With athlete pay legal, here’s how NIU AD Sean Frazier hopes to flip new conferences into revenue growth

The way NIU athletic director Sean Frazier describes things, NIU has a shiny new beach house and a new lake house.

Those assets should help the university increase its revenue, a necessity in a post-House settlement world in which schools can compensate athletes directly.

“Folks have looked at NIU and said ‘You know what? They put themselves in a position where there’s definitely some upside coming,’” Frazier said. “There are opportunities to continue to grow revenue.”

Frazier calls joining the Mountain West for football only the beach house. Joining the Horizon League for most non-football sports is the lake house.

The move to the Mountain West is expected to bring in more media revenue than the Mid-American Conference receives. And the move to the Horizon League, according to Frazier, will reduce expenses.

But Frazier said the moves have also improved the school’s brand, which in turn is attracting new sponsors and expanding existing partnerships.

“We see people starting to say, ‘Ooh, I think we want to team up with these cats,’” Frazier said. “At the end of the day, we’re starting to see foot traffic. We’re starting to see revenue.”

According to a financial report on the school’s website for the 2023-24 season, just over 27% of NIU’s revenue came from external funding, which includes multimedia rights, licensing and donations. That was responsible for almost $9 million of the school’s nearly $33 million in athletic revenue.

In the 2016-17 report, external funding was 14% of the school’s athletic revenue at just under $4 million dollars

Two weeks after NIU football beat Notre Dame last season in a historic upset, the school announced a partnership with Jersey Mike’s to allow the company on-field logos at the 25-yard lines.

In April, the school announced a five-year deal with Rockford Credit Union as the official financial literacy partner for Huskie student-athletes.

“We’ve always had a really good brand. Now it’s even better,” Frazier said. “Now you have individuals inquiring about, ‘How about this? We like that level of risk because we love college football. We love college athletics. We see NIU going into different marketplaces and this is a good thing.’”

Frazier said deals must serve the university’s core goal, making sure at the end of the day all students, including athletes, are getting diplomas.

“Now we have to smoke it out to make sure that everything that was said doesn’t look like sunshine and rainbows and that we understand the cause and effect,” Frazier said. “If we do this, we get that. A lot of it is about making the current revenue streams we have better.”

Frazier said pursuing corporate money has its risks, and just like with decoupling conferences for football and other sports, is a deliberate process.

But given the new landscape of collegiate athletes being able to be paid, it’s important to maximize all revenue.

“We’ve got the beach house, we’ve got the lake house,” Frazier said. “We need to make sure we continue to renovate so we are competitive in this marketplace. I really do believe it needs to be about entrepreneurial spirit, an innovation piece, where you are bringing in some of these seasoned or older people, some of the younger people to understand that we can be good at this.”