News and Commentary On All Things Notre Dame

From the Street & Smith's Sports Business Journal...cover story
Gold Standard - Notre Dame cashes in on tradition, but maintaining its luster depends on better play
By MICHAEL SMITH
Staff writer
Published September 08, 2008 : Page 01

As Notre Dame kicked off its 121st year of football last weekend in South Bend, sponsors and their guests were expected to cheer at the pep rally, dine in the press box, tour the locker rooms and touch the well-known "Play like a Champion" sign that is the last thing Fighting Irish players see before they step onto the field.

The school's sponsors, blue-chippers like Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Gatorade and Xerox, call this the "Notre Dame experience," and they swear by its power.

"It's a surreal experience," said Derek Eiler, chief operating officer at Collegiate Licensing Co. "If you can imagine what it was like in the 1940s, with the pep rally and everybody's just joyous, that's how it is. They can be 2-8 and there's still this belief that they're the greatest team in the land. It's an aura around the place that's really, really cool."

The football's the thing at Notre Dame. It's why companies spend into the low seven figures to be a member of Team Notre Dame, the school's highest level of sponsorship. It's why NBC pays more than $10 million a year for the exclusive rights to televise Irish home games. It's why ISP Sports usurped the national radio network away from Notre Dame's 40-year partner, Westwood One, this year at $2.6 million annually.

And it's why, when you add it all up, the school's multimedia, marketing and licensing revenue reaches nearly $30 million a year.