Tennessee football will run out this fall with a First Horizon Bank patch on its jersey, and it's not some throwaway logo deal. Per ESPN's Pete Thamel, the agreement runs 10 years and is worth more than $120 million over the life of the contract, putting it in the conversation with the biggest sponsorship money college sports has ever handed out.
NEWS: Tennessee football has signed a 10-year jersey patch deal with First Horizon Bank, which industry sources tell ESPN will be worth more than $120 million over the life of the deal. The deal also includes various Olympic sports, but is separate from the men’s and women’s basketball patches.
The number is the headline, but the relationship isn't new. First Horizon has been the self-branded Bank of the Vols since 1993, and this deal is really that 33-year partnership finally getting a jersey patch and a nine-figure price tag attached to it. The bank becomes the first-ever jersey patch sponsor for Tennessee football specifically, with the same agreement also covering a slate of Olympic sports — volleyball, soccer, golf, tennis, track and field, cross country, swimming and diving, and rowing.
Notably, this is separate from Tennessee's men's and women's basketball patch deal with Axle Logistics, meaning the Vols now have two different companies paying to be on different jerseys across the athletic department. That's the modern reality of college sports economics — schools are slicing up patch real estate sport by sport and stacking the revenue.
Context matters here too. Notre Dame's SoFi deal runs about $18-20 million a year, and the Big 12's conference-wide Monster Energy patch pays out $20 million annually league-wide. Tennessee's $120 million works out to roughly $12 million a year, which isn't the richest annual number in the sport, but the total payout and the 10-year length make it one of the largest single-school commitments on the books — well ahead of deals like Michigan State's $40 million, 10-year patch agreement with MSUFCU.
For Tennessee, it's another data point in the arms race NIL and revenue sharing have forced athletic departments into. Every inch of jersey space is now a line item, and a program that just went to the College Football Playoff needs every dollar it can find to keep competing for talent. Locking in $120 million over a decade with a bank that's already been part of the furniture in Knoxville since the early '90s is about as low-risk as this kind of money gets.
Expect more of these to trickle out across the sport as other blue bloods look at Tennessee's number and start making calls of their own.