MSU's Batt Open to Naming Rights Deal for Spartan Stadium

"The changes in college sports ... like them or not, have created additional pressure on revenue," Batt said. "And so, I think that the 30,000-foot change that you've seen is that because of that pressure, we've got to consider more things that potentially we may not have done in the past.

"And certainly, naming rights of stadiums, fields, other opportunities to monetize, optimize, we will be looking at all of those."

"The key is ... that you've got to find the right intersection between the business terms of an opportunity and aligning those with the institutional values of your university."

Benefits of a Deal

This is a type of deal that has become more and more common in recent years in the realm of college sports.

"There's certainly lots of people that I'm sure would love to put their name on Spartan Stadium," Batt said when asked about the level of interest for such a deal.

Just last week, Indiana struck a 20-year, $50 million deal to change the name of its Memorial Stadium to Merchants Bank Field at Memorial Stadium. Ohio State has had a logo for Safelite Autoglass painted onto its field since 2022. Heck, Florida International's football stadium is now named after the musician Pitbull, which will net the school over a total of $6 million over five years.

Really, it just comes down to the fact that it's extremely easy money for athletic departments that really, really need it with revenue-sharing and the House settlement impacting the financial side of athletic departments everywhere. It would mean millions of dollars towards Spartan athletics with very little to no additional cost.

At the end of the day, this is another thing that college sports fans are probably just going to be expected to live with. Everyone can just continue calling it Spartan Stadium anyway.

"I think it's when you find the right fit and the right partner, you would certainly consider it," Batt said. "Again, all those things (naming rights to stadiums and fields), we've got to put on the table.

"I've said a lot of different times that -- zoom out from college athletics -- in any industry, where there's change, there's opportunity. Our industry's gone under probably one of the most transformative changes in the last few years, really even accelerating into the post-House (settlement) era.

"There's opportunity to take ground right now, and so I think what you'll see from us is not being on our back foot, but instead being on the front foot, finding opportunities, being strategic about that path, and considering all opportunities to drive revenue."

Again, all the business-centric talk that seems to be anti-fan can be disturbing at surface level, but Batt insists that any naming rights deal in the future comes with a good reason.

"The things that we've needed to do to evolve college athletics that we're doing every day at Michigan State as we're building out a team and those sorts of things -- a lot of that has to do with protecting and maintaining what's staying the same, which is that college athletics is fundamentally about opportunities and protecting the student-athlete experience and the opportunities, broadly, that's really what we're in this for," Batt said.

"It evolves, it takes different realities and different pressures to drive revenue, all those sorts of things. Part of that is to protect the overall opportunities provided by college athletics."

Michigan State's football team, of course, opens its 2025 season in Spartan Stadium against the Western Michigan Broncos on Friday at 7 p.m.