Say you are a college football program, and you have a stadium with a name that means something to your fanbase. Specifically, let’s say your stadium is named after your greatest coach ever, a man who happened to also be a one-star general who served in World War II. It’s been named after this man for 62 years. You don’t want to rename it, but every few weeks, another business calls offering millions of dollars for the naming rights. They tell you your archrival’s about to sell their stadium’s name for the same price. They remind you of conventional wisdom’s favorite truth in this college football era: Money wins championships.
Whether conventional wisdom’s right or wrong regarding the causal relationship between dollars and wins, millions of dollars are a nice thing to have. In most of life, it is better to have millions of dollars than to not have millions of dollars. Say you’re pondering this after hanging up with your latest prospective sponsor when you get an email from a booster.
The booster has caught wind of the latest sponsorship attempt. They don’t want you to take the money. Yes, money is good, they say, but think about this in the long term: Fans are getting sick of college football losing soul. If you take that name off that stadium, support is going to wane. It’ll be marginal at first, but it’ll add up. You can charge more for tickets and jerseys if you keep the stadium name the same.
It seems Tennessee faced a decision like this one. The sponsor in question? Pilot, the truck stop giant. The stadium? Neyland Stadium. What did Tennessee do? They navigated a middle path. Pilot will be the naming sponsor. The stadium will remain Neyland Stadium.
What does this mean? In practice, it seems Tennessee has guaranteed Pilot that they won’t sell the naming rights to anybody else while the contract is active, no matter how much Love’s offers to pay. Tennessee will also prominently feature Pilot’s branding throughout the stadium, including on the football field itself.
Is this the model which will protect stadium names from going the way of the Copper Bowl?
I don’t know the answer to that question. I would imagine Tennessee could have gotten more money than Pilot is paying if they sold the actual name of the stadium. I would also imagine there’s an opportunity here for booster/sponsor partnership: If a stadium’s name is worth five million dollars a year, maybe Pilot pays three million and a booster collective pays two million. Pilot gets priority sponsorship, one step shy of full naming rights. The booster collective gets to see their beloved building hold onto its name. Tennessee football doesn’t “fall behind” in the “arms race.”
Of course, you could argue Tennessee should eat the two million in losses, directing their boosters to spend it on recruits instead. If the booster financial supply isn’t infinite and if that two million would be better spent directly on talent, Tennessee would be better off telling boosters to go help Josh Heupel land another four-star. There’s also a path for this to take the shape of a hostage situation. If you’re Tennessee, I’m not sure you want to go to your boosters saying, “Give us two million dollars or we’ll destroy this thing that you love.”
College sports are and aren’t about money. When people say, “It’s all about the money,” they’re usually oversimplifying. Even when it’s true, though, they’re neglecting the definition of money: It’s a store of value. It’s an alchemic tool which allows Tennessee to convert the value of their stadium’s name into cash and to then convert that cash into a better defensive coordinator. What’s kind of heart-warming about this is that you probably really can put a price on the value of things like a stadium’s name. Your nostalgia is worth something. It’s hard to estimate it precisely. It might be smaller than you want it to be.* But in this instance, that seems to be what Tennessee did. Tennessee’s athletic director and Pilot’s CEO got together and figured out what the name “Neyland Stadium” is and isn’t worth. Pilot gets to be the good guys, the local company who kept Neyland Stadium’s name alive. Tennessee gets a nice check. Clearly, the name does have value. So much, in fact, that Tennessee wouldn’t sell it.
*What would Alabama fans trade for the naming rights to Bryant-Denny Stadium? Would one extra win against Auburn be enough?
Miscellany
- In a follow up from yesterday: J.J. McCarthy will miss the full season. The Vikings’ orthopedic surgeon got in there and decided the meniscus needed a full repair. This isn’t a good scenario for McCarthy. What we discussed yesterday was how McCarthy might thread the needle, getting some NFL experience without the pressure assigned to first-round picks in sneakily bad situations. Instead, he’ll be tasked with making his debut next season, as a sophomore, after a full year with no real game action.
- The Falcons just traded for Matthew Judon, and I would like to withhold judgment until someone reminds me whether the Falcons are or aren’t trying to win their division this year. If they are: Great! If they aren’t: Oh no do not extend that man. (The reason I am confused is named Michael Penix Jr.)
- The FedEx Cup starts tomorrow, and I don’t know if that’s even the right phrasing. Should I have called it the FedEx Cup playoffs? What is the FedEx Cup, anyway? It turns out that the FedEx Cup Playoffs, somehow in their 18th year, are a three-tournament series which whittle a 70-golfer “playoff field” down to one champion. The format has changed a few times, and it’s a little confusing. After the first tournament, the field shrinks to 50 golfers for the second tournament. After the second, it shrinks to 30. In the finale, the “Tour Championship,” golfers start at scores which correspond to their place in the standings. For example: The leader begins with a 10-stroke head start relative to par. What I’m struggling to find is how the cuts are determined from 70 to 50 and from 50 to 30. My impression is that it’s based on golfers’ places in the standings and that the playoff tournaments are just worth a lot of points, but I can’t find anything which says that definitively. Chalk one up for LIV, I guess.
