Let the Sponsorship Madness Begin
I was lucky this weekend, lucky to be in Chicago, lucky to be inside the United Center for the 2026 TIAA Big Ten Men's Basketball Tournament Championship, and lucky to be in a city that was fully alive for St. Patrick's Day.
If you know Chicago in March, you know the river runs green, the bars run deep, and the energy is unlike almost anywhere in North America. The weather didn't cooperate, but the United Center was cooking with the passion of Big Ten alumni who travel for their teams and wear their colours like religion. That passion, by the way, is exactly what makes college sports one of the most unique commercial properties in the world.
Entitlement partner TIAA understands that better than most. Created in 1918 by Andrew Carnegie and his Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as a fully funded pension system for professors, TIAA doesn't call its customers "customers"; it calls them "participants." Those participants are teachers, university staff, researchers, and administrators, the people who have given their careers to the same academic institutions that make up the Big Ten's 18 schools.
When a sponsor's community and a property's community are literally the same people, that is not a sponsorship. That is belonging.
Abbott, as the official health sciences and diagnostics partner of the Big Ten, activates one of my favourite platforms, "We Give Blood," a nationwide blood donation competition in which all 18 universities compete to drive the most donations, with the winning school receiving a $1 million grant for student or community health. The rate of blood donation among people ages 19 to 24 has dropped by nearly a third in recent years, driving Abbott to act. In 2025, the program inspired over 80,000 donors and saved nearly 250,000 lives, with more than half of those donors giving blood for the first time. Think about the ROI on saving a quarter million lives.
March Madness highlights the commercial opportunities in women's sports. College sports in the United States have been the quiet engine of the women's sports movement. Title IX paved the way, but it took forever to build the stage. Finally, a class of generational players emerged, and we are now witnessing decades of slow progress finally paying out in a very serious way.
In this year's tournaments, you will see how Degree tapped WNBA three-time champion Candace Parker for its Clinical 5X campaign, and Marriott Bonvoy is placing rewards members at the Sheraton Phoenix Downtown during the Women's Final Four. Buick is in its third consecutive year with "See Her Greatness," built squarely around the women's tournament.
I could write an entire column about Allstate, which has made one of the most structurally interesting commitments to women's sport, beyond being the title sponsor of the Big Ten Women's Basketball Tournament and the presenting sponsor of all 12 women's Olympic sports championships and tournaments, gymnastics, soccer, softball, in short, all of it. They went deeper by sponsoring BTN's new women's soccer series, On The Pitch, showcasing the stories and journeys of Big Ten athletes. They leveraged the partnership to launch the Allstate Big Ten Women's Championship Series, a year-long competition tracking performance across all Big Ten women's programs, with the school posting the highest cumulative score across the full academic year crowned the overall champion.
One could say that women's sports are in good hands with Allstate.