The Horizon League's secret weapon to sell more tournament tickets? MBA students

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A regular theme in this newsletter over the last several years has been that athletic departments generally don’t do a very good job of utilizing the expertise available elsewhere on campus.

Sure, most athletic departments will use students to help run broadcasts, produce copy for the Sports Information Department, and service as equipment managers. A few schools even go above and beyond and find ways to bring in students from completely different disciplines.

But in my experience, examples like Florida are less common. Whatever research is coming out of the business, law, journalism or sports management departments usually doesn’t make its way over to the athletics offices.

That’s why I think what the Horizon League just pulled off is especially clever.

Just in case you aren’t familiar, the Horizon League is a mid-major D-I conference, headquartered in Indianapolis. It’s unabashedly a basketball-centric league (it doesn’t sponsor football), and includes (mostly) urban campuses across the Midwest. Think schools like IU-Indy, UW-Milwaukee, Oakland, Cleveland State, etc. It’s a solid league, but it isn’t a conference of especially rich schools.

With no football or massive linear broadcast contract, one of the most important assets the league controls is the Horizon League Basketball Tournament. Beyond putting on an excellent event, the league would really like to sell a bunch of tickets. More ticket revenue means more money to spend on conference staff, programming and centralized resources.

But hiring a more well-known consulting company, like, say, Deloitte, could be very expensive. So instead, the Horizon League decided to call the Kelley School of Business at the University of Indiana.

Before the actual start of classes, students participated in a weeklong case competition to try to come up with the best possible strategies for the Horizon League to improve ticket sales and attendance. The student groups went through multiple rounds of presenting and judging, before the conference selected a final proposal.

“This is meant to be a bit of a jump in the deep end of the pool experience,” professor William Ball told me, as the students didn’t necessarily have any sort of experience or previous knowledge of the sports industry.

Ball believed that would actually benefit not just the students, but the Horizon League. Students who could approach the business problems of the conference without years of experience working in college sports may be better prepared to pitch “bold ideas” that might not otherwise make the whiteboard. “There’s value here, even for the ideas that didn’t win.”

After all, Ball noted, the Horizon League “doesn’t have a marketing staff of a hundred people. So what they end up seeing in this diverse solution ideas are things they may have never thought of, simply because they don’t have the resources to sit around and brainstorm.”

So what proposal won?

Of the 13 proposals, the winning deck recommended the Horizon create a “city-wide fan engagement initiative called the Indy Tipoff Tour.”

This event would give fans a “physical passport” that they could bring to a variety of participating local businesses, like restaurants, coffee shops and bars. When fans visit these locations, they get a stamp on their passport. If fans bring a stamped passport to any of the Horizon League Tournament games, they get entered into a raffle, with the grand prize being “Exclusive Experience” tickets to the 2026 Men’s Final Four.

The students tapped into similar programs that had absolutely nothing to do with college sports, like the Nebraska Beef Passport, and worked to select specific businesses to partner with that would align well with the tournament’s target demographic, event geography, and league budget.

This could be a win-win for everybody

The potential benefit for the Horizon League is clear. They got a clearly articulated supplemental marketing strategy without having to pay an established consulting company, plus potential brainstorming ideas from the other 12 project proposals. If the Indy Passport idea works out, the league enjoys improved attendance (and revenues), but even if that doesn’t happen, the conference is likely to improve their economic and social impact in their home market.

The winning students, Ball told me, got a trophy and all-important bragging rights over their peers as they head into the fall semester. But the case competition is about much more than just a trophy.

“I think we [IU] have done a really good job of preparing students for what they’ll experience across their MBA program. Why would we not want to share those successes with the community?”

If students are going to work in consulting, they’re regularly going to have experiences where a client asks them to work on an industry problem they’re not especially familiar with. A competitive case competition in an unfamiliar industry will test everyone’s research skills, creative thinking, teamwork and communication skills. That’s exactly the sort of practical experience that colleges want to be creating for their students.

Indiana, while an excellent business school, didn’t invent the business case study competition. Ball sees this model as one that potentially other conferences could employ, and for whatever it’s worth, I agree.

I’ll have to try to make the drive to the Tournament this year. And if I do, I’ll grab a passport…even though I’m pretty sure my press credential means I can’t actually win anything.

Btw, last week as super busy, so just in case, here’s some stuff you might have missed from Extra Points that is still sitting in your inbox somewhere

• We published a guest post from Dr. Neal Ternes at NIU, and Dr. Monyae Williamson-Gourley at Cincinnati, that suggests that many FBS stadiums have such broad Code of Conduct policies that they violate the first amendment.

• I wrote about some of my frustrations with how college football budgets are discussed during coach firing season, and that sometimes, what appears to be a small operating budget really isn’t. Here’s how you, yes you, can talk about data from the MFRS Report without making major mistakes. Or, to put it more bluntly, how to talk about budgets without sounding like a dumbass.

• I wrote that part of the struggles with college athletics reform comes from the fact that the system holds contradictory ideas at the same time. It’s a business, but also not a business. It’s an educational enterprise, but also isn’t. Honestly, that reminds me of church.

• And oh yeah, Elon and Queens are about to merge. Unlike other recent college mergers, both of these schools play D-I sports. So what happens next?

• I also took some time over the weekend to add some updates to Athletic Director Simulator 4000. I’ve rebalanced some early-game questions, so users should have an easier time either getting promoted, or fired, from their first low-major job. I also added a few completely new scenarios. Remember, the game will give you different questions (and different success probabilities), depending on what school profile you select, so play the game a few times to see everything.

• We’re finishing a few larger updated to the game to improve player Quality of Life and provide more resources to professors who use the game in class. We’ll have more information very soon. Just want to test everything a bit more before it goes live.

• And finally, we added even more documents and salary databases to the Extra Points Library. At the D-I level, we now have over 7,500 documents, including way more volleyball and softball coaching contracts, new AD contracts (like new Utah State AD Cameron Walker), MMR deals, and more. You can learn more about our regular updates to Library by subscribing, for free, to the Library Card:

We’ve got another big week planned, from guest posts, to major news at our sister publication, NIL-Wire, to original reporting, and much more.

Thanks for reading. We’ll see you on the internet this week.