🚨 Join our College Football Playoff Contest
In lieu of a news quiz this week, we're organizing a Club Sportico bracket challenge for the College Football Playoff.
Hello! Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we chat about the intersection of sports and money. We hope you’re having a better Monday than Mike Norvell…
Today, instead of the standard weekly news quiz we send to club members, we’re inviting all subscribers to join us in a Club Sportico-hosted college football playoff pool. Test your knowledge—or your luck—in predicting which school wins the first 12-team playoff. The password for our pool is: playoffchallenge.
If you’re looking for inspiration, here’s where the 12 teams rank in terms of football spending in 2022-23 👇. It will likely come as no surprise to see Ohio State ($72.4M) 🌰, Notre Dame ($71.9M) ⛪, and Georgia ($69.1M) 🐶 at the top. It’s also not shocking to see Boise State ($17.1M) 🐎 at the very bottom. What jumps out to me? Arizona State 🔱 spending more than Oregon 🦆; and Indiana 🀄 ranking #10.
We’ll have a special prize for the highest-finishing paid subscriber. Maybe a trophy with a built-in Pop Tart®️ toaster? And maybe something smaller for the best team name. That will be determined by Jacob, so plan accordingly.
Look out for some fun updates along the way, too (did you know this thing takes longer than March Madness?)!
Make sure to sign up for a Club Sportico paid membership if you haven’t already—we’re locking the paid subs list for contest purposes on Friday, so you can’t just join our membership tier in the event you do well (not that we’d expect you to stoop so low)!
Want to get a free month of the paid Club Sportico experience? All you need to do is pass the newsletter along to five friends (or enemies)! See if you can beat your buddies!
Lastly, here’s a Monday Thought from Eben 💰: For much of the last 12 months, I have considered Florida State to be the embodiment of so much of the business change/upheaval in college sports. The Seminoles are suing to get out of the suddenly-second-tier ACC; the school was early to consider private equity funding; FSU athletics is raising $300+ million with a recent bond offering; and now the football program is reckoning with a dramatically underwhelming season amid nationwide roster overhauls.
This morning, the school announced another move that will turn heads—football coach Mike Norvell is taking a $4.5 million pay cut to help FSU start putting money aside for revenue-sharing. These clauses are starting to show up in contracts around the country. Oklahoma State’s Mike Gundy recently took a small pay cut for a similar reason. LSU coach Brian Kelly announced he’d match up to $1 million in donations given to the school for rev sharing; UNC coach Bill Belichick’s contract included a $13 million annual commitment from the Tar Heels toward revenue sharing.
A $4.5 million haircut is something else entirely. The Seminoles were historically bad this season, but coaches have had bad years in the past, and I can’t name too many contracts that were revised downwards in the aftermath. I don’t want to read too much into this quite yet, but we may be seeing at least a small shift of money flowing directly from coaches to athletes. It’s about time.
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.