SBJ Unpacks: Takeaways from the PGA Championship

Tonight in Unpacks: PGA of America CEO Terry Clark lays out his goals for the early days of his tenure at the PGA Championship, where SBJ’s Josh Carpenter also reports on discussions about the state of golf balls and the schedule.

Also tonight:

• Georgia Tech’s $90 million facility showcases a new business calculus
• The drama of ABS creates a new kind of sports inventory for MLB
• Inter Miami adds Mastercard to sponsor roster
• Op-ed: NIL needs infrastructure, not just marketplaces

Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where Abe Madkour closes out the week with the strategy behind the NFL’s schedule, the Comets laying out their plans for the move to Houston, further expansion for the PWHL and more.

It was a mostly quiet start to the week at the PGA Championship near Philadelphia, but three themes emerged from the ground at Aronimink Golf Club, reports SBJ’s Josh Carpenter:

• PGA’s new leadership: A lot of eyes were on new PGA of America CEO Terry Clark, who faced the media for the first time since taking the position in early March. Overall, Clark played it pretty close to the vest and didn’t make much news, a stark departure from last year’s PGA Championship press conference. He indicated the tournament wouldn’t be moved from its May date and also commented on the proposed rollback of the golf ball, saying the organization would refrain from supporting anything that would negatively impact the recreational player. Clark laid out three main goals: Strengthening the org’s PGA professionals; growing the game across all levels; and continuing to find a way to elevate the PGA’s championships.
• The golf ball rollback: Much has been made about the USGA and R&A’s proposed plan to roll back the ball in 2030 in an effort to curb the distance gains by the world’s top players. But Golfweek reported on Wednesday that Cameron Young — the No. 3 ranked player in the world — has been playing a Titleist ball since late last year that would conform with the new rules. Young has won twice this year — including the Players Championship, when he bombed a 375-yard drive on the 18th hole en route to victory, the longest in the history of the hole. Young’s new golf ball was the talk of Aronimink on Thursday. His prolific distance even with a conforming golf ball made several executives ask the same question: Would a rollback even be worth it?
• Schedule, schedule, schedule: The PGA Tour’s changing schedule remains a hot-button issue. As of Friday, 13 dates have been confirmed for the 2027 schedule through next year’s PGA Championship. But there are still some holes in early 2027. None of the tour’s Florida Swing tournaments have had dates posted outside the Players Championship, leading sources to believe a date shift could be coming for events like the Cognizant Classic, Arnold Palmer Invitational, Valspar Championship or Cadillac Championship. Also, the tour is expected to make significant changes to its 2028 schedule, and one new region has been gaining steam as a possible addition. The Pacific Northwest is one that sources pointed to as a likely addition to the 2028 schedule, with several executives mentioning Sahalee Country Club near Seattle as an option. It’s a region starved for pro golf, and a move there by the tour would likely be a popular one among both fans and players.

Georgia Tech Athletic Director Ryan Alpert steps through a pair of glass doors, dodges a scissor lift and looks toward the grand staircase at the front of the Thomas A. Fanning Student-Athlete Performance Center, where drills echo as crews finish the Yellow Jackets’ new football offices and athlete performance space.

The official unveiling of the school’s 108,000-square-foot, $90 million center came May 14, but in the days leading up, a brief tour from Alpert offered a look into how college athletic departments rethink what facilities are supposed to do.

With revenue sharing adding millions in annual roster costs, schools are looking beyond recruiting flash toward projects that can improve athlete performance, create commercial inventory and justify investment in players.

“This project is not the bowling alleys, it’s not the tennis courts, it’s not the basketball courts in a football building,” Alpert quipped. “This is about how can we recruit and retain the best talent possible, then pour into those athletes and show them it’s not just words, it’s not just a building.”

The Fanning Center is a marvel in a college sports world that has seen palatial facilities crop up for much of the last two decades. The project, approved in 2022, was fully funded philanthropically and includes the school’s first sports science lab, expanded sports medicine facilities, an upgraded strength and conditioning complex, nutrition and dining facilities, and dedicated football meeting and office space. The building is also expected to be used for varying donor events and recruiting activities (instead of renting space in downtown Atlanta).

The tech behind the center, too, integrates Emory Healthcare and the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, modeled after the Falcons’ SPARC facility. Emory, which has been a longstanding collaborator with the school and its sports medicine program, is effectively expanding its partnership through HPA to map muscle activity, joint forces, asymmetries and other metrics to reduce injury risk and enhance performance.

“I’ve compared it to a Formula 1 car,” said Brad Kimble, Georgia Tech associate athletic director of sports medicine. “You think about all of the data that goes into those machines and being able to do that with our student athletes.”

That Georgia Tech is taking a revamped approach to the money it pours into facilities — seeking as much functionality as pizzazz — comes as schools are trying to be more thoughtful with broad construction projects.

Other schools are taking similarly pragmatic approaches. Alabama and Learfield opened the 2,200-square-foot Advantage Center inside Bryant-Denny Stadium in 2023, turning a former Zoës Kitchen into NIL activation space with Learfield offices and a podcast studio. South Carolina, meanwhile, is planning a major overhaul of Williams-Brice Stadium focused on premium seating, student areas and fan experience.

The South Carolina project is part of a broader shift in scale, as schools look beyond piecemeal upgrades toward projects that can help balance increasingly costly high-major athletic department budgets.

Mixed-use developments at Tennessee and Iowa State are in the works. Oklahoma is also slated to break ground on an 8,000-seat arena as part of the $1.1-plus billion Rock Creek Entertainment District in Norman.

“Institutions have to diversify their revenues at a point in time in athletics history where institutions are being forced to help fund athletics for the first time,” Iowa State AD Jamie Pollard said. “Five years ago, not many Power Four athletic programs were taking money from their institutions. Now, almost everybody is in some form or fashion. [With] those costs, the institutions need to diversify revenues, and these entertainment districts are a great way for the institutions to do that, which then quite frankly, indirectly helps athletics.”

Georgia Tech isn’t going quite that far, but Alpert said a planned $70 million renovation of Bobby Dodd Stadium will add chairbacks and upgrade suites. He projects the renovation will generate returns of nearly twice the annual mortgage payment needed to finance it. The school also expects to raise ticket prices in stages, with a larger increase before construction and a smaller jump after the project is completed.

“Leading up to the summer of ’25, there was probably a little pause or hold in facility development because no one knew exactly what the world was going to bring,” said Nations Group founder Chris Nations. “But after that, everyone has said, ‘Let’s go,’ because it’s kind of the last frontier that hasn’t been monetized the way it can be monetized.

“Our approach from how we’re doing things within stadium renovation and new facilities hasn’t really changed. It’s just become more important to the client. That importance means more schools want to do it; it means they want to do bigger stuff. It used to be $150 million. You could go raise that money, create some premium and then you’re happy. Now, it’s like, ‘How do we go look at $500 million, $1 billion, even $1.5 billion?’”

The back wall of Georgia Tech’s new meeting room in the Fanning Center is lined with windows displaying the prominent Atlanta skyline and the dozens of major corporations that call it home.

There’s intention in this symbolism, Alpert said.

The school has long tried to draw a line from its campus on the north side of the city and the corporate hub that occupies its center. The Fanning Center, its improved tech and advanced analytics programs are designed to assist in bridging that gap — and, of course, hopefully bringing a few extra wins to The Flats this fall.

“If you’re paying these athletes what we are,” Alpert said, succinctly, “we have to invest in their bodies.”

The bases were loaded and the crowd at Great American Ball Park was ready to erupt.

Twice in the same at-bat during a March 28 game against the Red Sox, Cincinnati Reds third baseman Eugenio Suárez tapped his helmet to challenge strike-three calls by umpire CB Bucknor using Major League Baseball’s Automated Ball-Strike system. Twice, after roughly 15 seconds of suspense, the video board flashed the same result: overturned.

“Outside!” Reds play-by-play announcer John Sadak shouted after the second successful challenge. “The loudest cheers of the game come on back-to-back challenges!”

No runs scored, but the sequence created a new kind of viral regular-season moment — a suspense-filled reveal experienced simultaneously by players, fans and broadcasters.

In the process, MLB may have turned the strike zone itself into a new form of commercial inventory.

“I don’t think anyone has really focused on the fact that it’s the only time that everyone in the ballpark learns a piece of information like that at the same time,” Seattle Mariners Chairman and CEO John Stanton, who chaired MLB’s Competition Committee throughout the ABS process, told Sports Business Journal. “And it really did create this unifying dynamic, especially with fans.”

A new kind of game moment

Nearly two months into the season, ABS has largely been viewed positively, increasing accuracy and fan engagement while minimally affecting game flow after years of testing in the Atlantic League, minor leagues and MLB spring training.

While nine-inning games were averaging 2 hours, 41 minutes as of May 10, up from 2:36 in 2024, about a minute or so of the increase could be attributed to ABS, with just over four challenges per game. Overall, in that same span, challenges had been overturned 53% of the time.

“You’re adding something to the game, a new tool for players and a new moment for fans to enjoy,” said Morgan Sword, MLB executive vice president of baseball operations.

Turning suspense into sponsorship

Live sports rarely creates entirely new, sponsorable in-game moments, making ABS particularly attractive to advertisers and broadcast partners. The initiative paid immediate dividends for longtime sponsor T-Mobile, which secured the rights to ABS back in 2023 — including powering the initiative via its 5G network — as part of an expanded five-year extension at an additional fee.

“Commercially, brands are always looking for never-been-done stuff, a piece of inventory that can differentiate them from their competitors,” said Nick Cartan, managing director and head of media for Playfly Sports. “This is a unique inflection point for sponsorship and brand integration, where it truly is a part of the engagement that is truly impacting the game.”

Unlike traditional signage inventory, ABS integrations are attached directly to live gameplay moments, making them particularly valuable for sponsors seeking visibility during high-attention situations.

T-Mobile’s ABS integration stems from its existing league sponsorship with MLB, which gave the carrier exclusive national rights to the challenge system. Nationally, U.S. broadcasts display “ABS powered by T-Mobile” during challenge moments — including the first challenge in Suárez’s viral at-bat — while 21 clubs have separately sold local ABS inventory tied to regional broadcasts, video boards and other team-controlled platforms. The activations vary by team and existing telecom sponsorship relationships, with clubs tied to Verizon or AT&T, including the Dodgers, Mets and Phillies, not part of the program.

“The brand integration in the moments that matter during the game is huge, and we definitely saw that as an opportunity knowing that these ABS challenges were going to be truly game-changing moments, and I think we love the opportunity for our brand to be part of that,” said Amy Azzi, vice president of sports, entertainment and hospitality at T-Mobile.

“It’s also all of the storytelling and network showcasing of being able to power it on the back end as well.”

Early returns suggest the visibility has been substantial. The launch of ABS generated $13.1 million in earned media value exposure across a combined 2,051 articles and social media mentions, while driving $525,000 in brand value for T-Mobile, according Meltwater’s analysis of data between March 23 and April 5. Playfly’s analysis indicates the value is significantly higher, with the average brand value falling in the seven figures.

“It makes you look up from your hot dog and your beer,” Azzi said. “When you’re in the stadium, you would think someone just hit a home run when a call is overturned.”

Why MLB chose challenges over automation

The process of getting ABS from concept to MLB ballparks was, as Stanton put it, “a long journey for all of us.” At one point, he was all but certain that the league would go with full ABS.

Polling from players and fans indicated otherwise.

In surveys issued via QR codes on scoreboards at minor league games, fans were asked to rank three systems MLB was testing at the time: challenge, status quo or full ABS. The challenge system was consistently the clear choice. “At that point, we felt like we were onto something,” said Reed MacPhail, MLB senior vice president of baseball operations.

MLB’s fan polling during spring training spoke volumes: 72% of fans said the challenge system had a positive impact on their experience.

“In my view, the fans get the golden vote in telling us what they want the game to look like, and that really changed the direction to more of a challenge-based system and accepting some of the complexities of that, but doing it in a way that would allow us to create a new and exciting element of the game,” Stanton said.

While doing early testing with full ABS in the Arizona Fall League years ago, Sword said one player who is now a major leaguer (though he declined to divulge his name) took a called third strike. The player then turned around to where the Trackman radar system was behind home plate and started yelling at it.

“I just thought it was so poetic,” Sword said. “With all the difficult ethical issues we’re worried about with introducing technology into baseball, I just thought it was such a great image of what we’re doing here.”

For Stanton, the success of ABS stems from MLB resisting full automation and instead embracing a challenge system that preserves both human judgment and dramatic tension — the very elements that helped turn the strike zone into a new fan-engagement and sponsorship opportunity.

“The dynamic is that we found kind of a happy medium that preserves the importance of the umpires in calling balls and strikes in the game,” Stanton said. “I think we will stay with the challenge for some significant period of time.”

Staff writer Terry Lefton contributed to this story.

Mastercard has signed on as a sponsor of Inter Miami and Nu Stadium, building on its endorsement relationship with the team’s star player, Lionel Messi, that began in 2018. The deal designates Mastercard as the club’s exclusive payment services partner and marks Inter Miami’s third deal in an adjacent payments or financial-services category in the past two months.

Under the deal, terms of which were not disclosed, Mastercard will receive branding throughout the club’s newly opened soccer-specific stadium and offer cardholders exclusive experiences, ticket access and rewards when using Tap and Go on public transit to the venue.

The agreement with Mastercard is Inter Miami’s 13th sponsorship deal closed this year, including both new partners and renewals, illustrating the continued appeal of the club’s brand to blue-chip companies since acquiring Messi in 2023.

The deal also highlights how narrowly Inter Miami is divvying up rights in the payments and financial services space. In the past two months, the club has signed Brazilian financial services firm Nu as its stadium naming-rights partner, Shift4 as the stadium’s official payment processing partner and Mastercard as its exclusive payment services partner.

The Mastercard announcement frames Nu and Mastercard as longtime partners that together will deliver “a powerful, fully integrated ecosystem, seamlessly connecting financial services, payments technology, and fan engagement under one unified platform.” Meanwhile, the club’s recent announcement with Shift4 says the firm will offer “integrated payment technology now powering ticketing and concession purchases at Nu Stadium.”

The distinction between Shift4 and Mastercard’s roles shows how Inter Miami is segmenting the payment process into separate commercial assets. Mastercard operates as a payment network and is primarily using the deal to reach consumers and cardholders, while Shift4 is the venue’s payment processor and is showcasing its stadium-commerce technology for potential enterprise clients.

Mastercard succeeds Visa in the payment services category after Visa held a similar designation for the past two seasons. Octagon represented Mastercard in negotiations with the club.

And, they’re off!

No, we’re not talking about Saturday’s Preakness Stakes. It’s that time on the calendar when NFL teams and media partners have their own spring holiday with the schedule release. As this newsletter lands, teams are jockeying for the best social media unveils (check out more on what resonated in Friday’s editions of Morning Buzz and the Daily).

But from a media perspective, the feeling across the board is that the NFL gave a thoughtful, balanced schedule to partners. That, of course, comes with the usual-suspect platitudes of “pleased” or “excited” or “pumped” or “thrilled” or “couldn’t have gone better” from network execs (which looks to be true, given the hard work of Mike North’s scheduling team at the NFL league office).

How the league feels

There seemed to be more moving parts than in recent years, with additional games out in the market and new partner priorities. That created a ton of late maneuvers to add or shift inventory — with some partners like Sunday Ticket rights holder YouTube getting shut out.

“Not everybody can win every opportunity, but we’re incredibly excited to have a very big partnership with YouTube around ‘Sunday Ticket’ that’s going to go for a number of more years,” said NFL EVP/Media Distribution Hans Schroeder.

There also was the backdrop of an FCC inquiry into the NFL, but Schroeder noted the league didn’t see that as a distraction in creating the schedule. “I don’t think we felt any pressure, to be honest,” Schroeder said, regarding pressure on keeping more games on broadcast TV. “Our focus is always, ‘How do we find the most reach? How do we serve our fans in the best possible way that we can?’”

Schroeder noted the league was keen on expanding the distribution of its “tentpole moments.” This included creating a tripleheader for Fox in one day (featuring a morning game), selling three games to Netflix (two of which are the first Australia and Thanksgiving Eve games), giving NBC and Peacock a Saturday doubleheader and more.

Also new for Netflix this year: a weekly NFL show. “We’ve got to figure out exactly what the content and programming angle is, but think about a weekly, topical, highlight news, entertainment-type show that’s engaging the Netflix audience on a weekly basis,” noted Schroeder.

For Amazon and Fox, there is going to be a lot of holiday cheer this season. Amazon gets “TNF” games on Black Friday, Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, while Fox has a Thanksgiving game.

Where do things go with YouTube?

Schroeder also noted the NFL will likely have three regular-season games to work with in the market heading into the next campaign. Could YouTube re-enter such conversations given how negotiations broke down this season?

“It’s a great relationship,” Schroeder said. “They mentioned in one of their earnings calls that we’ve reached the highest number of subscribers of ‘Sunday Ticket’ ever. They’ve done a great job continuing to build that product. We couldn’t be happier with it.”

CBS pleased with NFL slate

Dan Weinberg, CBS Sports’ EVP/programming, called this coming season “one of the best schedules that we’ve seen over the last several years.”

The network again put a focus on its Sunday 4:25pm ET national windows, which has been the NFL’s best window for three straight seasons. “The volume and the tonnage of games all season long is terrific,” Weinberg said.

CBS will again lean into being the home of the AFC, and that includes four games with the Chiefs as QB Patrick Mahomes comes back from an injury. Those Chiefs games are spread over CBS’ schedule. “As far as we’re concerned, the more of the Chiefs we can get, the better,” said Weinberg.

But while the AFC is a high priority, Weinberg also emphasized a “tremendous presence” of big NFC franchises, including the Cowboys twice.

CBS also has a Cowboys-Ravens game from Rio in the national window in Week 3, but don’t necessarily look for the network to be gung-ho in adding more international games. “It’s frankly not something that we think about too much. In this case, it lined up very well,” said Weinberg.

Prime (Video) time

Coming off a record season-long audience for its “TNF,” Prime Video will keep the momentum rolling when it starts Year 5. Amazon was able to land a coveted game as the Bills open the new Highmark Stadium in Buffalo against the Lions.

“A rare and special occasion,” said Jeff Kaiser, Amazon’s head of sports programming. “The first regular-season game from a new stadium, especially one from a storied NFL city like Buffalo. We’re really thrilled that the NFL was providing Amazon with that opportunity. ... We have the added advantage of having Ryan Fitzpatrick as part of our shoulder programming crew, who I know is excited to celebrate this moment.”

Prime Video will have a game on New Year’s Eve for the first time, and it could offer fresh opportunities for the platform. “We’re talking through different ideas and plans right now with the production team,” said Kaiser.

Fox gets its wish list

For Mike Mulvihill, Fox Sports’ president of insights and analytics, there were five goals for the network heading into scheduling for this season, and he feels the top priorities were met by the NFL.

“Those guys are working on it literally around the clock in the last couple weeks and even prior to that, they put in just an incredible amount of work to make sure that all the partners are treated fairly,” he said.

The five things Fox wanted: 1) More windows than anyone else; 2) an emphasis on being the home of the NFC; 3) going big on holidays; 4) getting Tom Brady back to Foxborough for a game; and 5) building strength in 1pm regional windows leading into national windows.

“We love the fact that we have more NFL windows than anybody else,” said Mulvihill. “That was true last year, and it’s true this year. And that came together as late as this weekend when we were able to close the deal for the Germany game and for the Week 15 Saturday game.”

With around 130 NFC team appearances, goal No. 2 was met. “Just reaffirming our network as the home of the NFC at a time where the NFC is really reestablishing itself as the dominant conference, that was really important,” he said.

With Brady the No. 1 analyst for Fox, the network circled Packers-Patriots to get the GOAT back to his old stomping grounds. “Didn’t know it was going to end up necessarily in Week 9, but that feels like a good place for it.”

Perhaps the biggest push for Fox came around giving a boost to national windows. “We really wanted our strength at 1pm to be on doubleheader weeks and not singleheader weeks,” Mulvihill told SBJ. “We felt like there’s a real benefit to having good 1pm games leading into our 4:25s. It becomes a kind of insurance if your planned 4:25 game doesn’t come up as strong as you hope and you can move something from 1pm to 4:25.”

ESPN’s road to Super Bowl LXI

Before any schedule decisions were even made, ESPN had big changes afoot this season. That included programming the newly acquired NFL Network, as well as shaping a “MNF” slate that would not have any side-by-side matchups like in recent season.

“Single games on Monday night, Weeks 1-17, that actually was a big clarifier and also a way to be a little clearer and more specific about what we were looking for with the league,” said Tim Reed, ESPN’s VP/programming and acquisitions. “The other piece to that is we knew we were going to have 10 [ABC] simulcasts of those 17 weeks, and as far as it goes from priority perspective, we were looking to definitely try to figure out how to maximize those.”

Nine of those ABC simulcasts are locked in, with one more TBD.

All of this would be artfully crafted to build momentum and give ESPN the best path into what will be its first Super Bowl yet (and Disney’s first since 2006).

A dozen ManningCasts are in the works, and plans for any animated “MNF” alt-cast remain TBD. “We’re going to continue to explore the options there, so I would stay tuned on that one.”

As far as NFL Network, the channel expectedly will be heavy on international games again.

Sunday night fever

NBC is coming off a monster season that included record viewership for “SNF,” and it will come out of the gate with two big games in Week 1 — a Wednesday night Super Bowl rematch with Patriots-Seahawks and then Cowboys-Giants to open up the Sunday night slate.

“We always really want to focus on the beginning part of the season and how do we get out of the gate in a big way,” said Justin Byczek, NBC Sports’ EVP/programming and management. “With what the Giants have done in the offseason and the signing of coach [John] Harbaugh, the excitement that’s brewing in New York around the draft to kind of get a quick look at what that team is going to be and how they’re going to play under the new coach and certainly under the backdrop of the 40th anniversary of the 1986 Super Bowl team.”

That game will also see NBC honor the 25^th anniversary of 9/11.

Byczek also noted that with Bills-Chiefs, the network will have its best Thanksgiving prime-time matchup since getting that window.

“It’s the rivalry of the decade, and the way that these two teams have played both in the regular season and the postseason, it’s kind of must-see TV,” he said. “Thanksgiving night is usually one of our highest nights of the year, and this year we’ll certainly live up to those expectations, and then some, with that matchup there. It’s something that if you’re a football fan, you just simply can’t miss.”

Wise words

After what was an arduous process, everyone in NFL media circles can take a breath and reflect on a job well done.

Perhaps folks can even enjoy this schedule-day anecdote from former longtime NFL PR chief Joe Browne, who tweeted, “When Pete Rozelle was Commish, we often would give clubs their sked in early AM, give media sked late AM, make certain it made AP wire & then Pete would take us out for Mexican food and, perhaps, a margarita. U think things have changed??”

The most important thing NIL has produced is not a brand deal, but the raising of a question not seriously considered before in college sports: Who actually owns the value that an athlete creates?

That question does not yet have a clean answer. Until it does, everything else — the marketplaces, collectives, compliance frameworks, and revenue-sharing settlements — is just rearranging furniture in a building without a foundation.

I competed as a college athlete in the 1990s, then worked as a securities attorney, and have since built companies at the intersection of sports, culture and capital markets. Across those vantage points, one thing is clear: The commercial infrastructure underneath athlete identity has never been built properly. If the market keeps moving at its current pace, the athletes who were supposed to benefit most will remain the least protected participants in their own ecosystem.

That is both the problem and the opportunity.

A market has been created. A system has not

The scale of change in four years is historic. The House v. NCAA settlement, finalized in 2025, opened the door for schools to directly compensate athletes and formalized centralized review through NIL Go.

Washington is now structurally involved. The proposed SCORE Act aims to establish a national NIL framework, clarify athlete employment status and stabilize what has been a patchwork of laws and policies.

The market is real. Volume is real. Regulatory attention is real.

What is not yet real is a coherent operating system beneath it. Rights are scattered across contracts, emails, collectives and compliance offices, and payments and auditability become inconsistent. The athlete generating the value is still the least protected party in the transaction.

What the marketplace model gets wrong

The dominant model is transactional: connect a brand to an athlete, close a deal, take a cut, repeat.

None of that is wrong, but it is insufficient.

A marketplace facilitates a transaction. It does not establish ownership of rights, persistence across institutions, auditable payment records, or how value compounds over time.

Even sophisticated systems fall short. Consider the evidence from the most sophisticated compliance infrastructure in college sports today: Learfield’s Compass platform manages more than 200,000 brand deals, and yet the College Sports Commission has denied 711-plus deals because the platform records that a deal was agreed and logged, but produces no cryptographic proof that the commercial deliverable actually executed. The most advanced marketplace in the space still cannot answer the most basic infrastructure question: did this happen, and can you prove it?

What has been built is a system optimized for the brand and intermediary. The athlete gets a check tied to a platform they didn’t choose, with records that don’t travel.

The leverage is not in the venue. It is in the rails. Whoever controls the identity, rights and payment layers controls the market. That is not a marketplace business. It is an infrastructure business.

Fan engagement is not a feature. It is the thesis

The most underappreciated dynamic in college sports monetization is this: The fans most likely to drive value are not passive — they want to be early participants.

Building a consumer-facing company has taught me things about fan behavior that no amount of industry analysis could replicate. The turning point was a strategic pivot: I stopped asking how many people were watching and started asking what would make them put something on the line. That reframe changed everything.

It’s clear that engagement depth and level of participation are the leading commercial indicator, not how long fans merely watch. A user who competes around a sport converts at multiples of a user who observes. A fan who discovers an athlete early and feels genuine ownership over that discovery becomes an evangelist, not just a consumer.

That has direct implications for NIL infrastructure. Systems that activate audiences early, generate measurable participation, and create loyalty that travels with the athlete build the demand layer that makes everything else valuable.

Without demand, infrastructure is theory. With it, infrastructure becomes an amplifier.

On the regulatory moment

The SCORE Act and federal push are directionally correct. Standardization reduces risk.

But regulation is focused on transactions: what deals are permissible and how they are reported.

The harder question is what rights athletes retain after a deal concludes. Who owns the data? What portability exists?

The current framework treats NIL as discrete transactions. A more durable one treats athlete identity as a persistent asset owned by the athlete.

That requires infrastructure. Right now, no one has built it.

What building the infrastructure layer means

This is not a product category. It is a strategic position.

It means:

• Athlete identity sits in an auditable, portable framework the athlete controls — payment rails are fast, documented, and persistent across transitions.
• Fan participation is measurable and tied to value.
• The system is interoperable across brands, schools and platforms.

A Career Equity model — linking athlete IP to verified execution, routing royalties directly, and enabling fan participation — is not theoretical. It is buildable.

The demand is already there. It is just not being served.

What happens if the gap persists

If identity remains fragmented, payments opaque, and records non-portable, athletes will remain in the same structural position: generating value while holding the least durable stake in it.

The deals will continue. The money will flow. But the value will concentrate with platforms, brands and collectives, not just the athletes.

The bottom line

NIL has created a consequential new market. The infrastructure around identity, rights, auditability, portability and payment remains underbuilt and misaligned with athlete interests.

The current model has produced volume without durability. Deals without ownership.

The next wave of value will not come from more deals. It will come from building the foundation that makes those “deals’” matter.

That foundation does not exist yet. It will not build itself. And the cost of waiting continues to rise

Lavell Juan Malloy II is CEO of Brag House, a media technology and gaming platform.

• SBJ’s Austin Karp, Josh Carpenter and Rob Schaeffer share their takeaways from this week’s upfront presentations, where sports play a larger (though not quite yet dominant) role than ever before.
• Less than a year into college sports’ revenue-sharing era, leaders within the ACC and across the Power Four are already weighing the need to come up with better ways to prevent schools from circumventing the $20.5 million cap, reports SBJ’s Ben Portnoy.
• The WTA on Friday debuted the first episode of a fashion-focused short-form content series called “Style Unpacked” on its YouTube channel, notes SBJ’s Rob Schaefer.
• In this week’s Audience Analysis, Karp reports the NBA Draft Lottery set a record with ABC drawing 2.3 million viewers, up 23% from last year.
• In this week’s Talent Pool agency roundup, SBJ’s Irving Mejia-Hilario notes that Jazz G/F Ace Bailey switched his representation to Klutch Sports, where he will be represented by Rich Paul.