SBJ College: What's Next For The Multimedia Rights Space?

Do I have this right? Another basketball season is going to start in less than a month and Bill Self will be the coach at Kansas, Will Wade will be at LSU, Bruce Pearl will still be at Auburn and Sean Miller will be at Arizona.

Here is what's cookin' on campus.

NEW PLAYERS COULD IMPACT FUTURE OF COLLEGE RIGHTS

• Schools are contemplating what to do with their multimedia rights in this unstable environment. Here's what they're asking: Do they stick with their current rightsholder, even if it means a reduction in guaranteed fees? If not, do they take their rights in-house or seek a different partner that might not be able to offer a raise?
  
  
• Just about every athletic department has had this conversation in recent months, which has led to speculation about the future of the multimedia rights business. Learfield IMG College remains the dominant force, despite well-chronicled economic headwinds in 2020, but here are four other storylines I’m watching:
  
  
• Playfly, the company that acquired 11 collegiate properties from Outfront Media, remains in an aggressive acquisition mode, CEO Mike Schreiber said, and he would love to add more school rights. “We’re just getting started,” he said.
  
  
• Practically every business in this space is sniffing around Fox’s collegiate sports properties, whose crown jewels include USC, Michigan State and Auburn. But there remains one significant roadblock to a sale. These school deals include a change-of-control clause that allows them to exit if there’s a change in ownership, insiders say. That makes the Fox college properties less attractive to a potential buyer.
  
  
• What’s the next move for Legends and Elevate Sports Ventures? Legends has established strong relationships at Notre Dame, among other schools, across multimedia and premium sales, and has the capacity for more. Elevate, which is setting up HQ in my backyard here in Charlotte, dipped its toe in the college waters two years ago and has an interest in college as part of its strategy going forward. Those are certainly two agencies to watch.
  
  
• We’ve been hearing about Ben Sutton and his Teall Capital making an entry into the collegiate marketplace and that talk is not going away. It seems to be more a matter of when, not if, before we start to see Sutton signing schools to a new revenue-producing model.

Could Auburn's multimedia rights be among those on the move in the near future?

CSMG GETS BIG INVESTMENT FROM GENERATION CAPITAL PARTNERS

• Another player in collegiate media and marketing, CSMG, earned a major boost this week when it received a new financing round from Generation Capital Partners. Terms of the investment were not disclosed, but Generation on its website says it targets equity investments of $10 million to $50 million. CEO Michael Schreck said, “It’s enough to keep us in business for the next several years.”
  
  
• CSMG has carved out a healthy business selling sponsorships and media rights for mostly smaller colleges and conferences. Schreck also is bullish on esports -- CSMG has acquired esports rights at the high school, NJCAA and four-year college level that add to the agency’s collection of rights to sell against.
  
  
• The new investment won’t put CSMG in bidding wars for Power 5 schools -- “That’s not our business model,” Schreck said. But it will keep the company competing at the mid-major level as a properties group and media rights rep.

AMERICAN UNIVERSITY PANELISTS TALK NAME, IMAGE, LIKENESS

• Name, image and likeness was the topic today on a virtual panel discussion sponsored by American Univ. A couple of compelling thoughts:
  
  
• Navigate Research Founder & CEO A.J. Maestas: “Imagine that there’s demand to produce a video game, there is talent, there is intellectual property and it generates incredible revenue. And those parties can’t come together. Is there another major sport in the world that doesn’t have a video game? For a lot of fans, the entry point is a video game.”
  
  
• Elliewood Partners Founder Ryan Kuehl: “What we could see these shoe and apparel companies do is get away from these all-sports deals and do it like they did back in the day, just go sport to sport. Especially if we’re talking about a challenger brand that can’t afford an all-sports deal, they could decide to just put the money into one or two athletes. Or maybe they decide to go younger and sign them before they even show up on campus.”

SPEED READS

• Charlotte-based LendingTree has agreed to a three-year extension as title sponsor of the bowl game at Ladd-Peebles Stadium in Mobile, Ala. (formerly the bowl game titled sponsored by Dollar General, GoDaddy and GMAC). Professional Sports Partners out of Houston brokered the LendingTree renewal. ESPN will announce its date and time on Friday.
  
  
• Cloud-based B2B communications firm Nextiva has signed a comprehensive telecommunications sponsorship with the Pac-12 that will put its brand on football coaches’ headsets beginning next week when play resumes in the conference, my colleague Terry Lefton reports. N.Y.-based Allied Sports, Nextiva’s agency of record, will handle activation, which is largely TBD.
  
  
• The Mountain West is looking at a series of smaller bubble set-ups, perhaps sending half the teams to Las Vegas and the other half to Colorado Springs, reports the San Diego Union-Tribune. The two complications are money and TV, as "someone’s got to pay for extra nights in a hotel for what would have been home games, and Mountain West TV partners CBS and Fox must sign off on it." Broadcasting from a single venue "makes more sense."
  
  
• Coastal Carolina football is getting a "stream of national media attention" after cracking the Top 25 for the first time in school history, notes the Myrtle Beach Sun News. Last week, ESPN, SiriusXM, Yahoo Sports, The Athletic and USA Today were among those reaching out for interviews. This week, ESPN "sent a three-person camera crew to campus" for a segment to air on "College GameDay" on Saturday morning.
  
  
• Northwestern AD Jim Phillips is advocating for former Illinois men's basketball coach Lou Henson, who passed away in July, to go into the Naismith Hall of Fame.
  
  
• The Big Ten is already in a bind with the cancellation of this weekend's Nebraska-Wisconsin game. Is the conference championship game now in jeopardy after just one week of play? The cancellation was definitely big news in Madison, Wisc., making the front page above the fold. 

THROWBACK THURSDAY

• On this day one year ago, legendary media exec and master dealmaker Barry Frank died at age 87. He spent 50 years in the business working with networks and properties, leaving a legacy so profound that even CBS Sports chair Sean McManus called Frank “a mentor.”

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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).