🏅In the rev-sharing era, sports analytics should be applied off the field, too

Hi everyone,

Today’s newsletter is one of the more thought-provoking pieces we’ve run in a while, coming to us from guest poster Bethany Bradsher. When you hear the term “sports analytics,” what do you think about? Advanced stats? Fancy cameras? Moneyball? Bradsher’s reporting shines a different light on the term, looking at how colleges can use analytics off the field/court in the revenue-sharing era.

— Joan

CALLING ALL ATHLETES

If you’re working on an exciting new NIL deal or taking a creative approach to NIL, we want to tell your story. What does that mean? Well, first we’d want to hear a bit more about what you’re doing, and then we’d assign a reporter to interview you — or maybe commission a video for social media. If you’re interested (or if you have any questions), send us a note at [email protected].

In the rev-sharing era, sports analytics should be applied off the field, too

by Bethany Bradsher

For the typical college athletic director a decade ago, budgetary concerns took the form of negotiating coaches’ salaries, seeking television rights deals and tracking ticket revenues. But the tumult of the past five years, culminating in the recent House settlement, has given ADs new and unexpected priorities — like how to raise up to $20.5 million to share with their schools’ athletes and how best to distribute whatever portion of that amount they manage to collect. 

In a landscape where the previously worn paths get more grown-over every day, athletics administrators are holding machetes and trying to clear the way to survive, if not thrive, in the post-House world. And as they trudge forward, experts from the academic side of universities — in sports management, analytics and even investment strategy — are ready to provide some new tools.

With fall sports set to start soon, athletic directors are seeking innovative ways to fly an airplane and build it at the same time, according to Sean Frazier, the athletic director at Northern Illinois, who used the analogy in a recent interview with Inside Higher Ed. And at East Tennessee State, athletic director Richard Sander sees this season as one of meticulous intentionality when it comes to every dollar raised and distributed and the types of positions his department is creating to meet this moment.

“I think every athletic program needs to figure out what their priorities are and figure out how to allocate resources based on their priorities,” Sander said. “I think if you don’t do that, because of the diversity of what we’re dealing with right now, you will not invest money in the best possible way to get the best return. I think if you just try to manage an athletic department you’ll clearly fail.”

Aware that the old way will no longer suffice, Sander and the administrators at ETSU brought in David Blackburn as the director of revenue sports, a newly created position. With decades of experience in fundraising and management in college athletics, Blackburn is navigating the particular challenges facing mid-majors trying to compete in both revenue-sharing and on the scoreboard. And while ETSU has not specifically tapped anyone to apply analytics to NIL and revenue sharing, Sander believes that another recent hire, devoted solely to marketing and branding, will allow the athletic department greater impact and visibility as it launches more development efforts.

Every dollar counts more than ever for athletic departments, though, so ADs don’t have the financial leeway to hire experts in all the new areas they suddenly have to tackle. That reality is where universities’ sports analytics and sports management programs can step in, as professors and students on the cutting edge of this reinvented world seek to lend that expertise to the teams and coaches on their campuses.

While the term “sports analytics” has traditionally been linked to athlete performance, UNC-Charlotte program director and professor John Tobias is placing his students in the athletic department offices to apply analytical concepts to the new NIL and revenue-sharing reality. Charlotte already has student interns working on performance analytics with every team sport at the university, and starting this summer those interns are exploring a new world of data linked to fundraising, revenue allocation, marketing and compliance.

“We’re expanding to help our business athletic department make informed decisions based on data,” Tobias said. “Analytics is a very en vogue term, very sexy, but really all it is is this: Let’s say a lot of big data was presented to you and me. Our goal is to extrapolate that big data and look for any kind of trends that would give our school a competitive edge based on the data.”

In this new post-House wilderness, Tobias and the other professors in his program will guide student interns to conduct broad research into how other university athletic departments are handling fundraising and revenue sharing and incorporate effective practices from other schools into Charlotte’s approach. The students in his program are willing to adapt their thinking based on policy shifts like the one brought on by the House settlement and excited about the prospect of bringing classroom knowledge to the operations that can help their sports teams become better funded and consequently more competitive.

Emily Sparvero is a professor of sport management at the University of Texas and an expert in the economics of college athletics, and she relishes the opportunity to think differently about the ways crunching numbers can help athletics staff find and use resources more effectively. “Analytics certainly creates opportunities for ADs to really impact revenues and expenses,” she said. Creative application of data analysis, according to Sparvero, could take the form of brainstorming new revenue streams in areas like fan experience and hospitality. At ETSU, Sander said, one new source of revenue generation is renting out athletics facilities to groups in the community.

While a new view of college athletics analytics must center on raising more money, Sparvero envisions a scenario in which data crunching can also help athletic administrators more effectively target donors, especially in the aftermath of some private NIL collectives dissolving and channeling their donors to university-run programs. Where a decade ago all booster donations were going to the university, in recent years many of those gifts migrated to the private collectives, and now that more personalized way of giving is being folded back into the athletic department, creating a need for more targeted marketing of a university’s donor base.

“Post-July 1, the question is, to what extent does that pot of money return to the university?” Sparvero said. “That’s where marketing analytics come in, looking at these donors to understand their behaviors, targeting and reaching the right people with the right message so that the money can be retained. Athletic departments will need people who can apply analytics to marketing and donor understanding.”

The new version of college athletics looks increasingly like a business, employing a range of tools that increase revenue and facilitate success, which in this case looks like winning teams. But even with profits playing an ever-larger role, Sander sounds a cautionary tale to anyone who would view his department’s goals strictly through the lens of maximizing the bottom line. “If our only responsibility was to make money, we could drop a bunch of sports and be a whole lot more financially sound, but that’s not our mission,” he said. 

Bethany Bradsher is a freelance sportswriter, author and ghostwriter. Her books have ranged from college basketball history to coaches' biographies and marlin fishing. Her most recent title, “Never Take This For Granted,” is an in-depth look at the baseball culture at East Carolina University, and recently she has authored sports reports for CQ Researcher. She lives in Greenville, North Carolina, where she is a season ticketholder in the Jungle at Clark-LeClair Stadium.