The College Football Playoff has awarded its licensing rights to Collegiate Licensing Co. in a new six-year deal.
The CFP selected CLC as its exclusive licensing agent back in the summer, giving the Atlanta-based agency a chance to get a head start on working with licensees, while contract terms were finalized. The two sides signed the deal last week.
CLC also represented the Bowl Championship Series in the past, but Cory Moss, CLC’s senior vice president and general manager, said the approach will be somewhat different with the new CFP. The BCS featured one championship game, while the CFP will have two semifinal games plus a championship game. The two semifinal games are included in the deal with CLC.
The marks related to the four participating teams, plus the two host bowls for the semifinals, are part of the rights CLC secured.
“Our goal is to give the playoff a year-round relevance,” Moss said. “The College Football Playoff mark is the one that pulls all of the FBS together. We think it can be an overarching brand for college football.”
In addition to signing CFP, CLC also extended its current deal with the University of Connecticut, and signed the U.S. Military Academy and New York University to international licensing agreements.
Specific financial terms were not released, but most licensing deals in the college space pay the client 10 percent to 15 percent on the wholesale cost of the product, plus any negotiated signing bonuses.
The CFP arrangement gives CLC the rights to the three games in the playoff each year to go along with the licensing rights it already owns for the Rose, Sugar, Orange, Cotton and Peach bowls. The Fiesta Bowl manages its marks in-house.
CLC’s Moss said the agency will work with a more exclusive set of licensees for the CFP than it did with the BCS. CLC has targeted 40 total licensees that will have access to the CFP marks. That’s a third of the number of licensees on the old BCS business.
“It is somewhat of a different approach,” Moss said. “We needed to make sure we had the best-in-class licensees who can get merchandise to market quickly.”
In the BCS, the two teams in the championship game were selected in early December and the game was played a month later, giving licensees plenty of time to turn around licensed product. But in the CFP, the semifinal games will be Jan. 1 and the championship game will be Jan. 12, providing a much tighter window to produce gear with the two teams in the finals.
