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Although they’re prohibited under current NCAA rules, Yahoo Sports’ Ross Dellenger reported this week that college leaders are considering a change that would permit college football and basketball programs to wear advertisements on their jerseys.
It’s estimated that jersey patches could bring in anywhere from $500,000 in additional revenue per season to as much as $12 million for some power conference programs, which would help offset the $20.5 million in revenue sharing that schools can distribute to student-athletes beginning next season.
The biggest obstacle, however, is the existing contracts that schools have with their apparel manufacturers, as Nike, adidas and Under Armour all forbid additional branding beyond their own, the school’s or conference and bowl patches on their uniforms.
That’s where Learfield comes into the equation, as Dellenger said the multimedia rights company will soon announce an initiative called Performance Partner Alliance that intends to provide the apparel companies with a tangible benefit in exchange for allowing advertisements on their products.
“We’ve been at stagnation with arguably one of the most valuable assets of college athletics – jerseys patches,” Learfield president and CEO Cole Gahagan told Dellenger. “There is seemingly little to nothing anyone can do to actually get it moving.
“Activity has to start somewhere. We’ve got a responsibility to kick off that activity. The (apparel) performance partners are the first groups that you have to address. The NCAA is the other partner that must agree to this.”
The NCAA Playing Rules Oversight Committee is scheduled to meet in January, and while a vote on this matter is not expected at that time, Dellenger said they are trending toward eventually changing the rules – especially with several conference commissioners publicly in support of an updated policy.
“Any conversation that involves value creation for our members needs to be on the table and we need to be thoughtful about it,” Big XII commissioner Brett Yormark said. “These are opportunities to create value.
Elsewhere, NBA franchises currently bring in $10-20 million annually with their jersey patch partnerships after the league became the first of North America’s “Big Four” professional sports leagues to allow advertisements in 2017.
The NHL and MLB also saw an additional revenue opportunity when they followed suit in 2022 and 2023, respectively, leaving the NFL as the lone holdout – though teams are still permitted to sell advertisement space on their practice jerseys.
This year, the NCAA began allowing schools to display corporate logos on football fields for regular season games, whether on a game-by-game basis or the whole season. They were not restricted to a specific location, though – like manufacturer’s marks – it’s likely they would have an assigned space on jerseys.
Header photo courtesy of @GoDucks on X/Twitter. Illustration by Andrew Lind.
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