Big 12 Chief Brand and Business Officer Tyrel Kirkham pulled into the gas lane at Buc-ee’s in the greater DFW area when he slipped his phone out of his pocket and pinged an old friend.
WWE SVP, Head of Revenue Scott Zanghellini didn’t respond for weeks, Kirkham says, laughing. Zanghellini playfully rebuffs the idea, but that note did mark the beginnings of a relationship between the Big 12 and WWE that has grown into a full-fledged operation over the last three years.
“I always appreciated the crossover between WWE brands and sports fans,” Kirkham said. “There’s a beautiful Venn diagram that sits in the middle, and then there’s the outer perimeter of that and there’s something new that we can bring to each of the respective audiences.”
“When you look at everything that [Commissioner Brett Yormark] and Tyrel have done at the Big 12, we always say they’re ‘appropriately aggressive,’” Zanghellini said. “The change that they’ve implemented over there, you think about the expansion and adding four teams and they continue to do things a bit differently.”
The deal between the Big 12 and WWE does not involve cash changing hands. Rather, it’s a mutually beneficial agreement that is seeing each side help promote one another’s product with a synergy that might not be obvious.
This year, the work between the Big 12 and WWE has included a four-campus tour of “WWE Smackdown” on Friday nights, the first of which was held ahead of the Week 0 game between Iowa State and Kansas State in Dublin, Ireland. The final rendition will be held Friday in Denver ahead of Saturday’s Colorado-Arizona State game.
The Friday night showcases in college towns have been a boon for the athletic departments involved and provided an opportunity to connect their athletes on campus with those intimately involved in the inner workings of the WWE.
Earlier this month ahead of the WWE event in Salt Lake City, WWE Superstar and former gymnast Tiffany Stratton visited with the Utes’ gymnastics squad, teaching an assistant coach her finishing move. Fellow WWE Superstar Montez Ford, a former Marine, also served as an honorary captain and visited with Utah ROTC cadets along the sidelines during Utah’s 45-14 win over Cincinnati on Nov. 1.
“We got a lot of content from it that we’re able to continue to push, but it also created just this relationship between the WWE and some of our athletic programs,” said Utah Deputy AD/CRO Patrick Nowlin. “To me, everybody’s focused on what it is that we’re doing now. And yes, we are getting the publicity, but it’s also about avenues that we can create for our student athletes down the road. This opened their eyes to things that they may not have seen before.”
How and to what end the relationship between Big 12 and WWE persists is TBD, but both sides have seen value in the strategic agreement.
Zanghellini noted there’s a recruitment play in WWE’s efforts, sending recruiters along on the bulk of the tour stops this fall to educate athletes on campus about how one might pursue a career in the space.
Kirkham pointed to the WWE-style title belts that have been created for each Big 12 championship and are presented to the winning squads as part of the joint-efforts forging a comfortable marriage between the two parties.
And to think this whole grand thing just started with a text.
“It tracks with who Brett [Yormark] is and how we think as a league,” Cincinnati AD John Cunningham said of the WWE partnership. “We’re going to think differently about our entertainment value. We’re going to look real holistically about how we connect to different demographics. We’re not going to be stuffy. We’re not going to try to base everything on longtime traditions. We’re going to look to be innovative and to be young, to be fresh.”
