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SBJ College: Greg Brown Gets His Firm Ready To Take On NIL


Next week’s Intercollegiate Athletics Forum in Manhattan will be my 14th straight year attending SBJ's annual event, and I can’t remember a time when there was more to debate.

Here is what's cooking on campus:

       

GREG BROWN READY TO TACKLE NAME, IMAGE, LIKENESS

  • Greg Brown is getting Learfield IMG College ready for a brave new name, image and likeness world -- one where school and college athlete marketing rights are sold side-by-side. That’s how Brown, the president & CEO of Learfield IMG College, sees the future of college marketing if athletes control their NIL rights. “They need to work together to be the most successful, so the use of school marks can be a part of what is included with the student-athlete representation,” Brown said. “There’s likely a place for that.”

  • Brown and I talked about the NIL debate for the first time today. I told him that all eyes are watching Learfield IMG College to see how the biggest marketing force in college sports would react to a monumental shift in the collegiate model. He doesn’t see why athletes would go anywhere else. “We’ve got a 35-year head start on these types of commercial relationships,” Brown said. “I do think that there's going to be a path where we can be helpful to student athletes, whether that’s in group licensing with CLC or more broadly at the school level.”

  • Learfield IMG College provides its 200+ college clients with an array of services, ranging from sponsorship sales to radio/TV ads and all kinds of content. That positions Brown and his company to be at the crux of NIL. With the agency engaged with more than 15,000 sponsors and advertisers across all of its college properties, “that would seem to be an incredible missed opportunity if student athletes don’t tap into that ready-made ecosystem.”

  • While most of Brown’s conversations take place in an AD’s office, plenty more strategy sessions are exploring the marketing of college athletes inside the walls of the Learfield IMG College's HQ in Plano, Texas. ”I'm constantly having the conversation, but it's not just to our team huddled up in Plano every day, it’s me speaking to the practitioners,” he said. “We do have a group of people focused on it to develop our best thinking on what role we should play in all this. It's probably more how are we going to support the institutions.”

 

 

U.S. SENATORS LOOK TO STUDY NIL ISSUE

  • Late this afternoon came word from Capitol Hill that a bipartisan working group has been assembled to study college athlete compensation and related topics. Senators Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah) jointly announced the initiative, which will seek discussions with athletes, administrators and other experts in the college space. The Senate working group includes Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), David Perdue (R-Ga.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.).

  • This working group could be the key to establishing a set of national legislation around NIL rights -- perhaps avoiding headaches and confusion that would come with a state-by-state approach. “Having 50 different state laws for compensating student athletes on their name, image, likeness would result in chaos and endless litigation,” Rubio said. “It is clear Congress must address this important issue.”

  • While there is a long way to go on the issue, and probably many lawsuits to come, this step by the upper house of Congress seems to solidify that athletes will one day have access to their own rights. Why else would a working group be formed unless they plan on creating a structure for athlete compensation?


 

DOWN & DISTANCE

  • SBJ's David Broughton reports the 20 teams competing in this weekend's 10 FBS conference championship games will travel a combined total of 8,600 miles and occupy approximately 2,100 hotel room nights. Utah will travel approximately 1,530 miles roundtrip to play Oregon in Santa Clara,, the most of any of the 12 schools travelling to a neutral-site game (P5 and MAC). The Utes booked 134 hotel rooms for one night -- the Pac-12 covers 132 room nights for official team travel party -- and will head home after the game. Georgia will head around an hour or so south to Atlanta for the SEC title game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

 

CONFERENCE TITLE GAME TRAVEL
SCHOOL
LOCALE
MILES FROM CAMPUS
Hawaii
Boise
2,836
Louisiana
Boone (N.C.)
1,176
UAB
Boca Raton
767
Utah
Santa Clara (Calif.)
765
Oregon
Santa Clara (Calif.)
554
LSU
Atlanta
526
Cincinnati
Memphis
477
Wisconsin
Indianapolis
334
Virginia
Charlotte
270
Oklahoma
Arlington (TX)
194
Miami (Ohio)
Detroit
187
Ohio State
Indianapolis
177
Central Michigan
Detroit
154
Clemson
Charlotte
135
Baylor
Arlington (TX)
94
Georgia
Atlanta
70
NOTE: Appalachian State, Boise State, FAU and Memphis not listed as they are hosting conference title games.
Download the
FBS title game travel


  • Tomorrow is the last Pac-12 title game at Levi's Stadium before a move to Las Vegas next year, and the Portland Oregonian's John Canzano believes that if ABC "pulls back and gives its audience a wide shot of the stadium, what you’ll see are tens of thousands of empty seats." The 68,500-seat venue, which has drawn over 50,000 fans only once since getting the game in 2014, is "expected to be about half filled." Canzano: "The hope is that the allure of The Strip and a new NFL stadium will help sell tickets." 

 


SPEED READS

  • The NFLPA's Ahmad Nassar, who will lead the OneTeam joint venture with the MLBPA and RedBird Capital, was a panelist at our Dealmakers in Sports conference yesterday and talked about how the movement around NIL was a big impetus for starting the new venture: "You've seen big unions like the NBPA take back their rights from the NBA. You've seen the U.S. Women's National Team take back their marketing rights from U.S. Soccer. ... If we had tried to do this 5-10 years ago, it wouldn't have worked. So this really is the perfect time for it."

  • LSU may have to give some credit to MIT for its return to the top of the football food chain this season. The Wall Street Journal's Laine Higgins writes the Tigers' success in 2019 may be "partly owed to a technological advance in the weight room arms race that has gripped college football in recent years." The school partnered with Perch, an "unknown fitness startup founded by a trio of 20-somethings" from Cambridge, Mass., who collect data in the area of “velocity-based training."

  • USF is a little over halfway to its $40 million funding goal for a new football center with $21 million pledged, but with the recent dismissal of coach Charlie Strong, progress is "expected to slow" on the project. AD Michael Kelly also said that the next coach "will be expected to engage more with donors and the alumni community."

  • It's that time of year again. CFP Executive Director Bill Hancock appeared on Paul Finebaum's program to give his annual defense against the perception that TV networks push for the usual suspects: "TV wouldn’t want to be a part of it. And even if they did, we would say ‘No, you don’t have anything to do with this. Get out of here.’” 

  • USA Today's Dan Wolken writes under the header, "Time Is Right For An SEC Team To Hop On The Lane Kiffin Train." That comes as sources put Arkansas AD Hunter Yurachek in Boca Raton this past weekend looking to woo Kiffin away from FAU. SI's Pat Forde had fun with the speculation on the Yahoo College Football podcast: “The only thing that we would be missing with Lane Kiffin back in the SEC is the late Mike Slive. … He hated Lane Kiffin. I mean he couldn’t stand Kiffin. Slive was all about decorum and collegiality. …. And Greg Sankey didn’t fall far from the Mike Slive tree."

 

 

 

Enjoying this newsletter? We've got more! Check out SBJ Media with John Ourand on Mondays and Wednesdays for insights into all the latest news around the world of sports media. Also check out SBJ Football from Ben Fischer on Friday afternoons.

Something on the College beat catch your eye? Tell us about it. Reach out to either me (msmith@sportsbusinessjournal.com) or Austin Karp (akarp@sportsbusinessjournal.com) and we'll share the best of it. Also contributing to this newsletter is Thomas Leary (tleary@sportsbusinessdaily.com).