In 2009, the University of Texas officially passed the University of Notre Dame for the most valuable college football program according to Forbes business magazine. In recent years, the Wall Street Journal has been doing their own valuation and coming up with the same results–Texas has a comfortable lead as the No. 1 most valuable team but Notre Dame continues to sit in the No. 2 spot.

Several Big Ten (Ohio State, Michigan) and SEC (Tennessee, LSU, Georgia, Alabama) programs have been consistently among the most valuable in the nation but even without a consistent winning product the Fighting Irish have remained second-best.

Whenever these figures are released each year there’s been a caveat with Notre Dame. No, it’s not that the program refuses to join a conference. It’s that the Irish haven’t fully flexed their muscles in regards the football stadium the way virtually every other major program has over the last 10-15 years.

That’s beginning to change with the unveiling of the Crossroads Project this fall. Here comes advertising on the new jumbotron, am I right!??

Actually, don’t hold your breath on that.

As virtually every Notre Dame fan knows the hallowed grounds on campus inside the football stadium have remained advertising-free since its opening in 1930. Well, almost. The old, old (now going to be the old, old, old) scoreboard was very clearly a nice little advertisement for clock makers Longines. Plus, the school did allow small NBC Sports signage on and around the scoreboard since the network began broadcasting Irish home games in 1991.

Oh, I guess it IS okay to advertise in the stadium.

We’re approaching 90 years of this tradition–with the university adamant nothing will change with Crossroads–and it’s always surprising at how little faith there is with this topic.

“I’m sorry I’m going to need another 100 years before I believe the school on this one.”

It’s mostly an irrational fear borne out an aversion to change and a misunderstanding of advertising, and more importantly, the operation of video boards and their revenue generation capabilities within the context of Notre Dame’s football budget.

I’m here to explain why Notre Dame will probably never go down the road of in-stadium advertising.

First, let’s talk money. There’s generally a misconception about the revenue that can be generated through advertising during college football games. For example, I’d recommend taking the time to read this lengthy New York Times piece from late 2015 on Alabama’s football team generating wealth for its school. In that article, the NYT discusses the money brought in from ads inside the Tide’s stadium:

Inside Bryant-Denny, the bigger regional and national sponsors own the scoreboards. Regions bank and Toyota pay $80,000 to have their logos rotate down the left side throughout the game. Muscle Milk and Coca-Cola pay six figures to own the tunnels and corner boards. Anywhere from $50,000 to $75,000 buys one minute of pregame ads and two minutes of in-game ads on the LED scroll and attracts companies like Cooper Tires and restaurants like Billy’s Sports Bar.

We can safely assume that these prices are near the top in college football if not Top 5 or Top 3 nationally. Think about it, these advertisers get roughly 600,000 to 700,000 people to see their product for roughly 4 hours per game 6 to 7 times per year. Maybe throw in a little more for a spring game. It’s not super valuable for these schools when juxtaposed with their total revenue.

For the big schools like Alabama, Texas, and Notre Dame you’re looking at maybe an additional 2% to 3% in revenue from this in-stadium advertising. Heck, if you want a more long-term worry it’s stadium naming rights. USC just recently signed a 15-year deal with United Airlines worth $70 million for naming rights at the L.A. Coliseum. Notre Dame could easily earn 600% to 800% more per year from one sponsor on a naming rights deal in comparison to in-stadium advertising and even that large sum hasn’t tempted the university as of yet.

When the Forbes and Wall Street Journals of the world talked about Notre Dame lagging behind it was almost always focused on the lack of premium seating. Obviously, the Crossroads project is rectifying this in the fall.

Notre Dame hasn’t publicly announced any prices for the 3,000 new premium seats (68 loge boxes & 2,100 indoor/outdoor club seats) but the Sports Business Journal recently published a story with insight into the financials involved:

…the new premium seats cost slightly less than Tennessee’s west club seats at Neyland Stadium, the venue where Notre Dame most closely bench-marked its products. Those seats at UT run $5,000 a seat annually, plus capital gifts of $35,000 to $50,000, according to Tennessee athletics’ website.

Now, start plugging some figures into a calculator and it becomes crystal clear why premium seating is so valuable for college football teams and sports franchises in general. In comparison, stadium advertising seems like mere bread crumbs. Which, by the way, is likely why Notre Dame has never forced this on its fans. It’s been a tradition for so long and the extra bit of cash isn’t worth the backlash.

Estimated 800+ square feet of speakers for Notre Dame’s new video board. 🤘🏻🗣🏈 https://t.co/gyxeOjjZ4L — Eric Murtaugh (@EMMurtaugh) April 26, 2017

There’s also another aspect to this discussion. Notre Dame has altered the stadium stands with the premium seating, a new visitors tunnel, and wider seating to decrease capacity by almost 3,000 seats to 78,000 overall. Even though we’ve recently witnessed some gaudy capacity upgrades (Texas A&M’s Kyle Field famously spent $450 million in upgrades which included an increase of almost 25,000 seats and they backed that down by 4,000 seats the year after its debut season) the truth is that live football is likely slowly headed in the other direction.

I’d be willing to bet that within 50 years the capacity inside Notre Dame Stadium dips below 50,000. For what its worth the L.A. Coliseum–previously well over 100,000 capacity and hovering around 92,000 in recent years–is reducing things to 77,500 following renovations.

This isn’t some new revelatory opinion. Football games in person are brutally long, with little game action, and are becoming a tired and expensive endeavor. It’s just easier, cheaper, and usually flat out better to watch at home. The future of live football is going to be more intimate, catering to a greater percentage of expensive premium seats with a wide variety of amenities, and definitely focused heavily on providing value (food, entertainment, access to technology, etc.) beyond staring at a field for several hours.

If we’re talking about advertising it’s clearly the television fans should be worried about. After all, Notre Dame can’t even get half a million people to show up to the stadium every year for football games while the home finale last year against Virginia Tech (with a poor rating at that) saw 2.4 million people watch just that one contest.

TV ad creep is coming and has already begun.

I’m personally not too worked up about this future of advertising because the market tends to correct the big problems and the implementation is so incremental that we get used to it as the years move forward. Plus, this type of advertising will be so heavily controlled by the likes of ABC, NBC, and ESPN that there’s a sense of inevitability of the networks doing this as traditional cable packages and commercials are slowly eroded.

Top 5 Opinions on Crossroads in the Stadium

1. On many of the Watch ND uploads there is a tiny sponsor that pops up briefly early in the videos. Lately, it’s been the St. Joseph Health System. We’ll presumably see these same videos used on the video board so will it technically be considered in-stadium advertising?

2. I’d bet the use of the video board will draw generally favorable reviews with the exception of the sappy side of the Notre Dame video world. We all know the “What Would You Fight for?” television spot is getting packed into halftime, right? I think the pat-ourselves-on-the-back type of videos (using the board to honor groups, etc.) is going to bring some of the loudest criticism.

3. Despite tin foil hat conspiracies we know the Kiss Cam and 60-second ads for (obligatory reference) Gurley Leep aren’t coming. In addition to the mushy Watch ND videos the loudness, timing, and music used by the sound system will be fascinating to watch unfold. In previous years the acoustics in the stadium were poor but still fairly loud. Now, with a much larger and better sound system the acoustics will be better but also potentially far louder.

4. Don’t sleep on the video ribbon boards being the biggest complaints. These are among the least talked about additions to the entire Crossroads project. Be prepared to hear and read many testimonials about how distracting they are. I’m cautiously optimistic on them, depending on their utilization especially with stats.

5. Notre Dame has given zero indication as of yet but I’d bet they will be expanding Crossroads in the future. People have marveled at the size of the new video board but I was never enamored with the lone board stuck in one end zone. Plus, coming in at 5,184 sq. ft. the Irish board is 13th largest heading into 2017. Not bad but in 5 to 10 years it’ll probably be outside the Top 20 and I fear it’ll be old-fashion a lot quicker than expected. That’s why further building expansion in the corners of the stadium may be in the cards down the line. More places to anchor additional versatile video operations so the current set up doesn’t feel so 1998 in a few years.