The Big 12 has officially stepped into the jersey-patch era.
At football media days on Wednesday, the conference announced a league-wide $20 million deal with Monster Energy, a partnership that will pay each of its 16 schools $1 million annually. The agreement puts a Big 12-Monster patch on football and basketball uniforms across the league, while also attaching the brand to court and field logos.
The reaction online was swift, and plenty of it centered on the price tag and the look of the thing. The patch news also landed on a day when Kansas revealed its own Crypto jersey patches, while Oklahoma State had already introduced a patch partnership with the Osage Nation. Around college athletics, the list keeps growing: Arkansas, LSU, Michigan State, Memphis, UNLV and Wisconsin have all rolled out similar jersey-patch deals.
The Monster agreement works out to $1.25 million for each Big 12 school in exchange for a jersey patch, court logo and field logo.
“I personally know of a company that has already offered over $5M to just be on the Oklahoma Sooner jersey.
What an awful, embarrassing deal for the Big 12.”
That post from Travis J Davidson captured a lot of the backlash around the announcement.
The bigger point, though, is that this is where college sports is headed. The Big 12 is now preparing for teams to wear as many as two ads on their uniforms in 2026, and the patch rollout is another sign of how far the sport has moved into a money-first landscape. At the same time, schools are not exactly in a position to turn down an extra $1 million when every dollar matters.
Patches were one of the defining storylines on Day 1 of Big 12 Football Media Days in Frisco, Texas, and the league’s move fits a trend that has been building for months. UNLV was the first school to announce a partnership late last year, and once that door opened, the rest of the sport started following.
For plenty of fans, the frustration is less about the existence of the patches than what they represent. Another piece of college football’s old look is gone, and the uniforms are becoming a billboard in real time.
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