Sports Memories And A Big Question

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Some of my best childhood memories are Saturday mornings playing basketball with my dad, then returning home to my bedroom that was covered in newspaper articles about my beloved Chicago Bulls and the Fab 5 at Michigan. I'm convinced I was the world's first Jalen Rose fan, after his mom, of course. Forget naming your kid Jalen. Can you believe Jalen Rose 05 was my email password growing up? Even now, if it's a Saturday mid-morning during college basketball season, I'll turn on a game just to hear the sneaker squeaking on the hardwood. That sound takes me right down nostalgia lane. Some of the best moments of my adult life with my oldest child have come through sports too. He has played everything football, basketball, soccer, hockey, wrestling, lacrosse, tennis, baseball, even speed skating. So when I was on a plane with my son coming back from, you guessed it, a football camp, and happened to read a Harvard Business Review article about the rise of the Oklahoma City Thunder, I was instantly hooked. I had already heard stories about their chemistry, their joy, the practical jokes, and how all of that helped them become a real team. And I had an immediate thought. What can higher education leaders learn from the sports world? That is where today's conversation begins.

Latent Demand Hiding In Plain Sight

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They were sitting on a huge, highly lucrative audience that had been trying to give them money for years. But there was a catch. They had not built the infrastructure to capture it. The demand was there. It had simply been suppressed, underestimated, fragmented, and difficult to monetize. What looks like a sudden success story today is really something else. An industry that finally learned how to activate latent demand. That is the story of women's sports in America. And the lesson buried inside it applies directly to the institution you are sitting in right now. Today we're going deep on what the professional sports industry can teach higher ed, about revenue, talent, and one thing that I think those of us in higher ed care about more than most others, which is keeping your institutional soul. We're going to look at everything from National Football League distribution strategy to the explosive economics of women's sports, from the hidden math of talent development to the very real risk of letting new revenue streams eat you alive from the inside.

The NFL Shift To Intentionality

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To understand growth and what's happening in higher ed right now, you have to start with the biggest, most dominant institution in American media. The National Football League. The National Football League is fascinating to start with because in professional sports, every problem is magnified, and the results of your strategy are just broadcast to millions of people in real time. Think about the reach of the National Football League. It accounts for 93 of the 100 most watched television broadcasts in the United States. They practically own American attention. Yet they act like an organization that is terrified of coasting. If you look at their recent moves, they are fundamentally redesigning how they reach their audience. If one of the most dominant institutions on Earth is terrified of resting on its laurels, then we should be too. That anxiety is entirely justified when you look at how the game gets in front of fans right now, because they are navigating a major shift. And in some ways I think it's the same type of shift that we're navigating in higher education. I call it a shift from inevitability to intentionality. For decades, sports franchises, much like many colleges and universities, relied on inevitability. They were just always there. Remember cable vision? In the media world, if your programming was part of the passive cable bundle, you were inevitable. Consumers turned on their television and you were just there piped into their living room by default. As we know, the launch of standalone streaming services changed the math entirely. Look at the standalone ESPN platform. I talked about the streaming services that are a line item on my household budget in a previous episode. ESPN is one of them, and we have cable too. Remember that son I talked about at the intro? Makes sense, right? Fans now have to actively, deliberately choose to pull out their credit card, navigate to a specific app, and subscribe. You have to earn them. They don't just arrive by default anymore. Content that was once delivered by default must now be chosen deliberately. Higher education was never cable vision, but we also benefited from an era of limited choice. Now learners can compare more options, access more formats, and navigate more price points than ever before. We are in a fundamentally different market. And so is the National Football League. This emergent market has caused the National Football League to revisit everything about how they value, distribute, and package their product. For them, this means recognizing that their overwhelming domestic dominance wouldn't automatically translate to this new intentional era. So in 2022, they made a radical move. They decentralized their revenue strategy. In our terms, that is the equivalent of colleges and universities allowing individual schools, colleges, and units to develop new markets, grow new revenue streams, and retain more of the upside they create. Historically, the National Football League's international revenue was pooled at the league level and shared equally among all 32 franchises. It was essentially socialism at the ownership level, but they changed the rules to allow individual teams to claim entire foreign countries as their exclusive proprietary markets, and the teams get to keep the financial upside they generate in those countries rather than throwing it back into the collective pot. It is a master class in incentive design. By decentralizing revenue, they put incentives in the hands of the people closest to the market, the ones interacting directly with demand and best positioned to grow it. Individual teams can build local fandom, partnerships, merchandise, events, and market-specific engagement in ways a central league office never could. And because those teams now keep more of the upside they create, they have a real reason to invest in the infrastructure required to win. All 32 National Football League teams are now actively building international fan bases in 22 different international markets, and the data shows it's really working. In 2026, there will be a record-setting nine international games across four different continents. The Super Bowl draws almost 70 million international viewers with a year-over-year double-digit increase. What stands out to me is how they are executing this operationally. You can't just take your famous hyper-patriotic domestic branding with fighter jet flyovers and American military stickers on helmets. Drop it into a new country and expect people to care. And this is where I think higher education should pay very close attention. I hear many people in higher ed say that families, students, and the public simply do not understand the value of a degree. Maybe there is some truth in that. But the more important question is this what are institutions doing to help people understand that value? The National Football League is not sitting back complaining that people in new markets did not grow up with American football. They are investing to solve that problem. They are partnering locally, adapting messaging to specific markets, and using 2028 Summer Olympics flag football as a low barrier entry point that teaches people the rules, the excitement, and the culture of the game. That is long game strategy. They understand that you cannot fully monetize value, people do not yet know how to recognize. Higher ed often wants the premium purchase first. Enroll now, commit now, borrow now, trust us now. But many learners need a lower barrier pathway that helps them understand the economic value, career relevance, personal fit, and real-world outcomes of what is being offered. The National Football League is teaching people how to consume the product before asking them to buy the premium version. A lot of colleges and universities are still waiting for people to arrive already convinced. That difference matters.

Women’s Sports And Demand Shock

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Now the National Football League had to circle the globe to find new audiences, but what if your biggest growth engine is standing right in front of you, like literally in your own backyard, and you just haven't built the infrastructure to actually see it? This is where the story of women's sports becomes the most important outside signal for higher education this year. Let's start with the Caitlin Clark effect. Maybe you like her antics on the court, maybe you don't, but I think there's much for us to learn about her outsized impact on women's sports in just a handful of years. Because of new name, image, and likeness rules, Clark was generating a $3.4 million sponsorship valuation while still in college. She was a walking economy before she even hit the pro market. When she did go pro, the Las Vegas Aces literally had to move a game against her team to a different venue with nearly double the capacity just to hold all the ticket buyers. 36 of the Indiana Fever's 40 games were put on national television, and State Farm signed their first ever NIL deal with a woman athlete specifically to align with her. Her impact is undeniable. Now, you might be on the Angel Reese train and think, wasn't Caitlin Clark simply a massive media phenomenon? A once-in-a-generation unicorn you cannot build a sustainable business strategy around? That is the right instinct to question. But strategy gives us a more useful lens for understanding what may have happened. There is a term in strategy and economics called a demand shock. It describes a sudden event that meaningfully changes demand patterns in a market, forcing businesses to respond. Sometimes demand shocks are negative, sometimes they are positive, but either way they alter the trajectory of the market. A unicorn creates a spike. Picture a unicorn's horn. One extraordinary star can temporarily raise ratings, headlines, and attention. The ceiling rises while that person is in the spotlight. A demand shock is different. A demand shock raises the floor. It brings in new customers, reactivates casual ones, attracts sponsors, increases media coverage, expands distribution, and makes the entire category more valuable. When there's a demand shock, people do not just tune in for one player. They begin following the league. They learn the rivalries, they buy tickets to other teams, they care about additional storylines. Broadcasters commit more coverage. Brands spend more money. So the strategic question is not whether Caitlin Clark was famous. Of course she was. The real question is whether her arrival created temporary attention or permanent market expansion. That is why calling Caitlin Clark a demand shock matters. It means she may have accelerated the growth curve of women's basketball, not just starred inside it. McKinse released a comprehensive study on this phenomenon. Between 2022 and 2024, revenue from women's sports grew 4.5 times faster than men's sports across the board. Yet, even with that explosive systemic growth, women's sports still make up less than 2% of the $75 billion US sports market. That is a significant disconnect. The appetite is there. The infrastructure to capture the value is not fully there yet. When you look deeper into that McKinsey study, the demographic breakdown is the real eye-opener. 99% of women's sports fans already watch sports. That means the growth did not come from discovering some mysterious new audience that nobody knew existed. It came from people already in the category whose appetite expanded. And I think this is one of the biggest growth lessons for higher education. There is no magical population hiding in a cave that we just have not found yet. We spend way too much time talking about new audiences, as if growth only lives there. When you strip away all the strategy language, growth is actually pretty simple. You are either creating something new or working with what you already have. And you are either doing it for new people or people you already serve. That gives you four paths. And every growth strategy you will ever see fits into one of them. I recently walked a Dean's committee through this exact framework because if you want growth, you have to get more precise about where it can actually come from. Now listen to this. So let me ask you a higher ed version of that question. Who are your existing learners with an expanding appetite for knowledge, advancement, credentials, or reinvention? What are you building for them right now? And do you have the infrastructure to capture that value? Now let's relate that back to women's sports. Why hasn't the infrastructure been there for women's sports? The systemic mismatch occurred because historically, organizations just tried grafting women's sports onto legacy men's sports. They offered them terrible broadcast time slots, limited merchandise runs, and just afterthought marketing funnels. They treated women's sports like a charitable add-on, rather than a unique growth market that needed a well-thought infrastructure. Caitlin Clark did not create the audience from nothing. She simply made existing demand impossible for the people in charge to ignore. What if one of the biggest growth mistakes in higher education is assuming low demand when the real issue is low visibility? We are constantly asking how to create demand, how to generate interest, how to find new audiences. But sometimes the audience is already there. Sometimes working adults want advancement, but do not see a program built for their life. Sometimes transfer students want the degree, but cannot see a clear path through the credit maze. Sometimes alumni want to come back, but no one has invited them. Sometimes employers need talent, but no one packaged the solution in a way they can buy. That is the lesson here. Caitlin Clark did not magically invent interest in women's basketball. She made existing demand impossible to ignore. And I think many colleges and universities are facing the same kind of moment. The question may not be whether demand exists. The question may be whether your institution knows how to see it, whether you know how to measure it, whether you know how to remove the friction blocking it, whether you know how to package it clearly enough for people to say yes. Because low enrollment and low demand are not always the same thing. Sometimes what looks like weak demand is really hidden demand, waiting for a clearer

The Value Frontier Of Talent

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path. So once we've identified our huge untapped audience, YOY is the immediate reflex to go on a spending spree. For sports teams, they build the new stadium, hire the expensive executives, overpay for star talent, buy the audience, buy the buzz, buy your way into relevance. And if that sounds familiar, yes, higher education has been known to run a version of that playbook too, which is usually a terrible idea. Because the data is pretty clear, trying to buy your way into a new market is often the fastest path to burning cash without building real value. So how do the smartest teams build demand, loyalty, and momentum without spending a dime they do not need to spend? Let's talk about the concept of the value frontier. McKinsey did another fascinating study analyzing over 100 professional European football clubs across four seasons. They wanted to mathematically isolate how some clubs consistently punch far above their financial weight. They found that just buying the most expensive superstars on the open market actually does not correlate with sustained winning. The metric that mattered most was something called internal squad assembly. They found a staggering €200 million budget gap between the most efficient clubs and the lagging ones. Two clubs could have vastly different outcomes even when the more successful ones spent 200 million euros less. How? 80% of that efficiency gap is explained by internal talent development, the integration of youth academy players, internal coaching infrastructure, and deliberate cultivation of existing talent. In institutional terms, it's the difference between building a robust internal promotion pipeline versus constantly relying on high-priced external hires. It's like buying a fixer upper and doing the master craftsmanship yourself, instead of overpaying for a turnkey mansion. You see this exact same philosophy dominating the NBA right now. The 2025 NBA finals featured the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers. Neither of those teams reached the championship by going on super team spending sprees or throwing hundreds of millions at aging superstars. They followed a strategy principle called rule-aware sequencing. Rule-aware sequencing means building your strategy in the order that best fits the rules of the system you operate in. In the National Basketball Association, those rules include salary cap limits, luxury tax penalties, contract restrictions, and roster rules. You cannot simply spend wildly and collect stars. So the smartest teams follow a sequence. First, they draft core talent early, then they develop those players while their contracts are still cheaper. Next, they add complementary pieces once the foundation is in place. After that, they preserve flexibility so they can respond to opportunities. Then they make larger financial commitments when the roster is truly ready to contend. The advantage of that sequence is that each step creates leverage for the next one. Cheap young talent creates room to add pieces. Strong development creates clarity about who is worth paying. Preserved flexibility creates options. And by the time the expensive moves happen, the team is spending to compete rather than spending to hope. That is rule aware, because it works with the system instead of fighting it. And it is sequencing because the order of the moves creates the value. Discipline today creates options tomorrow. But here is the part that gets glossed over. That sequence only works if your organization can actually execute each step. And execution is not a strategy problem, it is a culture problem. You can design the perfect sequence on paper. But if your people are still operating under old incentives, old habits, and old definitions of success, the sequence breaks down immediately. That is why cultivating internal talent and setting new standards is not a nice to have. It is the prerequisite. And I am going to be honest with you, doing that well can require dismantling parts of the existing culture. And that is incredibly painful. So what does it actually look like on the ground when an organization goes from worst to

Culture Change And Deselection

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first? It looks messy. Because real transformation is a fight against institutional inertia. You cannot bolt a new growth strategy onto an old culture. The muscle memory is tied to the old incentives. Which brings us to a concept most leaders avoid deselection. Dan Bartholomew took over the athletic program at Western Michigan University when it was averaging ninth place in its conference. He instituted a complete operational reset he called the Western Way, a strict set of daily operational standards, and critically he explicitly and publicly let go of people who refused to adopt those standards. Within three years, the program jumped to averaging fourth place. They won a hockey national championship and all five fall sports reached the NCAA postseason. The second example shows the sheer scale transformation sometimes demands. Jason Wright, former president of the NFL Washington Commanders, took over an organization with a deeply toxic culture and plummeting revenues. He didn't bring in a few new vice presidents. He turned over 85% of the workforce. You don't let go of 85% of your staff because they lack technical skills. You do it because in a deeply flawed organization, and I want to emphasize that I'm talking here about deeply flawed organizations, toxicity is decentralized. You can't just remove the head. You have to remove those who were enforcing the old, unwritten rules that were expected in that toxic culture. As a result, local revenue grew 50%. Their core operational profitability expanded ninefold. They completed a highly lucrative sale to new ownership. None of that would have happened without the willingness to endure the profound discomfort of turning over staff to fit the strategy. Here's the direct translation for higher education. How much of your leadership energy right now is being spent trying to train people who fundamentally disagree with where the institution is going. Sometimes you have to look the people who built the old system in the eye and say, we are playing a different game now. Deselection is the hardest part of leadership, and it's also the part most academic leaders spend entire careers avoiding.

Gambling Revenue And Integrity Risk

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Before I leave you, I need to name one more thing, because it is a warning the sports world is broadcasting right now. And as much as I believe higher education has a great deal to learn from the world, those lessons include both what to do and what not to do. Let's say you do everything we've explored today, you reset the culture, you pivot your distribution strategy, you find your latent Audience. You cultivate internal talent. You create a new revenue stream, and have the institution is organized around protecting it and growing it. You're the Golden State Warriors privately funding your $1.4 billion arena and spinning it off into new revenue streams like an entertainment district of apartments, offices, and retail. You're swimming in revenue. I know that's hard for higher ed to imagine. And that's when you have to protect your institutional soul. This is where the Laboratory of Sports provides a very serious warning about integrity and the danger of misaligned incentives. We need to examine the explosion of legalized sports gambling. It's a huge issue right now. And just as a quick important note for everyone listening, I'm looking at this strictly from an organizational perspective. I'm not taking a moral or political stance on gambling itself, but I'm analyzing the mechanics of how this new revenue stream impacts the institutions that rely on it. And structurally, the facts are alarming. Since the 2018 Supreme Court decision that opened the doors for legalized sports betting, we've seen the rise of what are called prop bets. These are proposition bets on highly specific individual player performances, like how many rebounds a specific player will get in the first quarter, or whether a quarterback will throw an interception on a specific drive. It's basically microbetting, yes, and the dangers and the mechanics. To manipulate a traditional bet, a player would have to convince their entire team to throw a game, which is incredibly difficult and obvious. But a prop bet creates a highly vulnerable manipulation. A player doesn't have to throw the game, they just have to intentionally miss two free throws or suddenly step out of bounds to alter a highly specific micro bet without anyone noticing. It's terrifyingly easy. And we are already seeing the consequences of this vulnerability. Miami Heat's Terry Rozier was arrested for collusion. The head coach of the Portland Trailblazers was charged in a separate probe. A prominent NBA agent, Daniel Hassan, went on the record to warn about this. He warned that players, their trainers, and their camps hold immense inside information, like a minor ankle sprain that isn't on the injury report. That information is incredibly valuable to gamblers. The call is coming from inside the house, and it creates a major conflict of interest. The league relies on integrity monitors. Their job is to police this betting activity and flag suspicious wagers. It sounds good in theory, but those exact same integrity monitors actually profit from gathering and distributing the data that the sports books used to create the profits in the first place. It goes even deeper. The leagues themselves, like the NBA, MLB, the NFL, they hold ownership stakes in these monitoring firms. Let me break it down at the fifth grade level. Imagine your school has a rule that no one can sell candy during class. So the principal hires a hall monitor to stop candy sales and catch rule breakers. But then you find out three things. That same hall monitor also sells the candy list that tells students which candy is most popular. The more candy that gets sold, the more money the hall monitor makes. The principal owns part of the hall monitor's candy business. Now ask yourself, will they be fully motivated to stop candy sales, or do they quietly benefit when candy sales keep growing? That is the concern here. As Daniel Hassan pointed out, the league is structurally incentivized to look the other way. He warned that they are in a position where they can't risk catching a star, because if they did, it discredits the whole league. Let's bring this back to higher education.

Growth Without Losing The Soul

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The lesson is not that colleges and universities are facing anything as extreme as sports betting. The lesson is structural. Whenever an institution becomes heavily dependent on a new source of revenue, that source of revenue can begin shaping the institution in return. It can influence what gets prioritized, what gets measured, what gets expanded, what gets ignored. And that creates an important leadership question. When we pursue growth through online enrollment, corporate partnerships, philanthropy, external ventures, or new credentials, how do we determine what is mission consistent versus what is merely lucrative? Because growth is necessary. Many institutions need it. But growth without discipline can create trade-offs that only become visible later. The strongest institutions understand this. They do not just ask, will this make money? They ask, does this strengthen trust? Does this fit who we are? Does this improve outcomes? Does this build durable capacity? Or are we slowly reorganizing ourselves around a short-term incentive? That is the real test of institutional discipline. Thanks for listening. The basketball playoffs are on, and unlike higher education, tip-off starts on time. Until next time.