Penn State's Updated View of Beaver Stadium Naming Rights Reflects College Football's New Reality

A year ago, Beaver Stadium's naming rights were "not on the table." Now, they might be.

A general view of Penn State's Beaver Stadium. / Matthew OHaren-USA TODAY Sports

In May 2023, after Penn State announced plans to renovate Beaver Stadium, Athletic Director Patrick Kraft detailed in an interview why he thought preserving the nation's second-largest stadium was important. At the time, Kraft said Beaver Stadium's name was important to preserve as well.

"No, naming Beaver Stadium is not on the table right now," Kraft said then in an interview with AllPennState.

But college football has changed significantly in the year since. Penn State has begun the planned $700 million renovation of Beaver Stadium, positioning the 64-year-old stadium as a year-round entertainment destination and generator of new revenue streams. And now, that revenue could come from selling the naming rights to Beaver Stadium.

In an interview with Ben Jones of Statecollege.com, Kraft offered an updated answer to the naming-rights question. "Yeah, I'm open to everything," he said.

Kraft's latest response underscored college football's new reality. Athletic departments seek new revenue streams as they figure out how to budget for perhaps $22 million annually in revenue sharing with athletes. The pending settlement of the House vs. NCAA lawsuit will open the door for athletic departments to distribute revenue payments directly to athletes as early as 2025.

That wasn't the case in 2023, when Kraft said of Beaver Stadium's naming rights, "I think it’s important for us, and I think our fans understand that it’s Beaver Stadium. We have no plan right now to touch that."

"Right now" is the crucial term of the last sentence. Penn State Athletics, which generated a record $202.2 million in revenue for fiscal year 2023, didn't face the possibility then of sharing more than 10 percent of that revenue with athletes. Now it does. In fact, Penn State football coach James Franklin said that the Nittany Lions will be among the programs able to max-out the revenue-sharing limit.

"Although we've got a pretty good idea of where this is all going big-picture, how it’s going to play out on all these different campuses is going to be very different," Franklin said. "Some schools won’t be able to meet the threshold. They won’t have the revenue to be able to do it. I think we’ll be a program that will. But then also you also have Title 9 that factors into that as well. So there’s a lot that goes into it."

Beaver Stadium will be crucial to contributing sustained revenue to the athletic department. In a recent presentation to the university's Board of Trustees, Penn State officials projected that the Beaver Stadium renovation project "most likely" would generate $43.7 million in surplus revenue and "best case" could generate as much as $264.8 million over the project's lifespan.

The concept of naming rights appears in the proposal, though stadium naming rights were not addressed specifically. However, the proposal suggested that philanthropy and naming rights could generate $50 million for the Beaver Stadium renovation project.

Stadium naming-rights deals are growing more common in college football. Georgia Tech signed a reported 20-year, $55 million deal to create Bobby Dodd Stadium at Hyundai Field. Arizona State signed a 15-year contract worth more than $50 million, according to Sports Business Journal, for "Mountain America Stadium, Home of the ASU Sun Devils." Earlier this year, Rutgers extended its naming-rights deal with SHI for an additional four years, according to NJ.com.

Ultimately, Penn State could upgrade Beaver Stadium while preserving the venue's history and opening bids for naming rights.

"I think Beaver Stadium is an historic place," Kraft said in the May 2023 interview with AllPennState. "It’s part of the fabric not only of the Penn State community but the state of Pennsylvania and college football. It’s just one of those iconic venues that I feel very lucky to be a small part of."

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AllPennState is the place for Penn State news, opinion and perspective on the SI.com network. Publisher Mark Wogenrich has covered Penn State for more than 20 years, tracking three coaching staffs, three Big Ten titles and a catalog of great stories. Follow him on Twitter @MarkWogenrich.