With expenses inevitably increasing — thanks to a long-overdue reckoning from a system that denied payment to players for decades — college football needs more money. One way to raise money is to find new revenue streams.
On Thursday, the NCAA’s Playing Rules Oversight Panel approved the use of corporate logos on fields for regular-season games in all divisions. The change becomes effective immediately.
As explained by Ben Portnoy of Sports Business Journal, schools can put an ad at the 50-yard line, with no more than two smaller ads elsewhere on the field.
They should have thought of it a long time ago. Then again, that sort of blatant cash grab would have made the failure to give players fair compensation even more glaring.
The presence of logos will be glaring, at first, for fans. Most should be used to seeing it; corporate logos have been an integral part of the bowl season for a long time. And no one ever turned off a bowl game because they were miffed by the infiltration of toaster-pastry product placement.
Regardless, necessity is the mother of innovation. And this is an easy, low-hanging way to get more money without passing the hat (again) to alumni and other boosters.
The new rule also puts programs in competition, sort of, with players. Companies have finite advertising budgets. The schools will be trying to get that money for their fields. The players will be hoping to get some of the money for themselves.
And the end result will be just a little more chaos for a system that deserves every ounce of chaos it is experiencing.
