ACC looks to corporate sponsorships as a way to boost the bottom line of league revenue

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Jim Phillips has spent his five-plus-year tenure as Atlantic Coast Conference commissioner trying to generate more revenue for a league facing financial pressures even with yearly record hauls.

For his league — and across the national landscape in the revenue-sharing era, for that matter — that has included more emphasis on corporate sponsorships.

Finding event sponsors for naming rights. Securing deals for advertisements on conference TV networks. It's all about looking for ways to sell those options and supplement the media rights payouts and earnings from postseason success that stand as core engines of the college financial system.

And stacking every bit helps in a time when schools are allowed to pay athletes directly.

“I don’t know if it’s pressure, but it’s the reality,” Phillips said Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press during the league's preseason football media days. “To me it’s the reality of this role and it’s reality of our league. We have to continue to find incremental dollars each and every year that continue to grow.”

That's been a particular focus for Phillips, too, in dealing with a significant revenue gap behind the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference since his spring 2021 arrival.

The league reported about $826.5 million in total revenue in tax filings covering the 2024-25 sports season, with schools earning a full distribution share getting an average of $47.1 million.

That continued the ACC's upward trajectory; the league reported $617 million for 2021-22 in Phillips' first full season, good for a full-share average of $39.4 million. And Phillips said Wednesday during his annual forum that the league would crack $900 million in total revenue for the just-completed 2025-26 season.

By comparison, the Big Ten and SEC both crossed the $1 billion mark in total revenue in their 2024-25 filings, with the Big Ten paying an average of nearly $79.9 million to full-share members while the SEC came in at nearly $72.4 million.

The biggest way to move the needle for a league looking to change its financial picture typically is media rights contracts. The ACC is locked into a deal with ESPN — both for its base TV rights and the August 2019 launch of the ACC Network — through the 2035-36 season. The TV revenue continues to increase, but Phillips said at least some gains have come through corporate sponsorships, such as investment management firm T. Rowe Price putting its name on the tradition-rich men's basketball tournament.

The ACC has doubled its list of corporate sponsorships to nine in the past five years, a list that includes Apple, Dr Pepper, Gatorade and Allstate. On Wednesday, the league announced a deal with AI cybersecurity firm ReliaQuest, which includes advertising through ESPN, ESPN parent company Disney and the ACC Network.

That goes with other adjustments such as changes to the league's revenue-distribution model to reward programs that generate higher TV viewership and the “success initiative” that allows schools to keep money generated by their own postseason success.

“You can’t wait around, you can't just kind of sit on your hands as it relates to some of these other areas and not fully explore and commit to finding those additional dollars,” Phillips told the AP. “All of that stuff adds up incrementally.”

Bob Lynch is bullish on corporate sponsorships from a national level. He's the founder and chief executive officer of SponsorUnited, a company that uses AI to track sponsorship deals across professional and college sports.

“I think everybody's starting to recognize these are businesses as well as educational institutions that need to compete and drive value," Lynch said.

In its most recent report, SponsorUnited estimated that Power Four schools generated about $1 billion in corporate sponsorship revenue across roughly 6,300 deals for the 2025-26 season.

That equated to about $9.7 million per school in the ACC and $11.2 million for the Big 12, which announced a multiyear partnership with beverage brand Monster Energy last week. The SEC ($21.5 million) and Big Ten ($16.1 million) led the way in that report, with the Big 12 as the only league lacking its own TV channel.

“There’s not a lot of places where you can go to an AD and say, ‘Look I think we could potentially generate $5-10-20 million annually if we think differently about this side of the business and we can control it,'” Lynch said. “So it becomes a really intriguing space to look and say if we invest there, we could potentially extract a lot of dollars and generate a lot that we weren’t doing before."

In the ACC's case, that meant hiring Anthony Macri last September as its first chief revenue officer. Macri previously worked for a Formula 1 racing team and spent a decade with the NBA's Memphis Grizzlies, where bolstering sponsorship revenue represented a critical component.

Now he's trying to do that for the ACC, as well as helping schools in determining their own options on anything from patches on jerseys to arena signage. And unlike selling a finite number of tickets for an event, corporate sponsorships could offer layers of revenue options.

“We have a chance to really grow that area,” Macri said. “It's been an underleveraged opportunity that has unlimited growth potential, so that gives us a lot of room to push on.”

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AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-football-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-football