Why the NIL, transfer portal era creates 'chaos' for event promoters

Securing all the essential pieces – the teams, the venue, the sponsors, the television partner – to create an attractive early-season, non-conference college basketball event has long been akin to putting together a jigsaw puzzle. 

But in recent years, here are the two elements that have elevated those complexities to a whole other level: NIL and the transfer portal. Now imagine third-party promoters trying to complete that jigsaw puzzle while partially blindfolded, on a much tighter time crunch and as competitors try to swipe pieces from them. 

“I don’t think I could adequately explain how much chaos or uncertainty NIL and the transfer portal introduced in this space,” said Mark Starsiak, vice president for basketball at Intersport, the media and marketing firm specializing in property creation, event management and content production.

“I don’t think any adjective could describe it appropriately.”

Intersport has seen rapid growth since 2018

Intersport, whose basketball business has been central to its DNA for decades – including producing the State Farm College Slam Dunk & 3-Point Championships – is at the forefront of this fast-evolving dynamic. In 2018, when it hired Starsiak, the company made a concerted effort to go full throttle, an inch wide and a mile deep, into the basketball events scheduling and management vertical. 

That year it created one early-season event, the Fort Myers Tip-Off. By 2022, it managed nine early-season events, hosted 34 different teams and staged games in seven different venues. That included American Family Field, home of the Milwaukee Brewers, for the innovative Brew City Battle. 

Other new Intersport-fueled events are on the way this coming season, most notably the inaugural Arizona Tip-Off, which features eight teams split into two divisions operating independently. And there’s an alluring matchup between perennial title contender Gonzaga and defending national champion UConn in Seattle, as well as the Ohio State–West Virginia meeting in Cleveland.

In the past, events like these were often signed and sealed years in advance. These days, there’s much more fluidity and many more moving parts.

College coaches, much less third-party promoters, have a difficult time discerning in the spring whether they will be stewarding a Final Four contender or a middle-of-the-pack team until activity in the crowded transfer portal settles down. And NIL opportunities sometimes, but not always, serve as the carrot that can prompt high-caliber players to stay on their teams, transfer or jump into the NBA draft. 

As it relates to promoters, the caliber of the team impacts the attractiveness of the potential event, which, in turn, impacts everything from ticket demand, to sponsor intrigue and TV partner interest. There’s only a handful, or two, of teams that inherently possess loyal, sizable fan bases that travel well. The fan appeal for most others relies heavily on the benefit or peril of what NIL and the portal yields each spring.

“The coaches at their core need to feel good about who their teams are and what they’re going to look like next year to determine when, where and against who they are going to play,” said Starsiak, who leads Intersport’s operations and development of its existing basketball events and new business opportunities in the space.

NIL and the portal, he said, have “thrown so much uncertainty and chaos into the known rosters of the teams, and that just trickles downhill.”

Amid his flurry of phone calls on a given post-Final Four day, a head coach may tell him, “‘It’s not May 11 [the last day to enter the portal] yet, so I don’t know what kind of event I want to do because I don’t know if my point guard is going to go in the portal.’ Or, ‘If I sign this other point guard, is he [the other guard] going to go in the portal for that? Or is it because someone is offering him NIL money at a different school?'” 

Getting ‘all the horses in the barn’

Consider Gonzaga’s predicament. While its prospects for next season appeared diminished after a slew of departures, the portal swiftly changed that forecast. Adding Ryan Nembhard (Creighton) and Graham Ike (Wyoming) in late April elevated the Zags to a borderline top 10-caliber team for 2023-24. Within a few weeks, Gonzaga and UConn secured their multiyear deal for an attractive series that includes the Seattle game on Dec. 15 and a game at Madison Square Garden the following season. All the while Starsiak worked the phones, with calls mostly with Gonzaga Coach Mark Few and a cadre of officials at UConn, to hammer home details. 

The metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle no longer truly captures all the variables at play for promoters. Starsiak has another way to articulate it: “I always say I’m trying to get all the horses in the barn and close the door real fast because one of them might sneak out if you let them sit in there too long without locking it.”

The window in which he needs to nail down all the moving parts is tighter than ever.

That’s why Starsiak is awake and typically on his phone not long after 5:30 a.m. each morning, diving head-first into his inbox to return messages from West Coast stakeholders or other East Coast early risers. Throughout the day, it’s a constant stream of texts, emails and calls to and from a wide swath of individuals, including some from city visitor bureaus, venue operators, sponsors, universities, coaches and TV executives. He will lasso in other Intersport specialists when needed on calls.

Much like a coach entrenched in recruiting battles, Starsiak said he’s got to have his finger on the pulse of activity 24-7, trading and receiving information on so many interrelated fronts. And that’s not even including all the time spent venturing down rabbit holes to pursue or tamp down rumors about other competing events popping up or a targeted, unsigned team with a wandering eye. 

Like in the athlete recruiting world, rumors are incessant. 

“Every day,” he said. “A lot of bad-faith actors in our space, and it’s hard to sort through them. And if it’s not you, it becomes you, because this is how third-party promoters [are perceived to] act.”

The seeds for initial ideas

An initial idea for an event starts with a catalyst, be it interest from a sponsor, a particular need by a team, interest from a TV entity or seed money from a visitor’s bureau. 

For neutral-site events, Intersport often gives participating schools six-figure guarantees. Amounts vary based on many factors. In creating and managing these events, Intersport generates revenue from sponsorships it can sell through the media rights and/or marketing rights it owns as part of the events. It also generates revenue from ticket sales, hospitality offerings and premium experiences.

The TV partner component may not directly be a notable direct revenue stream for Intersport. But it can indirectly be a money maker via media assets sold to local and national partners.

If Intersport creates a multi-team event (MTE), it can shop the event around to potential media partners. But if it’s a one-game, neutral-site event, the TV partner is often contingent on which conference footprint the event encroaches on and the intricacies of that conference’s media rights deal with respective TV partners.

Last year, Intersport had games broadcast on six different networks and one via pay-per-view, the Oct. 28 Gonzaga-Tennessee exhibition at Comerica Center in Frisco, Texas.

‘Way more riffraff in the game nowadays’

As the space has evolved, a pivot point came in 2020 as the pandemic forced last-minute cancellations and abrupt audibles to reschedule or replace games. Over the last three years, the number of third-party promoters has grown considerably, Starksiak said, but with a downside: “There’s way more riffraff in the game nowadays … It’s gotten too out of control. There are not enough guardrails in place, necessarily.”

The other change is out-of-whack expectations from schools based on the money flowing through the NIL marketplace.

“The market is in just such upheaval because of donor funny-money rolling in with NIL things that they think that there are just giant checks laying all over the place and that media companies pay us $2 million for one game here and there,” Starsiak said. “Guys, it’s like zero in most instances. There’s not a lot of funny money in the third-party promoter role as there is with your massive, expansive media rights deals over your entire conference, over 15 sports, including football, that deliver some of those things back at campus.”

He added that we’ve reached an inflection point. High-profile programs – national brand names – are looking for big agencies, big locations and skilled people who know how to run top-level events and know how to run them well, versus just chasing “shiny objects and false promises.”

“It’s an inflection point right now, I think driven largely by NIL and the transfer portal – the upper 1% of teams and brands, a lot more of those teams know their worth and are asking for more business market value rates and opportunities for themselves, versus just going, ‘Oh, I like this guy, let’s go play here. We’ve got a player from there,'” Starsiak said. “It’s gotten a little more business savvy from the top end. Conversely, there’s only 1% of people who are acting like that – 10% think they should be. Some teams, they are in a scramble for NIL dollars and things like that.”

Intersport uniquely qualified for new college sports world

Intersport has achieved expansive growth in the college basketball scheduling space over the last five years, helping to shape the non-league season. And Starsiak believes the company is uniquely qualified to provide the best full-service solutions for managing these types of events.

It also maintains its eye on expanding further. It will stay true to its foundation, which includes events in Fort Myers (Nov. 20-22) and Arizona, as well as the CBS Sports Classic on Dec. 16 in Atlanta featuring Kentucky, Ohio State, UCLA and North Carolina. (An official announcement will be made in the coming weeks.) But it also strives to be opportunistic, as it is with staging the Ohio State–West Virginia game in Cleveland and the Gonzaga-UConn matchup. 

Because of NIL and the portal, it’s a fool’s errand to try to plan too much, too far out these days. But Starsiak said in late spring that he had a few verbal commitments for Fort Myers for 2024 and one for Arizona next year as well. As for this coming season, he felt he was about 90% done. He still was awaiting word on one “big offer” that would make him very happy if the event could be consummated. And there were a couple of exhibition games – like the Gonzaga-Tennessee one last year – he was looking to finalize. 

He was also about to head out on vacation. 

“But that phone,” he noted, “won’t stop ringing.