SBJ College: Georgia State Naming-Rights Deal Rivals Power 5

Army hires Legends. Georgia State signs a naming-rights sponsor. Outfront Media might have a buyer for its college business. Believe it or not, business deals are getting done in college athletics.

Here is what's cookin' on campus.

VAN WAGNER LANDS NAMING-RIGHTS DEAL FOR GEORGIA STATE

• Georgia State will now have one of the richest stadium naming-rights deals outside of the Power 5 conferences. The Sun Belt school in Atlanta has closed a 15-year, $21.5 million agreement with Center Parc Credit Union that provides naming rights to the school’s football stadium. The contract will be reviewed by the University System of Georgia Board next week, where it is expected to be approved. The board included the terms when it released the meeting’s agenda.
  
  
• Van Wagner Sports & Entertainment had been in the marketplace about two years trying to sell naming rights to the stadium, which was previously Centennial Olympic Stadium before being converted to Turner Field for the Braves. The GSU football team took over when the Braves left for the suburbs and has played in the venue just south of downtown the last three seasons. In addition to branding inside the stadium, Center Parc Credit Union will be seen by thousands of drivers on the interstate each day -- the venue sits at the busy merger of I-85 and I-75. Center Parc is a division of the Atlanta Postal Credit Union.
  
  
• Georgia State has seen its revenue from corporate partnerships increase since it began working with Van Wagner as its multimedia rightsholder in 2015. Naming rights were not part of that original deal, but AD Charlie Cobb hired Van Wagner in a separate agreement to sell naming rights. At a time when practically nothing is selling because of the pandemic’s effect on business, Van Wagner somehow got this one to the finish line.
  
  
• The Panthers’ deal would be the ninth largest in terms of total value in college athletics for all venues, based on research by SBJ’s David Broughton, and fifth largest for college football stadiums. Colorado State (Canvas Stadium) is the only other Group of 5 school in that top five $2.5 milllon annually). GSU’s $1.433 million per year is just dollars ahead of naming-rights deals at Minnesota (TCF Bank Stadium) and Rutgers (SHI Stadium). According to SportsAtlas research, Houston is another Group of 5 school with a lucrative deal ($1.5 million annually from TDECU). South Alabama (Hancock Whitney Bank), UAB (Protective Life), North Texas (Apogee) and New Mexico (DreamStyle) each get $1 million annually for their stadiums.

Georgia State's stadium offers prime exposure just south of downtown Atlanta near some very busy highways

HAS NCAA CEDED TOO MUCH POWER TO POWER 5 CONFERENCES?

• The NCAA has ceded so much control to the Power 5 conferences that the leadership in college athletics has become fractured and ineffective. That’s the opinion of Charlotte AD Mike Hill, who spoke on a networking call this afternoon with sports marketing execs. Both ADs on the call, Hill and Doug Gillin of Appalachian State -- two of the most respected and influential voices in the Group of 5 -- boldly predict that the structure of college athletics is about to undergo some serious alterations in the coming years.
  
  
• Hill: “We’re in the middle of the biggest crisis we’ve faced in college athletics and there’s a lot of deference from the NCAA to the conferences. … I just don’t think the NCAA has the same authority level it once did. So, we’ve seen a shift to the autonomy conferences (P5) making a lot of decisions based on what’s in their best interests and that’s created a chasm” between the P5 and everybody else.
  
  
• Gillin: “For the schools in the Group of 5, it’s a resource issue, and it’s going to be resources … for what changes might come. I think you’ll even see in the next couple of weeks more change in the Group of 5 as we get closer to the fall.” Gillin did not elaborate on what that change might be.
  
  
• Hill: “The five autonomy commissioners were in lockstep a few months ago on what the plan was going to be for college football and it all fell apart. It was every man and woman for themselves. You’ve also got a lot of talk about the autonomy 5 staging their own fall championships.”
  
  
• Hill: “There’s a fracture point that is real and I expect there to be fundamental change in the structure of college athletics over the next couple of years.”
  
  
• Gillin: “I agree there has to be some structural change. You’ve got the NCAA making decisions about the number of sports, the commissioners making decisions about the FBS. … There’s just a lot of different decision-makers.”

REVISED ACC SCHEDULE HIGHLIGHTED BY CLEMSON-NOTRE DAME

• The ACC became the first power conference this morning to release its full schedule, with matchups, dates and each school’s non-conference opponent. Only Clemson and North Carolina have not filled their non-conference opening yet. The marquee game on the calendar is Clemson at Notre Dame on Nov. 7. The non-conference games don’t offer many compelling matchups. ACC schools clearly were looking for wins with their plus-one.
  
  
• Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick joined "The Paul Finebaum Show" this afternoon and talked about why it’s important to at least establish a schedule now. “All we’ve done is put ourselves in a position to try right now,” Swarbrick said. “If we start to get negative results, we’ll change. We won’t be able to play. But I think it represents good judgment, not bad, to get this far and prepare for the potential of a season.”
  
  

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SPEED READS

• Nick Khan, the CAA Sports agent who helped negotiate the SEC media rights deal and counted Paul Finebaum among the TV personalities he repped, will get a five-year deal from WWE as he becomes the outfit's president & CEO, according to a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. Khan will have a base salary of $1.2 million and an expected annual bonus of $1.9 million, which means he could hit up to $3.1 million if he hits all his bonuses. He also received a signing bonus of $5 million and picked up a $15 million stock grant that vests in five years.
  
  
• Virginia released a slew of interesting ticketing numbers from the 2019 season in an RFP for stadium seating, reports SBJ’s David Broughton. The Cavaliers averaged 47,862 fans last season at Scott Stadium, with 20,563 season tickets sold. Among those crowds, 3,599 full-season chairbacks were sold, generating $135,223. An additional 5,751 single-game chairbacks at $10 each brought in an estimated $57,510 over the course of seven games. For 2020, early-bird pricing was set at $37 per season-long chairback. Around July 1, this pricing jumped to $47. Virginia’s RFP seeks a company to oversee its chairback stadium seating services for the 2021 football season. Bids are due by 3pm ET on Aug. 24, and a vendor will be picked by December for the 2021 season.
  
  
• Fresno State has joined Opendorse Ready, the name, image and likeness readiness program that helps athletes maximize their NIL value by providing social media brand development. Fresno State is the first university in California and the Mountain West to join Opendorse Ready. The Bulldogs, Nebraska, Clemson and Indiana are among the schools to adopt the program so far.
  
  
• COVID-19 first put a halt to a Notre Dame-Navy matchup in Ireland to start the season, and with the Irish going in with ACC on scheduling, that game was then taken completely off the books. But Navy today announced a replacement in independent BYU, which itself had lost five games due to intra-conference scheduling for 2020. The Annapolis Capital Gazette noted Navy will host BYU for a game on ESPN on Sept. 7 in primetime. Navy will make a return trip to BYU sometime in the future. And while Notre Dame and Navy will not play their matchup this year, the schools today did announce an extension of the series through 2032.
  
  
• The UMass football team plans to play as many games as it can schedule this season, despite the news that neighbor and rival UConn has decided to sit it out. UMass AD Ryan Bamford told media yesterday that the Minutemen, a football independent, are working to replace the three opponents they’ve lost. Bamford: “It’s been an advantage as an independent to maneuver around some things. We ultimately will be able to make our own decisions on the competitive environment for this fall. If college football is going to be played, I think we can find some opponents to fill out the schedule.” Boston College is considered a potential opponent.
  
  
• Learfield IMG College is launching “With U,” a national marketing campaign designed to better connect fans and sponsors to college sports. The campaign will activate with more than 170 schools nationwide with which Learfield IMG College has multimedia rights deals.

THROWBACK THURSDAY

• It was mid-August in 2010 that John Ourand and I reported that the Big Ten had begun to rework its media deal with ESPN and would sell the rights to the conference’s championship football game. Those deals, plus the maturity of the Big Ten Network, which launched in 2007, set the groundwork for monster increases in TV revenue for Jim Delany’s league and set it on a course to make more money from media than any other conference for the next decade. That TV money led to record distribution of $54 million per school in 2018.

Enjoying this newsletter? We've got more! Check out SBJ Media with John Ourand and SBJ Esports with Adam Stern and Trent Murray. Also check out the SBJ Unpacks newsletter every Monday-Friday night, as we look at how the sports industry is being impacted by COVID-19.

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).