The University of Notre Dame prides itself on a clean, advertisement-free look. Notre Dame Stadium has no corporate sponsors. No billboards wink at the crowd from the sidelines or tunnel entrances. What happens on the field beneath the “Touchdown Jesus” mural is meant to be college football at its purest.
That’s why Notre Dame’s recent decision to add an advertising patch on every student-athlete’s sports jersey has rattled many Fighting Irish faithful.
Starting this year, Notre Dame athletes in all sports will wear the logo of the personal finance company SoFi near the shoulder of their jerseys in a deal worth more than $100 million over the next six years, according a person familiar with the deal who was not authorized to speak publicly about the terms.
The deal is a result of the modern realities of college sports, where top athletes are now compensated for their play. During the 2026-27 school year, athletes could earn $3.78 billion in compensation. Putting together the best teams often requires schools to pay up. A top quarterback could cost a school as much as $5 million, a wide receiver up to $1 million and defensive lineman up to $800,000.
An N.C.A.A. policy adopted in January allowing schools to place up to two sponsorship patches on player uniforms is considered a lifeboat for universities trying to keep up. Louisiana State University, Wisconsin, Ohio State and many more have patch deals.
But Notre Dame?
“The immediate reaction was people weren’t happy and presumed we were selling out by Notre Dame,” said Sean Stires, an evening host at WSBT, a popular sports talk radio station in South Bend and the school’s flagship station.
On the ESPN talk show “First Take,” Chris Russo, popularly known as “Mad Dog,” said football factories like Ohio State cut those kinds of deals, not a program as steeped in history as Notre Dame.
“It’s the Fighting Irish,” said Mr. Russo, whose daughter graduated from the university. “It’s Knute Rockne. It’s 1934. It’s Lou Holtz. It’s everybody.”
Aaron Horvath, Notre Dame’s deputy athletics director, acknowledged that change was hard for some Notre Dame fans and expected pushback. But, he said, schools need to innovate financially in order to keep improving their teams.
“That is a new age of college athletics,” Mr. Horvath said.
For alumni like Brady Quinn, a star quarterback for the Irish from 2003 to 2006, the patches were a necessary step for Notre Dame to continue to be one of the best teams in the sport.
But he also said deep-pocketed donors — citing the $150 million football center named for donors, not corporations — and deep reverence among the fan base for the Notre Dame mystique would force athletic officials to show some restraint in the types of corporate deals they sold.
“If you’re asking are they going to turn into a NASCAR, no, I don’t think the stadium or I don’t think the jerseys or the program will ever turn into that,” Mr. Quinn said.
He said he could see universities finding ways to turn certain logistics, like transportation to games, into sponsorship opportunities. Picture an official airline sponsor of Notre Dame football, or planes with the Notre Dame logo next to the airline’s.
“You’d have to kind of get creative,” he said.
Branded sponsorships have been part of college football for decades. Even before athletes were allowed to profit from the industry, sponsors began paying to name bowl games, stadiums and practice facilities.
Bobby Carpenter, who played at Ohio State in the early 2000s, remembers playing against Notre Dame in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl and wearing patches with the tortilla chip brand’s logo on them.
“So, you have a bowl patch, but it also has branding to it,” he said. “And no one ever made like a huge deal about that.”
Ohio State, Mr. Carpenter’s alma mater, announced a multiyear jersey patch deal with Chase Bank worth about $17 million just a few days before Notre Dame announced its deal last month. And the whole of the Big 12 Conference signed with Monster Energy for $16 million to be split by all its members.
Many Notre Dame alumni take competitive pride in their deal. Kyle Rudolph, a Notre Dame football alum who made two Pro Bowls during his 12-year N.F.L. career, said the patch fit with Notre Dame’s values.
“You know, you evolve with the time; you hold yourself to a high standard,” he said. Then he laughed a little. “You’re not going to be the Big 12 and give it away for a million bucks a school. I mean, that’s just absolutely ridiculous.”
How much bang will SoFi get with its bucks?
Kelsey Slater, an assistant professor of sports promotion at the University of Nebraska, led a study published this year that tracked people’s eyes as they watched Major League Baseball games on television to see how much attention people gave to teams’ jersey sponsors. The study found that on average viewers spent one second looking at jersey sponsorships. After glancing at them once, they were unlikely to look again.
Still, companies do benefit from their association with sports teams, said Jonathan Jensen, an associate professor at Texas A&M University.
Mr. Jensen, another Notre Dame alum, said Notre Dame’s history was replete with examples of corporate sponsorships that figured prominently. Look no further, he said, than Rockne, who helped build Notre Dame football into a powerhouse in the early 1900s.
This year, Rockne’s remains were returned to a cemetery on the campus. He died in a plane crash in 1931.
“Knute Rockne was the P.T. Barnum of college football,” Mr. Jensen said
Rockne was happy to engage with corporate sponsors. He recruited the car manufacturer Studebaker as one of Notre Dame football’s early sponsors. Then in 1928, Studebaker hired him as a motivational speaker. A few years later, he became the automaker’s manager of sales promotion, all while serving as the school’s head football coach and athletic director.
It’s something Notre Dame’s administrators think about as they plunge into the modern world of college sports.
