For those of you plugged-in types (and my sympathies if you are), you might have seen a Notre Dame-themed Twitter account brag after Ohio State’s massive uniform-advertisement deal with Chase Bank was announced this morning that the Irish would never, repeat NEVER, stoop so low as to infect their uniforms with corporate sponsors.
What happened next was more or less inevitable.
Mere hours later, Notre Dame announced that it will accept a bribe from SoFi to slap their name on the Irish’s uniforms in all sports. Per multiple media reports, it’s the richest such deal in the very short history of this kind of thing, which reads more like a challenge to the next company that goes into business with a well-known college sports brand (Texas? Michigan?) than anything else.
Notre Dame has partnered with SoFi as its official jersey patch sponsor.
The six-year deal with SoFi is expected to be the most valuable jersey sponsorship deal in college athletics history at an average of $18-20 million annually, sources tell @YahooSports. pic.twitter.com/01R6I2XCBx
— Ross Dellenger (@RossDellenger) July 28, 2026
I and many other Irish fans had pie-in-the-sky dreams that maybe Notre Dame’s predisposition to be, for lack of a quicker phrase, ‘all Notre Dame’ about things like this might keep ads off the jerseys for a while, though I didn’t rule it out. In reality, it should have been obvious. Eight-figure deals that will, for all intents and purposes, help ND get to table stakes with top recruits and transfer portal targets in football are just the way of things now in collegiate sports.
To put it another way, Marcus Freeman’s utterly insane run of blue-chip recruiting wins in recent weeks doesn’t come cheap. And especially when Notre Dame is already operating at a (slight, but still real) deficit in terms of media-rights money when compared to schools in the SEC and B1G. Revenue streams must be tapped in order to succeed at that type of level, it would seem.
The silver lining, if you want to see one
The deal isn’t totally without its merits; according to Pat Forde’s report (which came out simultaneously with the announcement; ND knows how to play the game) SoFi will fund a full scholarship for a male and a female walk-on athlete at Notre Dame each year, which is nice for them. ND athletic director Pete Bevacqua claimed that the deal will also include financial literacy support for Irish athletes, which isn’t an area the school was coming up short in anyway by all accounts, but OK, sure, that’s good too.
(Props, by the way, to Bevacqua for the “Well, we’ve done corporate jersey patches for bowl games before” justification for this deal. I don’t buy the spin, but the media major in me appreciates the attempt, anyway.)
There’s not that much more relevant to be said about this deal, which falls into the ever-expanding bucket of college sports things that are probably necessary now but just plain suck. No one actually wants a bank logo on Notre Dame’s jerseys, any more than they want one on Ohio State’s, or a chicken company on Arkansas’, or whoever else’s. But everyone needs more money now, and it certainly isn’t going to come out of the bigwigs’ pockets, so here we are. Advertising for everyone. We saw it at the World Cup with the ‘hydration breaks,’ and now we’re seeing it in college sports.
It’s perhaps a darkly funny turn of events that, thanks to my wife gifting me a Lambeau/Shamrock Series trip as a way to soften the blow of my milestone birthday this fall, I will be in the stands when the Irish take the field for the first time with an ad on their jerseys. History! (I guess.)
It’s probably time for the names on the jerseys
I have long been agnostic about the topic of no names on the Notre Dame football jerseys, leaning towards liking it. It made the jerseys cleaner, in my opinion, and to be honest, it was a bit of a flex on my end to (usually) be able to identify which player made a play before other people watching the game with me did. Other than that, I didn’t care about it much.
But if a dang bank can throw their name on the jerseys, the Irish ought to put players’ names on them. It’s not like they’ve never done it before (ND usually had player names during the Devine and Faust eras), and given *gestures to everything* it wouldn’t hurt the players’ marketability.
It sort of feels like ND has been priming the pump for that change anyway with the addition of names on the 2024 and 2026 Shamrock jerseys (and the 2022 green jerseys), and with this change occurring anyway, it would make sense to go ahead and do it now. We will see if that happens.
NOB! NOB! NOB!
Why even bother coming up with some stupid spin about having done this before. They are getting $20 million for it, that’s the spin. The people who are mad aren’t going to care about rationalizations.
Having been resigned to this for years, I’m mostly just disappointed that the patch is aesthetically awful. tOSU’s is a relatively unobtrusive circular Chase logo without any type of background. Is a giant white rectangle really the only option?
Not on the side of multibillion dollar global corporations, but it’d be really f-ing stupid to pay millions of dollars a year to have your logo “blend in” to the thing it’s affixed to.
Unfortunately, the people at SoFi appear to be the least stupid ones out there..
So far of the ones I have seen, Monster (Big 12), FedEx (Memphis), Tyson Foods (Arkansas), USAA (Army), and JPM Chase (tOSU) have no background.
LSU and BYU have a rectangle background the same color as the jersey. MSU’s has a rectangle background with inverted jersey colors (probably the best mesh of standout marketing and matching the jersey).
Some of them are pretty big or a strange color for the given jersey. But they still mostly look better than ND’s.
The one big exception: Wisconsin’s bright blue Culvers patch is definitely worse than ours.
Which team(s) get a crypto/draft kings logo? Or is that the line?
UNLV
Or Texas Tech
If the jersey patches had to be done then there are two great things about how this happened.
The first is that they went out and got a public company to drop 8 figures annually/nine over the 6 year deal. If this was a decade ago there’s a real chance that, in an effort to be “all Notre Dame” about things we’d have ended up with a deal with the South Bend Public Library for less than a Big 12 team is getting from the Monster deal and a press release that included the sentence “As part of the deal players will be able to borrow books for free from any SBPL location.” Instead they played to win.
Second, there were always going to be anger over an advertising patch, but ND managed to have the whole rollout ready and pounced while the sports media was drooling all over OSU being the biggest brand in college sports. Being able to say both “well, $20 million is a lot” and also “$20 million is more than OSU got” was a dramatically better introduction to the patch than just the first bit. That’s a media savvy that the athletic administration has, we’ll say, dramatically lacked recently.
I saw some people point out that this dropped right before Lincoln Riley took the podium at B1G media days, too. I don’t think that was related, but the social media department has been just under-the-radar petty/sneaky enough about things over the years that I wouldn’t rule it out, either.
How about if we make players pay to put their names on their jerseys? no such thing as a free lunch guys! (seriously though i’ve always been pro- putting names on jerseys. there is too much change every year for me to remember the roster, and by the time i learn it the season is over)
Apparently Pete Bevacqua told a podcast today that he doesn’t see the NOB thing happening imminently, so I guess it isn’t. Like I said in the article, I’m pretty agnostic about it, but it would make sense to do it now.