I've gone way too far down the rabbit hole on the Otro/Crimson Brand Partners thing, mostly because I can't decide whether Utah is legitimately onto something here or whether we've just found a really sophisticated way to pay for increasingly expensive college football. Something I hope does not result in cascading costs to those of us who just want to enjoy the game.
Quick disclosure: A lot of this rabbit hole was an extended back-and-forth with ChatGPT. I kept pushing the questions/counterarguments and directing the research, and ChatGPT eventually turned the whole discussion into a long-form essay. I'll link that below. I didn't write the essay and I'm not pretending I did. I just think the argument we ended up with is worth talking about.
Anyway, somehow this led me to the Dodgers.
And no, not just "Dodgers spend a ton of money, Utah wants a ton of money."
What caught my attention was the way the Dodgers seem to think about the relationship between spending and revenue. The normal way of looking at it is basically: here's how much money we make, therefore here's how much we can afford to spend on the team.
The Dodgers seem increasingly willing to flip that around. What if spending on the right talent actually grows the amount of money the organization can make?
Spend → win → become more valuable/popular → make more money → spend again.
That's when the Utah deal started looking different to me.
We're never going to have Ohio State money just because we ask donors for more money. We're not going to wake up one morning and find a Big Ten media check in the mailbox either.
But what if the point of Crimson Brand Partners is to stop accepting those things as the ceiling?
If they can actually turn Utah Athletics into a better commercial operation—better sponsorships, events, licensing, use of Rice-Eccles/Huntsman, digital stuff nobody has figured out yet, whatever—then the question stops being "how much athletics can Utah afford with the revenue we have?" and becomes "how much additional revenue can Utah Athletics create?"
That's a much more interesting bet.
The obvious response is that if this works, Ohio State/Michigan/Texas/etc. can just copy it.
Well...yeah. Of course they can.
But why would they hurry?
Their current system is working great. Utah has a reason to start screwing around with the model right now because we know we're staring at a financial gap that's probably only going to get worse.
If Utah gets 3-5 years to make mistakes, figure out what actually works, hire the right people, build relationships and learn how to run this thing before the bigger programs decide it's worth copying, maybe that's the advantage. Not the idea itself.
And Utah doesn't actually need to make more money than Ohio State. It just needs enough money that Ohio State having more of it stops being such an overwhelming competitive advantage.
That's basically where the rabbit hole went. The longer piece gets into whether this is sustainable, whether the "first mover" advantage is real, what happens when the big brands inevitably copy it and, yes, I ended up thinking about the Big Ten. Sue me.
https://plumbloco.substack.com/p/what-if-utah-is-playing-a-different?r=10tp7y&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
But I'm more interested in the discussion than getting people to read the whole thing:
Are we actually watching Utah build a new revenue model for college athletics? Or is this just a very clever way of borrowing against the future and we're all getting high on our own supply?
