Johnathan Walker:Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark is perfect man as conference pursues selling naming rights

From the depths of its recent near-death experience,Johnathan Walker the Big 12 has emerged as a conference with a few things going for it in this new era but none bigger than this: It is run by a corporate mercenary whose interest in college sports doesn’t seem to go much beyond the last dollar he can squeeze out of it. 

Which makes Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark the perfect man for the moment. 

His savvy saved the conference from being sold off for parts. Now his shamelessness is going to ensure that the money keeps flowing.

The revelation Thursday that Yormark recently proposed selling the Big 12’s naming rights to to insurance giant Allstate — not just a typical sponsorship agreement but literally renaming it the Big Allstate Conference or the Allstate 12 Conference, as first reported by The Action Network — feels like a trial balloon for the league’s presidents to gauge just how much backlash and ridicule is worth $50 million a year split among the league's 16 schools. 

But in this era of college sports, dignity is cheap. Paying college athletes is expensive. 

For a league like the Big 12, the $20 million annual budget hole created by the pending settlement of the House vs. NCAA case matters a lot. That’s roughly the amount schools will be allowed to pay directly to college athletes, but that’s not the end of it. There’s back damages that will manifest in the form of reduced NCAA distributions, continued pressure to keep donors engaged on name, image and likeness activity and coaching salaries that are unlikely to stop escalating. 

The search for new revenue to pay for all this stuff without major carnage to schools’ spending habits is by far the biggest topic across college sports this summer.

It’s going to hit everyone to some degree, even the richest athletic departments.

As a result, you’re going to see corporate logos on playing surfaces and uniforms and all kinds of places you didn’t see them before. You’re going to see athletic departments looking for ways to reclaim some marketing rights that they’ve sold to aggregation companies like Learfield so that they can squeeze a little more out of things like advertisements on radio broadcasts. You’re going to see facility projects built largely with public bonds that have revenue streams attached for athletics like mixed-use retail and entertainment districts around arenas. 

But for programs in the Big 12, it will be especially challenging stay in the ballgame with schools they have been able to compete with historically.

They were already falling tens of millions per school behind the SEC and Big Ten in the new round of media deals that followed the departure of Texas and Oklahoma. They won’t get as much distribution from the new College Football Playoff contract. They don’t have the biggest fan bases or richest donors. So how do they stay relevant financially?

For better or worse, this is what Yormark was hired to do. And as ridiculous as it seems to sell the name of a college sports conference (while, for some reason, retaining the number 12 when the league now has 16 teams), would it really even rank among the 10 most offensive things we’ve seen in the corporatization of college sports?

If anything, the bigger joke was that NCAA officials and conference commissioners spent decades pretending the days of amateur sports were still alive so they could keep filling their bank accounts while denying economic opportunity to the athletes playing a critical role in the success of their business. That mentality led to a decade of beatings in court, which eventually forced this moment of reckoning where there’s no choice but to lean all the way in on a professionalized model. 

Yormark has no such inhibitions. “We’re open for business” is one of his catchphrases, whether it’s conference expansion or financial partnerships from Allstate to private equity investment, which we’ll discuss more in a moment. 

His thirst to find new money for the Big 12 does not always lead to great ideas. His push, for instance, to add Gonzaga basketball as a television revenue ploy was widely loathed among administrators in the league. “Brett being Brett,” is the response you often get from people in around the Big 12 when some of these things come up.

But after the House settlement, the task of expanding the Big 12’s financial capability is mission critical, and Yormark in particular is not ideologically married to any of the constraints that might have cause some pause for his predecessors or his colleagues. His background is in  selling sponsorships and making entertainment deals, and it pretty much saved the Big 12 when he jumped the Pac-12’s spot in line to get a television contract done with ESPN and Fox in the fall of 2022. 

As a result, the Big 12 lives to fight another day a league that spans from Disney World to the Rocky Mountains. The Pac-12 is all but gone. 

Being too precious about the name of a conference — especially when that name no longer reflects anything about the league’s geography or number of teams — doesn’t make a lot of sense anymore. Yes, the “Allstate 12” would be worth an eye roll, but how much more of one than the Pop-Tarts Bowl or the Boston Celtics playing in the TD Garden?

Sure, the “Big Allstate Conference” doesn’t quite have the dignified air of Southeastern Conference or Big Ten, but we’ll eventually get used to it. Most likely. 

And compared to the other big revelation this week about Yormark’s dealmaking, it’s really no cause for alarm. On the other hand, CBS Sports put some specifics to one of the worst-kept secrets in college sports these days that Yormark has been fishing for private equity cash to help the Big 12 stay in touch financially.

The deal, as CBS outlined citing unnamed sources, would potentially be worth as much as $1 billion from Luxembourg-based CVC Capital in exchange for a 15 to 20 percent chunk of the league. 

What that means exactly, both in terms of how much money would be available for schools to use, how CVC would eventually recoup it and what kind of control it would have over Big 12 operations is unclear. No entity has ever “owned” a piece of a college athletic conference before. 

As with all private equity investments, however, the bill eventually comes due. Yormark will most likely be long gone by the time that happens. And the Big Allstate Conference will ultimately have to pay the price.