have known women like that, I know, but I am just glad I was able to bring one of them to a couple of those 1999 Women’s World Cup games.

Oh, and I know Foudy would want me to add here that she scored the crucial second goal in the Americans’ 3-0 win against the Danes.

Those were heady, end-of-millennium days, with Y2K barreling towards us, talk of the end of history, and an unbridled exuberance about where technology and globalization were taking us.

And women, that remarkable group of women on the U.S. Women’s National Team, were definitely at the center of things. That World Cup was all people talked about all summer; the team played before sellout crowds in the country’s largest stadiums and their TV ratings shattered expectations, and anything previously accomplished by women athletes, or soccer of any kind, on U.S. television. Almost 20 million people watched Brandi Chastain rip her jersey off upon scoring the winning PK against China in the final at the Rose Bowl. From then on, there were always going to be 20 million reasons why anyone who suggested there wasn’t an audience for women’s sports was talking nonsense.

That team of Foudy, Mia Hamm, Briana Scurry, Kristine Lilly, Chastain and all the others accomplished so many feats. They played amazing soccer, first and foremost, but they also took it upon themselves to promote the game — those KC Current players I saw signing autographs an hour before their kickoff were following in the footsteps of these USWNT 99ers — and to become persuasive advocates for equal pay and gender equity in our society. They were also caught up in endless cultural debates over whether they had redefined what it meant to be female and athletic, posing on magazine covers, being marketed for their attractiveness and so on. The fact that many of them were clearly brighter and more eloquent than is often the norm for professional athletes raised another set of taboos for cultural critics. The country just wasn’t ready for all they had to offer.

From our Great Game vantage, the greatest feat and legacy of this USWNT, and their equally remarkable successors, is that they turned soccer into a naturalized American. There was nothing foreign about the game once they were done with it. That summer of 1999 was the culmination; they’d won Olympic gold three years earlier in Atlanta, too, and the explosion of girls’ soccer since the passage of Title IX meant that by the time Bill Clinton was seeking re-election in 1996, pollsters and political demographers had coined the term “soccer moms” to represent one of the most “mainstream” slices of the American electorate: suburban, upper middle class, mostly white, fairly independent minivan-driving voters who weren’t that entrenched in partisan politics but were driven by civility vibes and economic concerns. This showed how far soccer had come in my years in the U.S. Fifteen years earlier if you’d told me American political analysts were looking to define a slice of the electorate as “soccer moms,” I might have guessed they were coining a term for subversive feminist voters who believed in world government.

Amusingly, late night talk show host David Letterman would appropriate the term “Soccer Moms” for a nightly segment touting the USWNT during the 1999 World Cup.

If “Americanizing” the world’s game was their greatest accomplishment, the second greatest feat and legacy of this USWNT, and it’s a close second, is how they inspired the rest of the world to embrace women’s sport more broadly. They globalized the idea and reality of successful women’s sports by how they Americanized the world’s game.

Andrés Martinez is co-director of the Great Game Lab at Arizona State University, where he also teaches at the Cronkite School of Journalism, and is a fellow at the New America think tank. He has been a business reporter, editorial writer, and editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times.

• SBJ’s Ben Fischer examines why the NFL and other investors are so bullish on flag football as a way to grow not only the game but also the bottom line.
• The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament heads into the Final Four on Saturday averaging 10.3 million viewers, its best audience figure since 1993, reports SBJ’s Austin Karp.
• The NWSL filled two key vacancies within its leadership ranks, hiring Brian Kelly from Top Rank Boxing as chief commercial officer and Rachel Epstein from ESPN as chief marketing officer, writes SBJ’s Alex Silverman.
• Athlete licensing giant OneTeam Partners partnered with investment firm EnTrust Global to launch EnOne Ventures, a fund that’s raising $250 million to back early- and growth-stage sports businesses, reports SBJ’s Chris Smith.
• A handful of Stanford women’s golfers are donning Tiger Woods’ Sun Day Red brand this week at the Augusta National Women’s Amateur despite not having official NIL deals with the company and the Cardinal’s apparel deal with Nike, notes SBJ’s Josh Carpenter.