From bourbon to lingerie: Inside the evolving landscape of licensing

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Today, I’m happy to publish one of those outside voices. Our pal KC Smurthwaite has a story today on the licensing world of college athletics. Extra Points readers know that licensing includes everything from digital video game IP to beer to sweatshirts. But it’s also a lot more than that….

I’ll pass the mic over to him.

Over many years working in college athletics in various roles, I’ve seen plenty of high-tension moments, but my time overseeing licensing as part of an athletic department's external affairs team brought a special kind of chaos.

One particular story sticks out in my memory: The football team’s defensive backs coach wanted players to be able to wear t-shirts that featured the university’s logo above the phrase “No Fly Zone,” and in a meeting, he explained the phrase’s meaning to a campus marketing and communications staffer: It referred to the team’s defensive identity, that it was great at stopping opponents from “passing through the air” — as if he were trying to explain it to a child. He went on to clarify, It’s just a saying in football. Nobody can pass against us. These are workout shirts.

Still, the school was resistant. Administrators thought “No Fly Zone” could confuse the aviation department or even a potential student, and there was no guarantee the shirts would stay confined to practice. In the end, the two sides came to an agreement: the phrase was moved to the back of the shirt, farther from the school’s logo. No one was really at fault. The person on the other end of the conversation had grown up in a house full of theater and arts majors. Yet somehow, they were the one policing the football team’s official gear.

Those kinds of conflicts are common. In an era when revenue drives almost every conversation, the language barrier between universities and athletic departments can feel worlds apart. Roughly half of university licensing programs don’t even sit within athletic departments; instead, they live inside campus marketing and communications offices. That means the people making final decisions on products, merchandise and even internal-use items often don’t reside in athletics. They might not fully understand everything that goes into a jersey, practice shirt or giveaway item — and that’s okay — but they still have the final say before anything gets printed.

Wil Spires, a partner at Affinity Licensing, which is a full-service trademark licensing firm, said that divide creates friendly silos that slow approvals and blur accountability. "It’s tough," he said. "If I’m dealing with someone on the university marketing side and we’re waiting on an answer from athletics, that creates a delay and vice versa."

And yet these two worlds have never needed each other more.