College football is entering its branding era

As the college football season kicks off in earnest this weekend, fans will be adjusting to a number of new aspects of the game, including a 12-team championship playoff, unprecedented conference realignment, radio communication between coaches and quarterbacks, and even a two-minute warning. But the change that ultimately might prove most noticeable to the viewer will be writ large across the playing field itself: advertiser logos.

Less than three months ago, the National Collegiate Athletic Association decided to allow sponsor logos to be placed on the field alongside team logos in order to produce a new source of revenue for colleges, one that is desperately needed in the wake of the upending of the old college football business model of not actually, you know, paying the players whose labor was bringing in millions of television and ticket dollars.

On-field advertising logos are not exactly new to college football; they’ve long been part of postseason bowl games played at neutral sites. Fans of a certain age may recall trying to make sense of the funky array of IBM OS/2 logos painted on the grass—or dirt, really—at the 1993 Fiesta Bowl, and as recently as last season, the midfield logo at the Avocados from Mexico Cure Bowl took on a starring role as it turned into a soupy mess in an Orlando downpour. And prior to this year, college football programs that had sold the naming rights to their stadiums—among them over a quarter of the members of the Football Bowl Subdivision, the top level of college football—had been permitted to display the logos of those naming sponsors on their fields, as seen at Georgia Tech’s Bobby Dodd Stadium at Hyundai Field and the University of Kentucky’s Kroger Field at C. M. Newton Grounds.

A new playing field

Given the short run-up following the NCAA’s June announcement of its new policy, it’s not surprising that only a few on-field logo deals have been finalized as the season begins. Texas Tech launched its larger partnership with Adidas this summer by announcing that it would adorn its already-sponsored field at Jones AT&T Stadium with the shoemaker’s three-stripe logo along with that of its pitchman, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback and Texas Tech alum Patrick Mahomes. Southeastern Conference giant Tennessee inked an agreement with fellow Knoxville institution Pilot Flying J chain of travel centers, earning the company some local goodwill even as it added credence to the late Bill Walton’s characterization of the SEC as a “truck stop” conference.

Smaller schools have rustled up more eclectic sponsorships: Coastal Carolina University’s teal-colored “Surf Turf” will sport the logo of the South Carolina State Election Commission, and Pitbull’s purchase of Florida International’s stadium naming rights will likely mean that the musician will have a presence on the Panthers’ field.

More logo ads will undoubtedly spring up on college gridirons as the season progresses; as a University of South Carolina official noted, all it takes is “a stencil for the field and a check.” But perhaps colleges shouldn’t rush into slapping down any old logo on their grass. College football, more than any other American sport, is focused on team brands. Individual players come and go more quickly than in the pros, especially now in the era of the transfer portal and NIL, when every athlete essentially becomes a free agent at the end of each season.

But universities and their teams stay put; there are no Brooklyn Dodgers or Baltimore Colts running off to greener pastures. And college teams are more solidly rooted in the identities of their fans as representatives of the places they live, grew up, or went to school. College logos, then, as the embodiment of those brands, hold great importance to fans. (As the SEC likes to put it, “It just means more.”)

A commercial logo is placed on the field next to a college symbol not just to garner eyeballs, but in the hope that some of the team brand’s mojo will rub off on it. But the reverse is also true, as the advertiser’s brand will be reflected onto the university, in potentially embarrassing ways. Hollywood loves to get a laugh out of this aspect of sponsorship, but no one in real life wants to look like Rocky Balboa entering the ring with a Shamrock Meats ad on his robe, or the Bad News Bears wearing a Chico’s Bail Bonds logo on their uniforms.

The branding kickoff

The schools that have adopted on-field ads to date seem to have done a decent job of selecting partners. The Adidas logo confers some degree of legitimacy on Texas Tech’s midlevel football program (although not as much as Nike’s would, and if we don’t soon see a Swoosh on the field at the University of Oregon—alma mater of Nike founder Phil Knight—then what are we even doing here?). The Mahomes logo, with its vaguely creepy gladiator imagery that seems out of step with the exuberant mohawk haircut and behind-the-back passing that define the quarterback’s vibe, looks a bit out of place on the field, but being associated with a three-time Super Bowl winner can’t hurt. Coastal Carolina’s sponsor is a little more low-rent, but encouraging voting is certainly a noble cause for the Chanticleers to take up, and FIU must figure that the kids still like the 43-year-old “Mr. Worldwide.”

It’s Tennessee’s deal with Pilot that’s really next-level. While on-field advertising will widely be seen as anathema to the traditions of college football, the Pilot sponsorship pulls off a judo reversal to position the company as the savior of Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium, named in 1962 for the Volunteers’ legendary coach, General Robert Neyland. The university has announced that the funding from Pilot will preclude it from having to sell the stadium’s naming rights and will help pay for its renovation.

This tension between the allure of advertising revenue and the pull of college football’s traditional ways will be interesting to watch play out. Some of the sport’s blue bloods have signaled their reluctance to have their fields besmirched with ads; Alabama’s athletic director told reporters, “Never say never, but we obviously are fairly conservative when it comes to what we do from anything like that.” When Major League Baseball cast aside tradition last year and allowed advertisements on uniforms, there was similar speculation that certain teams might not lower themselves to participate. But today, even the New York Yankees take the field for every game wearing “Starr Insurance” patches on their sleeves.