Are there investments that are still too toxic for college sports?

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Keep your students engaged and informed with Extra Points Classroom

If you're teaching anything about the business of college sports, you know how difficult it can be to try to build a syllabus. With the industry changing every few weeks, forget textbooks. They'll be outdated before midterms!

That's why we built Extra Points Classroom, our resource bundle to save professors time, save students money and give everybody up-to-date information they can actually use.

EPC includes premium access to Extra Points, plus access to our massive contract and budget database (Extra Points Library) and our computer game (Athletic Director Simulator 4000).

It also includes supplemental curriculum materials, so you have extra reading resources and case studies on everything from realignment to NIL. For more information on how Extra Points Classroom can serve your students, from high school to graduate school, click here.

Last week, David Covucci over at FOIABall broke a huge story: The ACC took a proposal to move the Holiday Bowl to Saudi Arabia seriously enough to bring it to member schools. Such a move, according to correspondence inspected by FOIABall, “would represent a ‘positive’ financial impact of $5-6 million.”

Also, via the story:

Significant cultural and reputational risks? You don’t say? 

A later report, from On3, claimed that the “athletic directors had conversations about it and decided they didn’t want to do it.” Given the number of times FOIABall found references to the proposal, I think it’s more likely that moving a bowl game to Saudi Arabia wasn’t entirely dismissed out of hand. But whether it was a brief flirtation or a serious consideration, it appears that the Holiday Bowl won’t be going to Jeddah.

I don’t mind admitting that when I first heard about this, my immediate, visceral reaction was, “Ew, gross.” While I’ve regularly written positively about playing college football games overseas, there are more, uh, human rights and legal considerations when you play a game in Jeddah than when you play in Brazil, Mexico, Germany, or Japan. Many human rights groups have accused Saudi Arabia of using significant investments in international sports to “sportswash” its negative international reputation.

But plenty of American universities already have strategic partnerships with countries that also have spotty human rights records. Shoot, the Pac-12 has played sporting events in China. If schools are already doing business in Saudi Arabia, and if major companies are doing the same, is it really crossing a massive reputational red line to play a Clemson/Washington football game there?

I still don’t like the idea. But after sitting with it for a few days, I can understand why an athletic director or conference official wouldn’t immediately dismiss it.

In fact, I feel fairly confident that there will be some sort of explicit Saudi Arabian tie to college athletics — be it a bowl game, exhibition, or public fundraising effort — in the next few years. There’s too much money floating around and too many programs who badly, badly want it.

If that feels unbelievable, just consider how many unbelievable things have happened over the past decade.

I started writing about college sports as my full-time job around 2012. Back then, the idea of selling alcohol to the general stadium population would have been considered too controversial for a lot of major athletic programs, even in states like Wisconsin and Ohio, which, uh, aren’t exactly strangers to alcohol consumption.

Sports gambling was illegal in most of the United States, and the idea that any athletic department would wink or nod towards gambling interests would have been ridiculous. The idea of potentially partnering with private equity or capital, putting advertisements directly onto the field of play or, God forbid, directly paying any college athletes, would have also been non-starters.

Shoot, I remember blogging about former Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany suggesting the conference would move to Division III if the NCAA lost the O’Bannon lawsuit.

So a lot has changed. Now, you can buy a frosty beer at almost every FBS stadium. Shoot, at Louisville, you can even buy a THC beverage. Gambling on sports is functionally legal just about everywhere, and for a minute, athletic departments even entered into explicit commercial relationships with sportsbooks. Barstool went from persona non grata all over higher education to getting its own bowl game (until the sponsorship was replaced by Snoop Dogg) and even being welcomed at BYU, of all places. Advertisements on football fields are commonplace, and corporate logos on actual college sports uniforms are likely to appear in the next year or two. The Big Ten is, at the very least, heavily flirting with accepting a private capital investment, and almost all of its peers have taken similar meetings.

And, oh yeah, the players get paid now. They’re still “amateurs,” because that phrase means whatever the NCAA’s lawyers want it to mean, I guess.

So in the span of 13 years, this industry has blown through at least a half dozen “red lines.” There’s more explicit commercialization than ever before, and thanks to athlete labor costs, increased operational costs and still-rabid fans, there’s now a more intense need to drive revenue than ever before.

So what’s still completely off the table?

I don’t ask this question to be a troll, or to do any holier-than-thou moralizing. I ask because standards have shifted so much, so quickly, that I think leaders ought to be very clear about where they believe the boundaries should be … lest they be left without any.

I remember asking variations of this question to a few ADs when we were first creating Athletic Director Simulator 4000, because we wanted the game to be realistic, even if we exaggerated a few scenarios for comedic purposes. The most common responses I got were about explicit and direct relationships with sportsbooks and gambling interests. But since every major broadcaster is now closely tied to gambling interests, that’s a line that can be hard to hold in practice.

Back in 2013, Florida Atlantic attracted controversy for entering into a stadium naming rights deal with a company that ran private prisons, with detractors naming the project “Owlcatraz.” I don’t know about at FAU specifically, but in 2025, it’s harder for me to imagine that project getting killed everywhere. I bet there are schools and markets where, for the right price, it would be acceptable.

My guess is that the only industry that would remain completely, 100 percent off-limits to any sort of sponsorship or partnership would be the adult entertainment industry. As cynical as I’ve become, I cannot imagine any school being okay with running an OnlyFans ad somewhere in its stadium (if such a partnership wouldn’t already be prohibited by state law).

But if state law didn’t prohibit it, could a school potentially partner with a weapons manufacturer? Shoot, Northrop Grumman already sponsors a bowl game. If Smith & Wesson offered to sponsor an athletic department, would Texas Tech really say no? Or Sam Houston State?

What about manufacturers of other THC products? Payday loans? Fracking? Is there anything about the college sports experience or asset portfolio that is 1000 percent, steadfastly, completely not for sale?

If so, I think it’s important for schools and conferences to speak up about where they think those red lines are, now, and in public.

I don’t think all of these changes are bad, actually. I believe it’s a good for consumers, public safety and revenue that most athletic departments now sell alcohol at events, since it creates incentives to curtail smuggling booze into buildings. I’m glad athletes can get paid, I don’t think slapping an ad on a football field is debasing some sacred temple, and I believe it’s perfectly fine for changing societal attitudes to influence where commercial red lines are drawn.

After all, according to Ronald Smith’s “Play-by-Play,” my definitive text for the history of college sports media, Notre Dame once prohibited any advertisements for “patent medicines and laxatives” on its radio broadcasts. I don’t think the Irish are in danger of courting any mortal sin if NBC runs a Miralax ad on Saturday.

But without more concrete principles beyond a vague “protecting the student-athlete experience,” I could see schools going in all sorts of uncomfortable directions without meaning to.

If those lines don’t exist, well, then schools should be comfortable saying that as well. If you’re going to be okay with playing in Riyadh, or slapping an Amway logo on your jersey, or letting CVC Capital Partners own 31 percent of your stadium, then let your fans and constituents know about that, too. Don’t hide behind euphemism when you want to make an unpopular decision that would generate more revenue.

I can’t say where the line should be. I’m not a university president or a conference commissioner. I know where the line is at Extra Points, and I know what sorts of companies and causes I won’t allow to be commercial or advertising partners.

I’d like to hear more of that from the folks who actually run college sports. Before somebody else makes those decisions for them.