Jersey Patches Offer College Sports a Major Revenue Opportunity

Multibillion-dollar broadcasting rights deals, NIL agreements and a landmark settlement for compensating athletes have changed the landscape of finances in college sports. Yet there’s another frontier for colleges looking to generate revenue through sports that has yet to be explored—the sacred jersey.

Elevate’s Insights and College Division has released estimated jersey patch valuations for the top 50 college football and men’s college basketball teams ahead of the 2025-26 fiscal year.

Among the top 50 programs with the highest revenue potential for patch sales, the top patch valuation for a college football program is $6 million, while the top for a men’s college basketball program is $2.2 million. When correlated with Sportico’s own research, it’s assumed that the No. 1 college football team would be the Alabama Crimson Tide, and the Duke Blue Devils would be the leaders of the pack in men’s college basketball.

Further separating the wheat from the chaff would be the valuations of the top 10 schools for both sports. The range for the upper tier of football programs is between $3.5 million and $6 million, with an average valuation of $4.6 million. For the top 10 men’s basketball programs, the range is from $754,000 to $2.2 million, with an average valuation of $1.2 million.

Among all 50 programs for both sports, the average valuations are $2.2 million for a football team and $590,000 for a men’s basketball team.

Elevate, a sports business consultancy firm owned by Arctos Partners, Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, the San Francisco 49ers and Oak View Group, assumes that the patch size on a college basketball jersey would mirror the 2½-square inch patch for the NBA. For college football, the assumed 2 ¼-square inch ad patch would be smaller than the 3½ by 4½-inch patch NFL teams wear on their practice uniforms.

Jersey patch sponsorships will unlock a whole new revenue stream for athletic programs and schools. That was certainly the case when the NBA became the first of the four major male pro sports leagues in North America to sell ads on player jerseys ahead of the 2016-17 season. The Philadelphia 76ers inked the league’s first deal with StubHub, a three-year, $15 million pact that saw the team add a 2½-square-inch logo on all of its uniforms. Every other team in the league followed suit, eventually raising the price of the special real estate. After the StubHub deal expired, the Sixers signed blockchain firm Crypto.com to be their patch sponsor for $10 million per year in 2021.

“The evolution of college athletics, advancements in NIL, and the recent House ruling has created a new demand on university athletic departments to identify innovative revenue opportunities to support their programs,” Jonathan Marks, the chief business officer of Elevate Marketplace, said in an email interview. “Following the recent approval by the NCAA of the on-field logo sponsorship, we believe monetizing jersey patches will be the next major revenue opportunity for athletic departments.”

It’s become a whole new world for college sports as schools pull in revenue from venue naming rights, sportsbooks and alcohol sales, but those established relationships could be beneficial as these colleges wade in these new waters. Financial services and insurance companies, which have secured some of the most lucrative stadium naming rights deals in sports, are also some of the biggest jersey advertising spenders in the NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball.

“The first step in maximizing revenue around this jewel asset is educating partner schools on its intrinsic and layered value,” Marks said. “Elevate is currently in conversations with over a dozen top university athletics programs over the value of their jersey patches, and in many cases re-evaluating associated venue naming rights.”

Unsurprisingly, four of the Power Five conferences are thoroughly represented in the top 50 schools along with historic basketball powerhouse the Big East. The SEC, where Alabama football reigned with a crimson fist until the rise of Georgia in the last four years, leads both tallies with 30% of the top basketball and 28% of the top football teams. Duke may have the greatest potential value in men’s hoops, but its conference, the ACC, only counts for 18% of the top 50 college basketball programs and 16% of top 50 college football teams.

According to Sportico’s college database, Alabama football sold $37.9 million in tickets in fiscal 2023, and reported another $42.7 million in football-specific donations. The Duke men’s basketball team had a $21.4 million budget in fiscal 2023, according to data submitted to the U.S. government. (As a private institution, there’s a limited amount of publicly available information on Duke’s finances compared to Alabama, which is a public university.)