Penn State Vice President for Intercollegiate Athletics Pat Kraft is open to selling the naming rights to Beaver Stadium, he told StateCollege.com on Monday morning.
In a brief interview, Kraft also expanded on a new NCAA ruling which allows programs to sell on-field advertising space. Kraft stated that while he is open to the idea, as things stand in late June, fans won’t see advertisements in any of three NCAA-allowed locations this upcoming season.
“When you ask where it’s at. It’s not that it’s nowhere, I think the option is on the table,” Kraft said. “Everything is up there, right? [But] we just don’t slap logos anywhere. It’s not done that way. It’s a thoughtful process. And how is that helping us in a revenue area — but no, let me just tell you as I sit here on June 24, you won’t see any of that this year, but I’m not going to take it off the table. I don’t think anybody can take anything like that off the table in the world we’re living in.”
As for Beaver Stadium naming rights, Kraft was to the point.
“Yeah, I’m open everything,” he said.
That stance is a continuation of the one shared by his predecessor, Sandy Barbour. Although Kraft did not hold that same opinion in 2023.
“No, naming Beaver Stadium is not on the table right now,” Kraft said last year.
“It’s absolutely something we would consider,” Barbour said in 2019, a pivot from her stance in 2014 which indicated that selling the naming rights to Beaver Stadium wasn’t in the department’s best interest.
Penn State — like every athletic department in the nation — is in something of a budget-balancing arms race to prepare for a revenue-sharing model that could see departments annually dishing out roughly $22 million per year to student-athletes. In turn, there is a premium on revenue generation and the creation of a sustainable model that allows for both aggressive investments into programs as well as simply making ends meet. Penn State athletics has largely reported positive cash flows since the downturn from the COVID-19 pandemic, but even for a football program that generates over $100 million in annual revenues, the potential impact of marquee naming rights is too valuable to pass up on as a matter of principle.
For in-state comparison, in 2003, Citizens Bank inked a 20-year deal with the Philadelphia Phillies worth $93 million for the naming rights to the Phillies’ home stadium, while Acrisure signed a 15-year deal worth a reported $150 million for the naming rights to the Pittsburgh Steelers’ stadium in 2022. Elsewhere in football, the San Francisco 49ers recently agreed with Levi’s for a 10-year extension on its home stadium naming rights worth $170 million.
What that means for the future of Beaver Stadium remains to be seen, but facing a $700 million renovation project of that same stadium, there isn’t a shortage of bills to pay.
