Looking at the 2025 licensing and royalty revenues for MAC teams

The current NCAA landscape has been chaotic with the introduction of name, image and likeness in the wake of the House settlement, up-heaving decades of normalcy in college athletics.

Part of this sea change has been more money going to the hands of student-athletes– whether that be from outside endorsements or from the universities themselves in some form or fashion.

These new changes have been particularly hard on smaller institutions, and have required creativity in order to keep pace.

Enter the "licensing and royalty rights" conversation.

Extra Points' Matt Brown submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to every NCAA Division I member, asking for each university's licensing rights revenue to identify how schools and conferences compare to one another.

This line item puts together revenues gained from corporate sponsorships, multimedia partner arrangements, intellectual property rights (read: logos on memorabilia, checks from EA Sports for use in video games) and other similar arrangements.

(Essentially, it's any money that is related to a school's relative value as a brand.)

It will likely not surprise anyone to know the Mid-American Conference scores the lowest amongst the 10 conferences of the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) in terms of median individual program revenue, with a median of $1 million per member.

What could surprise people is where each individual member stands as of fiscal year 2025, which you can see in the table below:

(octothorpe [#] indicates departed member, percent [%] indicates new member, asterisk [*] indicates incomplete data)

These numbers help paint a fascinating picture for the MAC, as they're set to enter a new negotiation window for their television deal within the next year. It's a chicken-and-egg situation; will a new media deal help its member schools get better royalty deals, or will creating better brand equity via royalty deals deliver at the negotiating table?

The universities themselves are ultimately responsible for acquiring licensing monies by leveraging their brands. A school's success here indicates they have been able to utilize their fanbase, market size and other unique factors in order to elevate their athletics programs– which you do not necessarily need on-field success to achieve.

The numbers also reveal underperformers and overperformers relative to their peers.

Despite struggles in football and cuts at the overarching university level, Akron is a top-five school on the strength of their other sports and their market. Rival Kent State, which has experienced similar issues, has also enjoyed a resurgence in brand awareness– likely in part due to their popularity in EA Sports' College Football franchise.

Meanwhile, a school like UMass, which has a top-five endowment in the MAC, sits third-to-last in licensing revenue. Northern Illinois, who sat mid-table in fiscal year 2025 for the MAC, opted to leave for the Mountain West in part to use their access to the Chicago market to collect more revenue and spread both the school and conference brand to new audiences.

Eastern and Central Michigan sit at the bottom of the table, which is fascinating when compared to rival Western Michigan, who on their own, haul in triple the amount of what CMU and EMU do each year combined.

(Sacramento State's numbers are unavailable, but we're under the assumption they likely compare to their California State peers, such as Bakersfield, Riverside and Irvine, at around $300k-500k. Fresno State, a comparable media market which is in the Mountain West, sits at ~$4.5 million.)

Thankfully for all the schools listed here, this is the easiest line item to change on a year-to-year basis. One can acquire corporate sponsorships and watch their revenue fly pretty quickly.

For instance, Western Michigan's field sponsorship with regional food-service vendor Stafford-Smith, which in part helps their large royalties budget, was worth $5 million.

Also something to consider is the current market for jersey patches.

At the "Group of Five" level, endorsements look to be in the range of $350,000 per year (New Mexico and the Inn of the Mountain Gods) to nearly $1 million (five years/$4.9M for Wyoming and Tallgrass Energy.) At the Power Five level, the Big XII announced a conference-wide jersey patch endorsement with Monster Energy which is set to net each member approximately $1 million per year of the deal.

As the schools at the MAC level start to discuss the next steps for surviving the current landscape, these numbers will do a lot to shape the context of the conversation.