The Big 12–Monster Deal Exposes College Sports’ Revenue-Sharing Gap
OPENING STATEMENTS
The Big 12’s newly announced partnership with Monster Energy has largely zeroed in on the rate card. The deal represents a $20 million annual infusion, with $1 million per year for each of the league’s 16 schools. It also gives Monster access to substantial conference-wide uniform real estate and entitlement rights, raising questions about whether Monster secured a significant discount.
But as I’ve thought further about the agreement, I think it misses the more consequential issue for athlete rights. As college sports continues evolving into a formal revenue‑sharing era under the House settlement and the College Sports Commission, the Monster deal is another example of the system adopting pro‑style sponsorship structures while refusing to adopt the pro‑style revenue‑sharing norms that compensate the labor powering those structures.
Under the House settlement, schools opting in may share up to 22 percent of defined athletics revenues - including media rights, ticket sales, and sponsorships with their athletes. Set at $20.5 million last year, the cap will rise to $21.3 million this year. The College Sports Commission’s framework makes clear that institutional payments tied to use of athletes’ NIL, including sponsorship‑related money, count against that cap. Third‑party NIL deals remain outside it. Viewed against that backdrop, a conference‑level sponsorship that turns every Big 12 football and basketball jersey and playing surface into Monster‑branded inventory is not just “extra” activation. It is precisely the type of sponsorship revenue that should be understood as part of the schools’ obligation to share. And it’s the type of financial backbone that can support non‑revenue sports without asking athletes to absorb all of the economic risk.
In major professional leagues, this link is explicit. League and team sponsorship revenues flow into defined buckets like basketball‑related income or hockey‑related revenue. Collectively bargained agreements guarantee players a fixed percentage of those totals. New entitlement partners and jersey‑patch deals increase revenue; players see the effect in higher caps and, ultimately, higher pay. No one pretends that patch deals sit outside the labor relationship. They are understood to be monetization of assets that exist only because athletes are competing in uniform, on a predictable schedule, in a marketed league.
The Big 12’s deal with Monster replicates the visible elements of that model - league‑wide patches, branded fields and courts, season entitlement - while insisting that athletes remain, in effect, a cost center to be managed under an arbitrary cap, rather than co‑participants in the value being created. Schools will report up to 22 percent of certain revenues into the CSC system and allocate those dollars across rosters that are already expected to skew heavily toward football and men’s basketball. Absent clear, enforceable rules that treat conference sponsorship as a shared resource, non‑revenue sports risk becoming the cushion that absorbs any shortfall between ambitious deals and constrained athlete budgets.
The pros also solved a second problem college sports pretends does not exist: who consents when athletes are monetized in the aggregate. Every NFL player, upon joining the NFLPA, is eligible to sign a group licensing assignment conveying the right to use his name, image, and likeness in any product featuring six or more players. NFL Players Inc. aggregates those rights, licenses them to card companies, video game publishers, and apparel makers, and distributes royalties across the membership on an equal-share basis. The practice-squad long snapper and the franchise quarterback draw from the same pool, because the product being sold is the group.
College sports has no analog. When the Big 12 sells Monster a patch on every football and basketball uniform in the conference, it monetizes the collective image of thousands of athletes at once, with no assignment, no aggregation vehicle, no royalty pool, and no bargained-for consent. The closest the college model has come is the opt-in group license behind EA Sports' College Football franchise, a one-off administered without union backing, at rates athletes had no seat at the table to negotiate. A standing group licensing structure, held by an athlete-controlled entity and triggered whenever a conference or institution monetizes athletes in the aggregate, is the missing infrastructure. Until it exists, every conference-wide sponsorship is a group licensing deal in which the group was never asked.
There is another path. If college sports is serious about both athlete rights and sport‑sponsorship sustainability, deals like Monster’s should be used to broaden, not narrow, the base of sports that can be funded. That means three things:
Acknowledging conference‑level sponsorship as part of the revenue that belongs in the 22 percent calculation
Committing, at the conference or institutional level, to a minimum allocation of shared revenue for Olympic and non‑revenue sports
Bargaining with athlete representatives over how entitlement and patch deals affect those allocations.
In that last model, Monster’s money does more than pad a conference distribution, as it helps underwrite the continued existence of sports that will never have their own conference‑wide jersey partner, by recognizing that the value of the “Monster Energy Big 12” product is built on a multi‑sport ecosystem, and that athletes across that ecosystem have rights in the revenues it generates.
Until college sports embraces that logic, the pattern will remain familiar: act like the pros when selling the product, and cling to an amateur narrative when it’s time to share the proceeds. The Monster deal is not an outlier. It is the latest data point in a trend that will define whether the House era is about genuine athlete participation in the business of college sports—or simply about finding new ways to cap their share while the sponsorship revenue keeps climbing.
EXHIBIT A
In the span of a week, two Division III schools have reversed decisions to cut varsity programs after facing Title IX legal threats. Christopher Newport University agreed to reinstate its co-ed sailing team less than three months after announcing the sport’s discontinuation, after three female sailors threatened a class action lawsuit alleging the cut would exacerbate existing gender‑equity gaps. California Lutheran University moved to bring back women’s lacrosse after advocates raised similar Title IX concerns. Taken together, these cases suggest that gender‑equity litigation is going to become a more powerful check on the cost‑cutting that has, and likely will continue to happen, in Olympic and non‑revenue sports.
EXHIBIT B
The NCAA’s newly proposed “legal tampering period” is the kind of innovation only a bureaucracy could love. In a bid to rein in rampant back‑channeling, reporting suggests that the Division I Board is floating a tampering framework that would green‑light contact with designated “contactable” athletes and their reps before the transfer window. The result is college sports borrowing yet another page from the pro playbook, codifying what everyone already knows is happening, then pretending it’s a fix. But with collectives, agents and coaches operating in a year‑round recruiting ecosystem, a sanctioned pre‑tampering period looks more like window dressing than reform. In today’s college model, tampering isn’t a bug to be patched; it’s the operating system.
ON THE DOCKET
Former Indiana president Thomas Ehrlich and Stanford law professor William Gould are the latest voices to argue that college athletes should have explicit collective bargaining rights via amendments to the National Labor Relations Act. In an op-ed, they write that it is “past time” for Division I institutions to recognize athletes as employees, given the compensation they receive and the control schools exert over their day‑to‑day lives. That vision would move the debate beyond piecemeal NIL fixes and lingering NLRB test cases toward a federal framework that treats athletes like workers in a billion‑dollar industry. It’s worth watching whether this continues to gain traction and whether this model - statutory employee status plus multi‑employer bargaining with schools and conferences - starts to emerge as the consensus solution in the next wave of reforms.
FOOTNOTES
$6.4 million
Projected payout to the U.S. Women’s National Team based on the U.S. men’s team’s performance this year and the federation’s equal pay structure
