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Beyond The Sideline: March 6 Edition

Welcome to Beyond The Sideline, the community resource for the next generation of sports business leaders.
The Big Idea
The Importance of a Clear Promotional Strategy
Did your last promotional effort work? That can be a difficult question to answer if you haven’t set a clear strategic objective from the start. Different objectives require different ways to measure success. For example, getting a lot more people to come to a game may or may not indicate an effective promotion, depending on what you were trying to accomplish. Here are the most common objectives and some ways to measure the relevant metrics to gauge success.
Expand Your Fanbase
If you are trying to grow your fan base, your ultimate goal is to attract people who have never attended a game before. In this case, just getting more of your established fans to come to a game is not a success. To measure the incremental impact, you’d want a way to identify new fans. If you have a CRM system in place, you can simply check if attendees are new to your database. If you don’t have that, other identifiers may be used to approximate measures. Email addresses or credit card numbers could also be used to check if they have been used for previous team purchases. However, people often have multiple credit cards and email addresses, so it wouldn’t be a perfect measure, but it would allow for some general comparisons of effectiveness.
Build Loyalty
Just like a restaurant, sometimes your objective is not to attract someone for the first time but to cultivate your regular customers. The simplest measure of loyalty is a repeat purchase. Tracking a repeat customer is the flip side of tracking a new customer. That means you can use the same data mentioned above but examine it for the opposite effect. If the customer is already in the database or is using a previously recognized email address or credit card number, you can make a reasonable assumption that it represents the same customer. Using this data, you can estimate how many fans at a given event were repeat customers.
Increase Average Spend
Another viable strategy is to drive higher average spending. In this case, you don’t care as much about whether the fan is new or a repeat customer but whether they spent more money than they otherwise would have without the promotion. This is particularly difficult if you don’t have a CRM system, as it makes it harder to gauge the average spend. There are two broad approaches you can take. One is to look at the aggregate effect. This means you could look at total revenue for the event (including tickets and concessions) and divide that by the total attendance. Then you could compare that to your average for the year or, if you wanted to be a little more sophisticated, compare it to a basket of similar nights without a promotion (e.g., same day of the week, same attendance, etc.). This aggregate approach does not give you individual information, such as how many people used the promotion or which demographics used it the most.
Generate Brand Awareness
There are times when the goal of a promotion isn’t to generate short-term attendance or revenue but to build awareness and raise the team’s profile. This is especially true for emerging sports teams outside the “Big Four.” A promotion can be designed to bring attention and media coverage to a team doing something unusual, fun, or otherwise noteworthy. This is in the vein of “Dress Like Your Favorite Superhero Night,” where the total number of participants may be small, but the photos and videos of a few dozen costumed fans can generate disproportionate positive interest. A good way to measure the additional attention generated by a promotion is to use a social listening tool to track mentions of your team. With social listening in place, you can establish your team’s baseline level of activity and compare how much a promotion boosted mentions, conversations, and impressions of your team.
Conclusion
Two critical elements in promotion planning are setting clear objectives and measuring your results. By doing this consistently over time, you can build a database of information on how each type of promotion performed against its given objective. This will enable you to identify common characteristics of what works best for a given objective and determine which approaches drive the most impact for your target audience over time.
Legal
The Ticking Time Bomb of Sports Betting
Legalized sports betting has transformed the modern sports landscape, driving fan engagement, revenue growth, and sponsorship opportunities. But with these benefits comes a dangerous downside: a surge in betting scandals involving players, coaches, and staff.
As leagues embrace gambling partnerships while enforcing strict anti-betting policies, the tension between these two realities is growing. Recent scandals prove that no organization is immune. Let’s explore the controversies and why betting scandals are an inevitable risk.
Recent Betting Scandals: A Wake-Up Call
Betting-related scandals have spiked in recent years, exposing vulnerabilities across sports.
Jontay Porter’s Lifetime NBA Ban

Jontay Porter squaring up to the basket against the Detroit Pistons.
In April 2024, Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter was banned for life by the NBA. He was found guilty of betting on games, sharing insider information, and limiting his playing time to manipulate betting outcomes. This harsh punishment underscores the league’s zero-tolerance stance but also raises questions about how widespread the issue might be.
Shohei Ohtani’s Interpreter Scandal

Shohei Ohtani (left) at a LA Dodger press conference with his then-interpreter Ippei Mizuhara (right).
Even the Los Angeles Dodgers weren’t spared. Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, allegedly stole $17 million from Ohtani to fund an illegal gambling habit. While Ohtani was cleared, the scandal highlighted how close gambling influences can get to star athletes.
NFL’s Gambling Crackdown
The NFL has suspended multiple players, including Calvin Ridley, Isaiah Rodgers, and Jameson Williams, for betting violations since 2023. Despite mandatory gambling education programs, the league continues to grapple with the issue.
MLB’s Ongoing Battle
MLB has a long history of betting scandals, from the 1919 Black Sox to Pete Rose. In June 2024, Padres infielder Tucupita Marcano received a lifetime ban for betting on games, including those involving his own team. Four minor league players were also suspended, showing the problem persists at all levels.
Why Betting Scandals Are Inevitable
Despite strict policies, betting scandals are bound to happen. Here’s why:
1. Addiction
Betting and gambling, just like any addiction, can become debilitating enough to lead many people into desperate circumstances. Now that gambling and sports betting have become the norm in sports culture, the addiction of naturally competitive athletes who love to win is inevitable.
2. Financial Pressures
Not every athlete is a millionaire. Many players, especially in the minor leagues, struggle financially. Team employees, often underpaid, face similar pressures. For some, the lure of quick money through betting is too strong to resist.
3. Insider Information as a Commodity
Players, coaches, and staff have access to confidential information like injury reports and game plans. This insider knowledge can be exploited for financial gain, whether through direct betting or by sharing information with others. Before you could place a bet on your phone or text a friend, the ability to share or profit off of this information was either not lucrative enough or too much of a hassle for the potential headache. Nowadays, not so much.
4. Enforcement Challenges
While leagues use AI, betting pattern tracking, and even GPS to monitor players, catching every violation is nearly impossible. Offshore sportsbooks and underground betting rings make it easy for rule-breakers to fly under the radar.
The Bottom Line
Is your team safe? Think again. No organization is immune. Whether in the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, or college sports, all it takes is one person making a poor decision to spark a major scandal. The sports betting industry isn’t going anywhere. While it brings undeniable benefits, it also comes with an ever-present risk of scandals. As leagues and teams continue to profit from gambling partnerships, they must also confront the reality that betting violations will keep happening.
What is an NBA team supposed to tell fans after it comes out one of their coaches was betting on games? Or when a quarterback is selling info for a price? This isn’t just a legal issue for these teams, though. This is something even marketing departments will need to deal with as they are told to incorporate sportsbook partnerships into their team’s ads. Consider this a warning to any and all front office executives and HR departments in sports. The question isn’t if another scandal will surface, it’s who will be caught next, so be ready.
Nerding Out
College Football’s Witching Hour

This is what college football looked like just a few years ago. How much more can it change by 2031?
2031.
This is the year the already precarious state of college football as we know it likely comes crumbling down. The past few years of conference realignment, including the abandonment of the regional conference system, have proven that the Big Ten and SEC conferences' war chests and money-making opportunities are too alluring to refuse. 2031 isn’t just another year on the calendar; it’s the perfect storm of factors that will further cement their domination of the sport.
Firstly, the College Football Playoff in its current iteration only runs until the 2031 season, and rumor has it that the two Goliaths of college football are pushing for automatic bids, potentially four for each of them, in the next version we see. Given the national airtime and importance of these playoff games, the addition of four guaranteed participants puts these two conferences into a different tier altogether, effectively burying the not-so-long-ago notion of a Power 5 and replacing it with the cold, hard reality of a Power 2. The rest of college football? They’ll be left fighting over the crumbs.
This potential shift in playoff structure isn’t the only thing at work, however. The Big 12, a conference that saw its most prominent and nationally relevant brands (Texas and Oklahoma) bolt for greener pastures just last year, has its grant of rights expiring. This would allow all the schools to potentially leave in hopes of joining one of the two super conferences—assuming they get an invite. This doesn’t mean the conference itself would dissolve, but it might go the way of the PAC-12, reborn with an almost entirely new roster of schools clinging to the branding that previous iterations of the conference spent decades building.
The Big 12 isn’t the only one with this issue, either. The ACC has seen some internal strife from member schools Florida State and Clemson lately. The two football powerhouses were locked in legal battles with the conference until recently, in an attempt to also make a break for the SEC. With the lawsuits settled, the ACC has now agreed to uneven revenue distribution based on competitive success and TV ratings. But more importantly, there’s a countdown clock. Beginning in 2026, there is a yearly decreasing exit cost for these schools, allowing them to leave as long as they are willing to pay the ever-shrinking ransom before their 2036 grant of rights with the conference is released. By the 2030-2031 season, that figure will be as low as $75 million, which, in the world of college football finances, is basically couch cushion money. Expect Florida State and Clemson to make their grand exit around then, leaving yet another conference looking for answers.
While the 2031 season is still a few years away, the Big Ten and SEC seem to be holding all the cards. For the other conferences, it’s going to take some Herculean effort, a sprinkle of magic, and maybe a few sacrificial offerings to the football gods to change the trajectory. Otherwise, they’ll be left watching from the sidelines as the Power 2 rewrite the rules of the game.
By The Numbers
Numbers That Jumped Off the Page
20%- The percentage some Dallas Mavericks season ticket prices increased. They must have some sort of international superstar playing for them to justify those prices!
2026- The year the MLBPA is fully expecting to be locked out during next year's collective bargaining negotiations. Looks like spring might be delayed regardless of Punxsutawney Phil’s shadow.
4,831- The current tally for episodes of Around the Horn, a staple of sports media for the past two decades that will see its final episode in late May. Don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened.
Pulse Check
Which of the Big 4 North American leagues does the worst job in their promotions? |
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