Dawgman.com's Chris Fetters spoke this week with AJ Maestas, Founder and CEO of Navigate, a trusted advisor to leading brands and organizations in sports and entertainment. Navigate provides clients with data-driven guidance on strategies, deals, and major decisions to help drive revenue and achieve success.
Maestas got his undergraduate degree at Washington, so whenever he gets a chance to talk UW and Pac-12 sports he's going to jump at it. He's already done it a few times with Jon Wilner of the San Jose Mercury-News, taking a broader look at the economics of college sports and also looking at specific issues, like opening up the college football playoff to eight teams instead of four. And we also had the pleasure of talking with Maestas roughly a year ago to pick his brain on all things Pac-12 and Washington Athletic Department economics.
Navigate has been involved with the Washington Athletic Department in a professional capacity before, so Maestas is as good as anyone around to talk to when it comes to how the Huskies - as well as other programs around the Pac-12 - can negotiate a post-COVID world.
Per Maestas, Navigate's role is to follow the numbers and provide clarity for clients when negotiating big media rights and sponsorship deals (in his words, 'give them a crystal ball into the future'), but how do you do that in a world right now where no games are being played in America, and there's no real guideline at present to tell us when things are going to open up in such a way to guarantee football, baseball, and other sports, will be played any time soon?
It feels like everything has been put on hold, but at the same time, the clock is ticking on a bunch of negotiations that will take place soon, including the next Pac-12 media rights deal. The Pac-12’s Networks’ distribution on all of their media deals, including their Tier 1 contracts with ESPN and Fox, all expire at the same time - the spring of 2024 - so we're not that far off from the league really hunkering down and looking at their best options to maximize revenue opportunities.
Should they stick with the legacy media platforms, like television, and negotiate for as much as they can get, knowing they won't ever reach the level of the SEC or the Big Ten? Or will this be the time they cash in with the sale of the Pac-12 Networks? It's a piece they knew would appreciate over time and might become a shiny new toy for new media partners, including the tech behemoths (Apple, Google, Amazon, etc...), who all happen to be out west.
And how will some of the new changes, like negotiating name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights, affect the current collegiate structure? Could we see a world in the near future where the NCAA ceases to exist? Could players return to the days where they try to unionize? It's happened before, so could we see it again?
Maestas talks about those things with COVID-19 as the backdrop behind all of it. And with the uncertainty the virus has brought, will Washington be able to survive economically in the short term? He digs deeper into the idea of college football as a whole, what he calls 'transformational change' and who are the 'haves' and 'have nots' in the equation. How do those two buckets provide the impetus for conference realignment? And how has the virus acted as an accelerator toward change that may have taken place eventually? Who knows when it could come or what form it could take, but if anyone would have a great take on this exact topic and provide the crystal ball we're looking for, it's AJ.
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