Barstool Sports, the offbeat and controversial website, was close to sponsoring a college football bowl game in Mobile, Ala., until ESPN stepped in, the organization’s CEO claims.
In an interview with SI.com, Erika Nardini said the NCAA was on board for Barstool Sports to sponsor a bowl game, but ESPN, which was going to televise the game, got in the way.
“Our understanding was that the NCAA was fine with it, that this was good to go,” Nardini said. “To be fair, we flagged this during the process with them. Are you sure ESPN is gonna want to broadcast this? You should check on that. This is not something we were surprised by. We flagged it. We were obviously hopeful this could work, but we had anticipated this would perhaps be a bigger issue.”
On Monday, Sports Business Journal reported that the deal fell apart because of pressure from both the NCAA and ESPN. Nardini said two names were discussed for the bowl: The Barstool Sports Bowl or The Mobile, Alabama Bowl presented by Barstool Sports.
“We were very excited about it,” Nardini said. “We had a lot of ongoing conversations about being connected to the bowl, we were starting to think about how we can bring that to life on site, what kind of programming we can do around it. We’re such a different animal in what we would’ve done around the activation that we were starting to have a lot of those conversations.
“We’re a little bit different than most sponsors or presenters in that we’re less interested in slapping a logo on something. We’re more interested in making it funny or relevant and compelling to a young, social and mobile audience. Basically, we were fairly far down the path. We were talking about numbers, activations, what we could and could not do on location. We were really excited to make it happen. Our understanding was that the NCAA was fine with it and then when the last bridge was to be crossed — the broadcast on ESPN and the commercial time that would come with the sponsorship — that’s where ESPN really balked.”
Tensions arose between Barstool and ESPN two years ago when ESPN cancelled “Barstool Van Talk” after just one episode. The end of the partnership came in the wake of Sam Ponder calling Barstool out over a 2014 blog post that demeaned her, which was followed by a podcast during which Barstool president David Portnoy called Ponder a “slut.”