This is what it was supposed to look like

When the NCAA approved commercial jersey patches in January, the conversation immediately went to the biggest possible numbers. Notre Dame and SoFi at $18 to $20 million a year. Ohio State and JPMorganChase at $17 million. The patch market became a scoreboard, and the programs with the biggest brands set the scale.

Most of the Group of 6 looked at those numbers and started hunting for corporate sponsors who would write checks. UAB went a different direction.

On Monday, UAB Athletics announced a five-year expanded partnership with UAB Medicine. The UAB Medicine logo will appear on football helmet bumpers starting this season, on primary game jerseys for men's and women's basketball and on helmets for baseball and softball — five sports over five years.

The partner is UAB Medicine, the academic medical center of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. UAB Hospital is the fifth-largest hospital in the country by number of beds. UAB Health System is a 16-hospital system with annual revenues approaching $8 billion. In 2025, UAB Hospital cared for a record 929,021 unique patients. When Andy Kennedy says the UAB Medicine mark on Blazer uniforms is "a visible reminder that we are all part of one UAB," he is describing the literal structure of the institution.

The athletics department and the health system share a university, a Board of Trustees and a president. They share a campus and a city. But this is not one university account moving money to another. UAB Medicine is a health system competing for patients, recruiting physicians and building a regional brand. UAB Athletics is building visibility and revenue to support its programs. Each side gets something real from the other. The athletes carry the brand into every broadcast, every highlight and every social feed. The health system's investment funds the programs those athletes compete in. It is a genuine partnership — mutually beneficial for the institution, the athletes and UAB Medicine.

UAB is not the only school that figured this out.

Utah put the University of Utah Health logo on football jerseys. UConn put UConn Health on men's and women's basketball jerseys — building on a relationship where UConn Health has been the medical care provider for UConn Athletics for 30 years. Marshall signed a five-year, all-sport deal with Marshall Health Network, an integrated academic health system partnered with the Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine. Michigan State locked in a 10-year deal reportedly worth $40 million with MSUFCU — the Michigan State University Federal Credit Union, founded by Michigan State faculty and staff in 1937. BYU put BYU Continuing Education on six Olympic sports uniforms. At Montana, an anonymous donor funded the football jersey patch space and dedicated it to the University of Montana Foundation's scholarship initiative.

At Pitt, the partner is UPMC — the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which bears the university's name even though it is now a legally separate entity. At Wisconsin, UW Health — an independent public authority affiliated with UW but legally separate since 1996 — sponsors four women's sports.

That is at least eight programs where the jersey patch partner is part of the university or directly affiliated with it. Healthcare and financial services are the two leading sponsor categories in the patch market, according to Front Office Sports, and university health systems are driving a significant portion of that healthcare category.

University health systems have the budgets, the brand incentive and the institutional alignment that makes these deals natural. Every university with a medical center or health system should be asking why it has not done this yet.

This is where the jersey patch conversation should have started, because this is what the commercial era of college sports was supposed to produce.

The original promise of NIL was to let athletes benefit from being the most visible people on campus — their name, their image, their likeness. Student-athletes are among the most effective brand ambassadors any university has. They are the faces on the broadcast, the names in the highlights, the accounts that drive engagement on social media. Every athlete who arrives on campus brings a unique set of connections — family, friends, hometown communities, high school networks — and for many of those people, the athlete is their primary window into the university itself.

I spent more than three years working with companies in the NIL space before launching Diehard. One of the first things we noticed was the audience math. At most schools — including programs far bigger than UAB — the university brand is the primary asset. It is a rare exception when an individual athlete's brand is more potent than the institution's. But the collective social reach of a university's athletes routinely extends the university's own profile by multiples of five, 10, 50 and in some cases more than 100. The athletes are co-stars in the show. Their audiences, their connections and their visibility amplify the university brand to audiences the university often does not reach on its own.

That insight got buried under the chaos. NIL collectives spending millions to recruit individual players. Donors burning out on writing checks that go directly to 18-year-olds they have never met. Transfer portal bidding wars. Programs scrambling to raise money through mechanisms that did not exist three years ago and may not exist in their current form three years from now. Most of that activity flows around the institution. NIL money goes from donors to collectives to individual athletes, and the university has no role in the transaction.

The jersey patch puts the university back at the center. The university brand drives the value of the patch. When Ryder Burton drops back on ESPN on Thursday night, the UAB Medicine logo on his helmet is visible to every camera in the building and every screen tuned in. When the basketball team takes the floor, the UAB Medicine logo on the jersey reaches the broadcast, the highlight clip, the social post, the photo a parent shares with 500 friends. The university built the stage. The athletes perform on it, and both create value for the partner whose brand is on the uniform.

Crafting structures that allow athletes to participate in revenue sharing while growing the university brand and creating additional value for key university programs should always have been the lowest-hanging fruit. The jersey patch does exactly that. The revenue goes to the athletics department and supports the entire program — every sport, every athlete, every coach. The athletic department, the athletes and the university all benefit. That is viable in a way the current NIL marketplace is not for schools like UAB.

Alex Mortensen said it Monday: "We're trying to create a program that's sustainable and improving and growing." A jersey patch funded by a partner with institutional roots creates a revenue stream that scales with the visibility the athletes generate, rewards competitive success and does not depend on the generosity of individual donors who may or may not come back next year.

The financial terms of the UAB Medicine deal were not disclosed. At the Group of 6 level, jersey patch valuations range widely. Troy signed a four-year, $2.1 million deal with Troy Bank & Trust covering all 16 sports. Air Force got $2 million annually from USAA. Sam Houston sold a one-year, football-only patch to Snapback Sports for a reported $100,000. No two deals look alike, and the pricing model is still forming.

What is not in dispute is the value of what UAB Medicine gets in return. Every football game on ESPN. Every basketball broadcast. Every baseball and softball game streamed or televised. The UAB Medicine logo in front of every camera, on every highlight, in every social media post from every game across five sports for five years — carried by the university's most visible representatives. For a health system competing for patients and talent in a regional market, that visibility has measurable value.

UAB Medicine is an institutional partner with a five-year commitment and a vested interest in the university's success. It is not a collective that can dissolve or a donor who can walk away. The partnership is built into the structure of the institution itself.

Kennedy called it "a meaningful investment in UAB Athletics and in the young men and women who represent this university every day." Dawn Bulgarella, CEO of UAB Health System, said the partnership "creates new opportunities to showcase the important role health care plays in helping individuals and communities thrive."

Both statements describe the same deal from different sides. The athletics department gets investment. The health system gets visibility across five sports for five years. The athletes compete in programs funded by sustainable institutional revenue instead of the year-to-year uncertainty of the NIL marketplace. And the university brand grows because its most visible programs and its most prominent health system are aligned under one identity.

The commercial era of college sports was supposed to create structures where the institution, the athletes and the partners all benefit. At too many programs, it turned into a bidding war that bypassed the institution entirely. At UAB, a jersey patch deal with the university's own health system built the structure the right way.

That is what it was supposed to look like.