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#10: New Ohio State Football OC Chip Kelly had a $1.5M buyout at UCLA, which Bruins AD Martin Jarmond said will be fully enforceable. (link) |
#9: Congratulations to Iowa women’s basketball student-athlete Caitlin Clark on setting the NCAA women’s basketball all-time scoring record. Here’s the shot (from the logo, of course) that broke the record (link) and the Carver-Hawkeye Arena crowd hitting 116 decibels in celebration. (link
); Clark: “I’m just thankful more than anything else. I will just be proud, proud of the way I worked for this more than anything.” The Athletic’s Ben Pickman notes that “although Clark has now set the NCAA record, she has yet to break Lynette Woodard’s women’s college basketball career scoring record of 3,649 points, set at Kansas in 1981 in the AIAW
era. If Clark maintains her current scoring average, of 32.1 points per game, she’ll likely pass Woodard by the start of the Big Ten tournament in early March. Though it wouldn’t appear in the record book, Clark could pass Pete Maravich’s all-time NCAA scoring record — men’s or women’s — of 3,667 points before the season ends.” (link); Vivid Seats saw a 68% jump in the overnight listed ticket price for last night’s game, per Sportico, which notes the average sold ticket price for the game was $270 as of Thursday. “This game was the best-selling women’s basketball ticket ever on StubHub.” (
link) |
#8: UCLA will place at least 1,000 students in the front rows of four sections directly behind the visiting team at the Rose Bowl
next season. School officials say this will make UCLA the only Big Ten team to have its students sitting directly behind the opponent. Nick Brown, president of the student fan group The Den: “By moving closer to the action, our new student section will further elevate the in-game experience for students and student-athletes alike. Every eight-clap will mean that much more — and give our Bruins an even stronger home-field advantage.” (link); Here’s a look at the new configuration via the Los Angeles Times’ Ben Bolch. (link) |
#7: Playfly
has released a new study called the Playfly College Football Fan Score, which SBJ’s Ben Portnoy describes as a “combo of in-house metrics married with those accrued through a strategic partnership with Vision Insights to help quantify fandom and commercial viability in major college football.” There are two separate top 25 rankings, one for the Power 5 and one for the Group of 5
, and they take into account passion (measured by enrollment and fan base size, attendance and viewership, team performance, fan engagement and participation and fan commitment) receptivity (fans’ responsiveness to advertising) and marketplace (mix of media and advertiser demand and athletic department revenue). Playfly CEO Michael Schreiber: “All these rankings all over the place, and most of them are performance-based, or coach salary-based. Nothing is really [written] on the marketing and commercial side – and that's where we live. So we thought it would be really interesting and useful to release those rankings." Playfly Head of Research Gregg Liebman adds: “Doing custom research, getting fans’ sentiment about the overall direction of the league, and sharing that with the industry – it was incredibly positive. ... A lot of those insights had not really been shared, and we're proud of sharing that and the health of the overall college landscape is really strong.” (
link) |
#6: The Arizona
Board of Regents is in negotiations with an external firm to help restructure the athletic department and streamline athletic administration “from the ground up.” UA Interim CFO John Arnold says the department needs a complete overhaul to bring it into the "modern athletics market,” adding: “We need to reset their budget and install hard budget caps.” According to the Arizona Republic’s
Helen Rummel, UA overspent its athletics budget by $32M in FY23 while the university overspent about $61M on all of its academic units combined. Given the rising costs associated with collegiate sports, Arnold said there will need to be a shift in how people think about athletics funding. "It's just unrealistic to think that athletics moving forward can be a stand-alone, self-funded unit. In the modern athletics market, that's just not possible." (link) |
#5: Women Leaders in Sports
held its board meetings in Kansas City late last week, which included a visit to CPKC Stadium. Lots of familiar faces. (link) |
#4: The College Football Playoff has agreed to a six-year, $1.3B per year extension with ESPN
that will run through 2031-32, per The Athletic's
Andrew Marchand, Nicole Auerbach, Stewart Mandel and Chris Vannini. Up from the $608M per year deal under the four-team playoff, the quartet note: "The full contract’s completion is still contingent on CFP leaders finalizing details of the expanded format in the wake of the implosion of the Pac-12. The CFP’s management committee and board of managers have meetings scheduled for next week and continue to work through the complicated process of settling their outstanding issues. The ESPN deal will not be ratified until the commissioners and presidents vote on the structure and financials of the expanded CFP. [...] Over the course of the contract, ESPN will have the ability to sublicense games, meaning another network or digital player could air Playoff games, but it would be at Disney-owned ESPN’s discretion." (
link) |
#3: The NCAA aired a new PSA during the pregame for Sunday night’s
Super Bowl, utilizing commercial inventory that had previously been used to promote March Madness, per SBJ’s
Ben Portnoy. This year, the association chose to tout its recent efforts, as NCAA SVP of Business Performance Brian Higgins tells Portnoy: “We thought with all the other things we were doing in the national office — to do more for our student-athletes and hopefully change some of the image of the NCAA — that it would be a better use of that 30-second spot to talk about the holistic student-athlete model and the mental health services that are going to be available for students.” (link) |
#2: Nebraska drew a record 15,042 fans for its women’s basketball upset win over Iowa. (link); After the game, Hawkeyes HC Lisa Bluder tried to get into the media room, according to KGAN’s Owen Siebring, and was heard shouting on an external microphone: “We’ve got a flight to catch. This is bulls–t. This is not Big Ten protocol. … They play music while you shoot free throws and now this?” Siebring notes the visiting team is traditionally supposed to go to the podium first. (link, link) |
#1: The Mercury News'
Jon Wilner reports the Pac-12 "has formally begun the process of separating from commissioner George Kliavkoff." (link) |
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