So this is how the last shred of purity in college football dies. With thunderous applause.
On Tuesday morning, Ohio State blew the market away when it announced a deal with JPMorgan Chase to place its logo on the jerseys of all 36 Buckeyes teams for a reported $17 million per year. Hours later, Notre Dame followed with an equivalent deal with SoFi worth a reported $18-20 million annually.
Needless to say, that is serious money.
The Los Angeles Lakers are believed to have the highest jersey patch deal in American sports, striking a deal with the personal finance app Albert earlier this month worth a reported $30 million a year. The New York Yankees are at $25 million a year. The scale slides down from there, with the Cincinnati Reds accepting a reported $5 million a year to sell a patch to Kroger.
Until Tuesday, only 30 Division I schools had struck jersey patch deals, per the Sports Business Journal database, and only 10 in the Power 4. Now that the Buckeyes and the Fighting Irish have jumped in the pool (and set a price they're willing to sell themselves for), every self-styled blue-blood will at least have to ask itself once more what its own price is. And every the bloods of every other color will have to redouble its effort to get its own deal, lest they fall even further behind.
“In this ecosystem, I am fine,” Texas AD Chris Del Conte said last August after selling ad space on Campbell-Williams Field at Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium in regards to putting space on the Longhorns' jerseys, echoing comments from Steve Sarkisian who called his team's jerseys "sacred ground." “We did not need this deal. I did not need this deal to make this work, to make this new era of college athletics work. When people are looking to go do this and say we need that to offset what NIL and revenue share looks like, that’s not what we needed. That’s not what we needed at the University of Texas.”
Maybe so, but Del Conte and every single one of his peers will be asked if their thinking has changed now that a jersey patch can pay for almost an entire side of the ball in football.
And if Notre Dame can make up to $20 million a year, what can the Dallas Cowboys make? The Green Bay Packers? In 2010, Roger Goodell set a goal to take his league to $25 billion in annual revenue by 2027. The NFL was at $14 billion at last check (a figure that does not include local revenues), and figures to earn a lot more once it can opt out of its 11-year, $125 billion TV deals in 2029. Until then, selling ad patches would be an easy way to add another billion to the pile.
My thoughts on jersey patches are well established, and I recognize they are more extreme than most. And that's fine. For the majority of fans, selling this sacred real estate will go largely unnoticed, and I envy you. But for the uniform purists among us, a jersey patch is the type of sight that can't be unseen, and Tuesday's news shows there is going to be a lot that can't be unseen.