CLEMSON — Clemson, like every college athletics program, needs money.
Michael Drake, the longtime pro sports executive, now CEO of Clemson Ventures, is the sort of person trained to find it.
He is, admittedly, a "restless" individual, a pre-law major who tossed aside school for front-office work. He climbed the ladder via stadium projects like AT&T Stadium in Dallas and Levi's Stadium in San Francisco. He ran sponsorships and ticketing operations at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta.
When State Farm wanted to put its name on the Atlanta Hawks' arena, Drake orchestrated the 20-year, $175-million deal.
The Hawks' VP of global partnerships found his next fit in a college sports realm that's become increasingly commercial. Drake is anything but unfamiliar with athletes being paid and working the business side to fund it.
Clemson Ventures was, likewise, built for the NIL era. Think of it like Clemson's fundraising arm, IPTAY, only its job isn't to reel in donors but corporations wanting to associate with the Tigers' brand, whether that's advertising on campus or placing promos on athletes' social media pages. Or both.
Money will flow to Clemson and its athletes, not just through marketing campaigns but with live events, game day experiences and content creation. Every lever pulled by Drake in Clemson's pseudo-front office.
"We might make a few mistakes," Drake said. "But we're going to get really smart before everybody else gets in this game, and be the leaders and create something that people are going to follow, and I think will be envied."
Clemson had a head start because its multimedia rights aren't held by a sports marketing firm like JMI Sports or Learfield. Since 2021, Clemson Athletic Properties (CAPCO) has sold brands like Hyundai on a radio mention after every strikeout and Terminix on sponsoring video-board highlights.
Clemson Ventures is CAPCO, evolved to tackle what's next. Corporate logos that have long been painted on NFL fields are coming to college stadiums. It's likely that jerseys will soon feature patches from commercial brands.
Drake doesn't want to make overly specific claims about how much Clemson Ventures can generate. But he's fully aware Texas A&M sold away its multimedia rights to Playfly Sports for 15 years for an average guarantee of $34 million.
If Playfly believes it can make more than $34 million a year off of A&M's corporate sponsorships, Drake says "there's no reason we shouldn't have goals to be in that realm — or more."
'Your company name here' in Death Valley
Clemson Ventures will have to build toward that Playfly figure because the university accrued about $16.4 million in non-program-specific sponsorships and advertising during the 2024 fiscal year.
But the growth potential of that number, as well as several others, explains why Clemson hasn't been urgent to shed expenses ahead of a $20.5 million revenue-sharing bill that starts paying out July 1.
The costs of athlete pay are nearly balanced by recent concessions from the ACC, which could funnel an extra $20 million per year to Clemson if its football games continue to draw more eyeballs than its conference peers.
Clemson has also relented on not charging students an athletic fee and selling alcohol at sporting events, which could equate to another $10 million annually.
Every dollar Clemson Ventures earns, just like every donation IPTAY brings in, is insurance against rising expenses but could also cut into the advantage of SEC and Big Ten schools and their more lucrative TV deals.
The university fully controls all of its property, and the earning potential of Clemson's "crown jewel assets" — as Drake calls Memorial Stadium and Littlejohn Coliseum — has yet to be fully realized.
"Naming rights of fields, jersey patches, naming rights of arenas — we are open for business in all of those spaces," Drake said.
Clemson isn't planning to rename Memorial Stadium or Frank Howard Field after State Farm anytime soon. But there are other revenue streams to tap into.
The NCAA will allow up to seven corporate logos on football fields this season, which can fetch about $1.5 million to $2.5 million apiece. A spot on the 25-yard line, readily in frame of broadcast cameras, fetches the higher end of that range.
If and when jersey patches are finally approved by the NCAA, that's a serious attention-grabber. According to Sportico, the New York Yankees have earned $25 million per year for a Starr Insurance patch on their uniforms.
It's unlikely placement on a Clemson uni will be valued the same, especially since the Tigers don't play in a metropolis. But Drake believes universities like Clemson can offer incentives that pro franchises can't.
Need ready access to a pool of potential hires? Clemson has thousands of alums and soon-to-be grads it interfaces with every day.
There are also opportunities for companies to work with the university's academic side, like BMW partnering with Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR) in Greenville.
Those are examples of leverage for a potential deal.
"We wouldn't let somebody come in and say, 'I just want to buy the field naming rights or the Littlejohn naming rights,'" Drake said. "We would work with somebody in a deep capacity (for a deal) that has multiple elements throughout athletics and, hopefully, throughout campus and IPTAY."
Balancing revenue with an 'experience'
Drake doesn't necessarily want to litter Death Valley with advertisements from every brand imaginable.
He prefers a "less is more" approach, working with fewer brands on deals that hold maximum value for both sides.
Clemson Ventures' approach to alcohol sponsorships is an example. Drake says venues will be broken up into "quadrants" where each brand has its own "swim lane" and can create "experiences" centered around its products.
Drake said he's "pretty darn deep" into talks with alcohol brands, and he expects to have multiple sponsors in place ahead of football season.
"We are not interested in beer and spirit brands dominating the landscape. We're interested in weaving them into what is already a killer experience at Memorial and Littlejohn and (Doug) Kingsmore (Stadium)," Drake said.
Meanwhile, Drake is interested in other experiences.
Across from Memorial Stadium, Clemson built the Watt Family Athletic Performance and Wellness Center for Olympic sport athletes. It has an elevated view of Tiger Walk, the football team's pregame stroll into Death Valley.
On college football Saturdays, Watt's third-floor bistro could be turned into something like a sports bar. Fans that don't have a ticket in Memorial Stadium could buy one for Watt and watch the game there.
"Certainly, generate revenue," Drake said, "but it's just an experience-enhancer."
These kinds of experiences have been a specialty of IPTAY in the past, but Clemson Ventures will have its hands in all sorts of things.
Drake wants more live events, like the Savannah Bananas' baseball game in Death Valley, which came with an expected gross of $250,000 for Clemson.
The challenge is finding acts that are swinging through Upstate South Carolina and not when Clemson's football and basketball venues are in-season.
"We will look to have maybe one to two big stadium events a year," Drake said. "Can you get, I don't know, five to 10 nice-sized shows — comedy acts, family shows or UFC-, WWE-type acts in Littlejohn?"
Clemson Ventures is also trying to expand Clemson's content offerings, which include docu-series and podcasts IPTAY members stream on Clemson+.
But Drake wants more than just Clemson content. He'd like to bring in a music group to collaborate with the Tigers. Maybe a series could star athletes from Clemson and another school, and they split the profits.
There's flexibility because, again, Clemson Ventures controls Clemson's intellectual property. There's no JMI, Learfield or Playfly to please, and Clemson is paying the "talent" — the Tigers' athletes — with rev-share deals.
"We'll keep doing Clemson-specific content, but we wanna think broader and more strategic to where we have two, three times the eyeballs," Drake said, "because now that's really valuable to big distribution houses out there and it can become a very valuable revenue stream."
A broader "library" of content could be an attractive vehicle for more ad revenue.
Or it could just be sold to a streaming platform like Netflix or Amazon.
The role of Clemson's 'talent'
If Clemson Ventures does its job well, Clemson will have a well-funded athletic department. But it should also have well-paid athletes.
Rules that used to prevent schools from facilitating NIL deals for athletes have been stripped away. Clemson Ventures contains an in-house NIL agency headed up by Everett Sports Marketing, a Greenville-based firm that has worked with stars like Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts and the Cavinder twins.
ESM got Clemson linebacker Sammy Brown involved in a Super Bowl campaign with Nerds candy this past winter. The agency also paired basketball brothers Chase and Dillon Hunter with Domino's Pizza.
The marketing firm is just one funnel because brands working with Clemson Ventures on university-wide sponsorships are also potential NIL partners.
"We spend an inordinate amount of time doing that, working with ESM on that," Drake said. "Anybody that interacts and does business with us, we are working to integrate NIL aspect into all of those deals."
Schools can share up to $20.5 million in revenue with athletes, but there is no limit on the millions Clemson Ventures and ESM could put in their pockets by essentially placing them in advertising campaigns.
That's a competitive advantage, especially if the "NIL Go" clearinghouse forges ahead with vetting third-party deals for fair-market compensation and rooting out booster-funded collectives' pay-for-play deals.
It's a potential boon for Clemson football, which can supplement one of the richer revenue-sharing allotments in the sport — estimated at around $15 million — with commercial NIL deals for its star players.
NIL cash will be just as important for Clemson men's basketball, which will need a boost because what's left over is a relatively small slice of rev-share.
Clemson Ventures is designed to offer an assist in the marketplace.
"We are having to educate all of these brands and vendors," Drake said. "But once they understand how to leverage a student-athlete, and their reach, their personas, they're finding it very valuable."