Why USC football games at the Coliseum will have DirecTV ads on the field

When USC fans get their first long-awaited look inside the LA Memorial Coliseum on Saturday night, they will be greeted by an unfamiliar sight at the back of both end zones of the century-old stadium.

An on-field sponsor advertisement, painted in black on the white field apron, urging them to “STREAM TROJAN FOOTBALL” on DirecTV.

That message may not have been well-received last weekend, after Disney pulled access to DirecTV amid a contract dispute, leaving more than 10 million people in Southern California unable to stream USC’s season-opening win over Louisiana State on ESPN. But by Saturday, DirecTV will be front and center for everyone to see in the end zone of the Coliseum — assuming, of course, you have Big Ten Network.

USC will be one of the first in college football to take advantage of new NCAA rules that allow schools to sell on-field advertising as a new means of generating revenue. Even fewer have sold on-field advertising space to a team. second sponsor like USC, which will display the logo of cryptocurrency investment platform iTrustCapital along one side of the Coliseum’s end zone.

But as athletic departments across the country brace for revenue sharing and other costly changes to the college athletics landscape, most stakeholders agree that on-field corporate sponsors are just the beginning of college football’s march toward commercialization.

“There’s a lot of pressure to maximize their commercial revenue in a way that there never was before,” said Christy Hedgpeth, president of PlayFly Sports Properties, which owns the multimedia rights to USC athletics and many other top-tier college sports programs. “They’re forced to consider things they wouldn’t have considered otherwise.”

The question, as schools look for new sponsors and new creative revenue streams, is where that line should be drawn.

At USC, that conversation began long before the NCAA changed its rules in June. In 2018, the university reached a 16-year, $69 million deal with United Airlines that would have rebranded the stadium as the “United Airlines Coliseum.” But that deal came under intense scrutiny when Janice Hahn, the chairwoman of the Coliseum Commission, spoke out fervently against it, suggesting it “insults the memories of (World War I veterans) whom the Coliseum was intended to honor.”

The backlash nearly scuttled the deal, which USC desperately needed to fund expensive stadium renovations. However, the two sides eventually decided on a new alternative. Instead of naming the stadium, USC reached a 10-year deal with United for naming rights to the stadium. The fieldwhich has since been called “United Airlines Field at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.”

Since then, United Airlines Field has been prominently displayed on both 25-yard lines — the most valuable piece of field that sports directors can sell. Selling more of that field, without overwhelming fans with ads, is a delicate balance that many in the industry are still trying to strike.

At USC, with its rich history and deep-rooted traditions, officials have tried to be especially mindful of where that line might lie. USC football coach Lincoln Riley said Thursday that he himself had “struggled with” that balance.

But even Riley agrees that a more business-like approach is inevitable, given where college football is headed. He called it “an adapt-or-die scenario.”

“We have a lot of history and tradition here at USC, and that’s never going to go away,” Riley said. “But we also have to understand that the world around us is changing and we can’t just sit back and live off of everything that’s happened in the past. It’s up to us to find those balances, honor them, but also not do anything that hinders our ability to move up, not just as a football program, but as the entire athletic department.”

That approach aligned with DirecTV’s own intentions in the space. Josh Stern, DirecTV’s associate vice president of brand strategy and investments, said the goal was to be “organic” and “noninvasive,” to capture fans’ attention but not annoy them.

Stern says there is no “one size fits all” approach to determining that balance, but he believes fans are more tolerant than they once were.

Still, some schools remain hesitant amid concerns about such tolerance.

“I don’t think schools have carte blanche yet,” said Hedgpeth, president of PlayFly Sports Properties. “Old habits die hard and traditions are really sacred. These college programs are older than most professional teams. They have fervent, loyal, passionate and engaged fans. There’s definitely a segment of the fan bases at some schools that are taking pause.”

Those holdouts are waning, though, just as athletic departments are increasingly desperate for new revenue streams. Hedgpeth, who worked with the NBA when it first welcomed corporate logos on jerseys, believes college football is not far off from allowing similar patches on jerseys.

According to valuations released in June by Elevate, a sports business consulting firm, top-level college football programs could charge as much as $6 million a year to stitch a corporate logo onto their school’s jersey.

It’s no small amount, considering the costs of college sports. But at what price could that affect tradition?

Riley believes it is possible to balance both.

“You see this across all of professional sports, with some of the most historic and successful franchises and organizations,” Riley said. “They’ve been able to have all the history and tradition you want, but they’ve also been able to adapt to a new world.”