Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but the Protect College Sports Act appears to be on very, very thin ice. Via Ross Dellenger of Yahoo:
That doesn’t mean the bill is dead dead yet. As FOS points out, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) could “file for cloture Monday” and get a vote scheduled late next week, before the Senate shuts down for August. Even though President Trump supports the legislation and lawmakers from both majority political parties support it, the sticking point appears to be … the support of the Big Ten and SEC.
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Now, it’s been several years since I earned my political science degree, but I don’t seem to recall the U.S. Senate reserving any votes for college athletic conferences. But the thinking seems to go that without the support of the two largest leagues — the very entities whose power the Protect College Sports Act was originally supposed to limit — there won’t be enough lawmakers from either political party to vote for the bill.
This doesn’t make sense to me. There are special interest groups that lawmakers probably should be afraid of, groups that can raise a staggering amount of money or control massive voter lists that could shift an election. The Big Ten might have a lot of fans, but it doesn’t have the political operation of, say, the NRA, or AIPAC or the National Association of Realtors.
But Matt, of course the Big Ten and the SEC have leverage, because nobody wants to take a vote that ol’ State U doesn’t agree with! Who wants to anger sports fans in a contested election?
I disagree! I don’t think that’s likely at all.
Let’s look at the Senate for a second. There are 33 Senate seats up for election all over the country. But most of those elections are either (a) not expected to be remotely competitive or (b) are open seats where the incumbent isn’t running.
You know how many sitting U.S. senators are in a Big Ten or SEC state and facing what is projected to be at least kind of a competitive election? TWO. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH). Everybody else is either projected to win by more than 10 percentage points or is an open seat that doesn’t feature an incumbent senator (like North Carolina, Michigan, Texas, etc.), or outside the footprint of those two leagues.
The House isn’t much better, honestly. The Cook Political Report lists just 37 congressional districts as either toss-ups, “Lean R” or “Lean D” — and only 20 in Big Ten or SEC states. In case you’ve forgotten, there are 435 members of the House …so “potentially exposed politicians” is a tiny percentage in both units.
If you think that, like, the Paxton/Talarico election is going to hinge on antitrust exemptions for college athletes … friend, I just don’t know what to tell you, other than you live on a very different internet than I do.
Is the assumption here that voters are tracking this particular bill so much that they’d punish a lawmaker for not sufficiently supporting it? Or that voters are going to remember what happened during this debate to punish a guy in 2028? I just don’t find that realistic, especially as the bill has grown more complex and it becomes harder to point to any particular program being advantaged or disadvantaged by its passage.
The idea that federal legislation should hinge on the explicit support of the entity being regulated sets a dangerous precedent. Certainly, lawmakers should listen to those industries. They should invite their input. But don’t give them a veto. You’re the lawmaker. Greg Sankey isn’t.
this is not how the legislative process is supposed to work, I think
If you’re a lawmaker and you like the bill? In my humble opinion, you should support it. If you don’t like the bill, then vote against it. If you don’t care enough about policy to have an opinion after years of debate and are just waiting to hear what the most powerful industry voices say about a potential regulation, then I would suggest you find a different vocation. Lawmaking isn’t for you.
Two takes about jersey patches that aren’t long enough to justify an entire newsletter
One of the smarter things I’ve read recently about the jersey patch ecosystem came from Sportico’s Eben Novy-Williams, who noticed that an awful lot of these early big jersey sponsors are banks. Some are huge national institutions, like Chase (Ohio State) and SoFi (Notre Dame), while others (like at Michigan State) are regional.
If anything, I’m a little surprised that even more financial institutions haven’t purchased sponsorship patches yet. There’s a direct-to-consumer play here, of course — banks want consumers to open checking accounts and get mortgages — and there’s a particularly important play for young, college-aged consumers, since many folks keep the same bank they signed up for at 18. But there’s also a talent acquisition play, as financial institutions tend to hire a lot of college graduates. Novy-Williams noted, for example, that Chase has hired over 1,700 Ohio State Buckeyes in just the past five years.
If you look at the type of companies that buy naming rights to college stadiums, or major sponsorships along scoreboards or athletic spaces, you’ll also see tons of financial institutions. Other popular major athletic department sponsors are insurance companies and health care systems. I’d expect to see more patches there, too, rather than beloved regional fast food chains or quirky independent newsletters.
If I were a smaller conference or mid-major institution trying to drum up demand for my sponsorship assets, I’d be selling the recruitment angle just as hard, if not harder, than the size of the potential audience for DTC plays. State agencies, car rental companies, insurance companies or anybody that needs to hire a lot of younger, college-educated workers would likely find meaningful benefit from deeper athletic sponsorships.
I’ve also seen some fans comparing the Ohio State and Notre Dame jersey deals (reported as in the $15 million to $17 million range and $18 million to $20 million, respectively) as proof that the Big 12 got a terrible deal for its Monster patch (valued at roughly $1 million a school, reportedly).
I don’t think that’s entirely fair, as the Monster deal doesn’t preclude Big 12 institutions from signing their own patch deals, as Oklahoma State, Kansas and BYU have already done. Comparing those two agreements feels a little apples to oranges.
But also … perhaps I’m biased, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that real estate on Ohio State’s or Notre Dame’s jerseys is nearly as valuable as smaller restate across the entire Big 12.
There aren’t very many truly national brands in college athletics, but Ohio State and Notre Dame (and Michigan, whenever it announces a deal) are unquestionably in that elite group. Some of that is because of their sustained athletic success over 100-plus years, but it’s also because of institutional size (Ohio State has more than 50,000 students!), geography and demographics. When lots of people move out of Ohio to places like Chicago, D.C., Arizona, Florida, etc., they take their Ohio State fandom with them.
BYU is the only Big 12 school I’d argue is truly NATIONAL, and its reach is really more global (thanks to the school's ties to the LDS church) than purely athletic. The other schools, while excellent, are mostly serving regional audiences in smaller population centers. That’s okay.
If money alone were all that mattered, Indiana wouldn’t be the defending national champs in football, Michigan wouldn’t have won the last men’s basketball championship, and the Big 12 wouldn’t be an elite basketball conference. In a world where athletic budgets will continue to soar to more than $200 million, I don’t think bragging over alleged jersey patch numbers is worth the space on message boards. But that’s just me.
A few other things we wrote recently that you might have missed:
High-tech stuff is important, of course, but I want to argue in defense of the humble highway billboard as a potential source for athletic department revenue and awareness generation. There are worse places to steal marketing ideas than Wall Drug. If you know, you know.
While I was on vacation, the FOIA Family over at NILnomics and FOIABall dug into why the “official” attendance numbers you see at college football games are often bunk. Turns out, way fewer people actually get their tickets scanned into the game. Sometimes that gap is as high as 40 percent, or more!
Here’s what we can learn from a new book on the Walter Byers era.
We’re, like, this close to hitting 15,000 total documents in the Extra Points Library. Over the past week, we’ve added salary data for more than 5,000 new athletic department employees across the country, plus new Division II budget data, major Division I vendor contracts, and the latest coach contracts across baseball, golf, track and more.
If you want an affordable way to get access to the latest and most accurate college sports data, check out Extra Points Library today.
And we didn’t write this, but I want to make sure everybody here knows about it:
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Dang, now I need to find a way to make the Extra Points Bowl trophy even better…
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Thanks for reading. I’ll see you on the internet next week!
