Why Snoop Dogg is making history with college football bowl game sponsorship

Before the start of the college football season in 2021, the NCAA published an annual handbook that listed what kinds of major sponsorships to ban from postseason bowl games.

It was a morality policy for bowl game advertising.

“Malt beverages, beer, wine and other alcoholic products” were forbidden, according to the handbook from 2021-22. Also banned were “nightclubs and other establishments that include adult entertainment and/or gambling.”

In 2010, the International Bowl in Toronto was even forced to go out of business after the NCAA rejected its proposed title sponsorship from 5-Hour Energy, a non-alcoholic drink that had ingredients the NCAA didn’t like, including amino acids and caffeine.

But then something unusual happened last week. On May 6, Snoop Dogg, the hip-hop artist, broke through with an announcement. He was not only sponsoring a bowl game, but he was doing it to promote his alcoholic beverage brand, Gin & Juice.

It’s called the “Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl Presented by Gin & Juice By Dre and Snoop.”

It is the first time in NCAA history that a bowl game has an alcoholic beverage as a title or presenting sponsor.

And it’s game-changing, as compared to how the NCAA once presided over the bowl-game business previously.

What happened to those NCAA rules?

In December 2019, USA TODAY Sports published a story about the NCAA’s moral code for bowl game sponsorships, which took up about three pages and added up to more than 1,000 words in its postseason bowl handbook. Not even “pool halls” with billiards or nutritional supplements were allowed to sponsor games if they had ginseng or creatine.

The purpose of these rules was to assure that bowl game sponsorships reflected the “collegiate model,” according to the handbook from 2019.

But the article noted that these standards weren’t strictly enforced. In practice, many bowl games had been accepting some compensation from alcohol brands, as long as they were “secondary” or non-major sponsors whose signage wasn’t in view of TV cameras or visible around student-athletes.

Critics described it as hypocrisy – sort of a sliding scale of morality that loosened further in subsequent editions, including dropping “pool halls” from the banned list by 2021.

The organization then took an even bigger step in 2022.

It quietly deleted those three pages of rules completely, ending the entire perceived charade. The morality policy simply disappeared that year without any announcement about it.

“Unless you’re really, really into this stuff, you may not have noticed it actually happened,” said Nick Carparelli, executive director of Bowl Season, which promotes the postseason bowl system.

It got virtually no public attention until two years later, when Snoop Dogg made his move this month with Gin & Juice.

What types of sponsorships are banned by the NCAA now?

None really, believe it or not.

The current handbook said title sponsors and advertisers should “be supportive of the values and attributes of college football.” Other than that, title sponsors must be approved by the athletic conferences involved with the bowl game, as well as the TV company that is televising it.

That means the NCAA is no longer passing judgment on the advertising allowed at bowl games. The NCAA still certifies these games and regulates the display of advertising logos on the field, including a prohibition of NFL logos.

But “Gin & Juice” is OK now as a presenting sponsor. A caffeinated energy drink with amino acids could even get its name in the game, too.

“A lot has changed in college athletics in the last three years,” Carparelli said. “So we’re all trying to evolve.”

Why did the NCAA delete all these bowl game rules?

The NCAA said in a statement that it was “to allow the conference offices and bowl entities to directly determine all corporate relationships, including bowl sponsorship agreements.”

The bigger reason for it was to get out of the way of these business decisions at a time when such rules now seem old-fashioned and paternalistic. The NCAA's old “amateurism” model has been under attack in the courts, arguably because it had too many rules that got in the way of free and fair ways for others to make money. In 2021, the NCAA also finally relented under legal pressure to allow athletes to profit off their fame for the first time.

“The NCAA just felt that if a bowl wanted to enter into a sponsorship agreement and the conferences playing in the game agreed with it, and the broadcast partner agreed with it, why should they stand in the way?” Carparelli said.

How the rule change affected the Arizona Bowl

The deletion of the old rules also allows bowl games a wider array of potential sponsors at a time when middle- or lower-tier bowl games are trying to stay viable and relevant as the sport expands its postseason playoff to 12 teams this year.

Their three main sources of revenue are sponsorship money, TV rights fees and ticket sales. For example, the Arizona Bowl’s most recently available tax form from 2022-23 showed $875,850 in revenue from “qualified sponsorships,” $603,500 from broadcasting and $424,096 from ticket sales.

That was when Barstool Sports was the title-sponsor and Ohio beat Wyoming in the game in Tucson in December 2022.

This year the game will be on Dec. 28 and will again feature teams for the Mountain West and Mid-American Conferences.

“Instead of having to go ask the NCAA, I just needed to get the permission of my two conferences,” said Kym Adair, the game’s executive director. “They gave the green light to proceed after I shared with them what I was hoping to do, what the product was, the overall impact of what this meant for our game and the visibility of the conferences. I think everybody saw this was a win-win situation.”

USA TODAY Sports asked both leagues whether they had concerns about approving such a sponsorship. The MAC and MWC responded with similar statements that didn’t answer the question and instead said they “were excited to continue our partnership” with the game.

Gin & Juice's alcohol by volume, lyric factors

Adair noted that the Gin & Juice product has an alcohol by volume (ABV) of “what a beer or seltzer would have (5.9%), so they were ready to give us the green light to proceed.”

It’s a creative deal. Snoop’s celebrity will help raise the game’s profile, much like the LA Bowl got a boost from having other celebrity names in the game’s name.

In this case, Snoop and Dr. Dre, another hip-hop artist, also own the beverage brand that is the presenting sponsor. It was named after their song together in the 1990s, “Gin & Juice,” which also might have faced another NCAA problem because of its lyrics.

The song featured misogynistic words, seemingly violating the old NCAA standards that banned major sponsorships from “those who promote hatred, misogyny or discrimination in their art.”

But those standards were deleted in 2022. Snoop Dogg’s music also has changed its tone since that song came out – part of his effort to make it more uplifting, as he previously described it. The press release about the sponsorship noted his support of the Snoop Youth Football League and how it will be the first alcohol presenting sponsor in a bowl game.

He couldn’t be reached for additional comment.

“I’ve sent many players through my SYFL to colleges (and the NFL) so it’s only fitting that I bring the ‘juice’ back to college football,” Snoop Dogg said in the release. “Dr. Dre and I are excited to bring our brand to the next level with this partnership, and we’re going to make the Arizona Bowl into a game day experience like never before.”

Follow reporter Brent Schrotenboer @Schrotenboer. Email: bschrotenb@usatoday.com