The Univ. of North Texas announced Friday that campus networking firm Apogee is the naming-rights partner for the school's new $79M football stadium, in a 20-year deal that averages around $1M a year. Austin-based Apogee has been a supplier to UNT since '08, and the naming-rights deal behind what will be called Apogee Stadium is a B-to-B play. The company calls itself the nation's largest provider of residential network services to higher education. With the deal, Apogee hopes to gain greater visibility, and a demonstration platform at a large public university. L.A.-based Premier Partnerships brokered the agreement for UNT. This is Premier's second naming-rights deal in the past four months; Overstock.com put its name on the former Oakland Coliseum in April. The 30,850-seat Apogee Stadium replaces 59-year-old Fouts Field. It is scheduled to open Sept. 10 with a game against the Univ. of Houston. UNT, whose most famous football alum is Pro Football HOFer Mean Joe Greene, is hopeful that the new venue will catalyze a renaissance for its football program, which has not won more than three games in a season since '04. While it is clearly at an exponentially higher level of commitment and cost, it is interesting to note that the nearby Cowboys Stadium is still without a naming-rights partner two years after it opened (Terry Lefton, THE DAILY). In Texas, Brett Vito notes UNT students "helped kick-start the school’s efforts to build a new venue in 2009, when they approved an athletics fee of $10 per semester credit hour to help fund construction of a new stadium." The naming-rights deal "would further help pay down debt on the facility and could also bolster UNT’s yearly athletic budget, because a smaller portion of the student fee would be needed to service debt on the stadium" (DENTON RECORD-CHRONICLE, 8/12).
