With the Niners + Learfield partnership expiring on June 30, the Charlotte AD is launching its own in-house MMR under the moniker Charlotte 49ers Ventures.
https://x.com/Charlotte49ers/status/1924837332688965917
Snippet from D1.ticker story that quotes Charlotte Business Journal piece about the launch: 
Is this going to work? What sayeth the board?
Can we do better than Learfield?
We’ll find out, especially with Hill already setting the bar per his comments.
This excites me more than stadium expansion. Cut out the third party who’s getting a cut of the pie. Direct streams of revenue. I’m sure we were limited with who we could work with based on the contract as well. It takes smart people willing to put in the work. I hope the team assembled gets it done.
Numerous schools have left Learfield this year. I am guessing they are trying something or someone different also. In theory this decision makes a lot of sense and should generate more revenue if we execute.
I trust this AD, why wouldn’t I? 20 years superb AD’ing.
Learfield has done a pretty poor job of finding sponserships for the school. Surely we could have a couple people in house do better.
It appears that we have essentially the same sponsors that we had when they arrived. Those companies were brought in by Mark Colonel and Signature Sports.
Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to affect merchandising.
Expanding our brand partners and bringing in more revenue is an absolute must if our AD is going to compete in this NIL era. Simply going after our current partners and asking for more money isn’t going to cut it. That’s essentially what we’ve done to our season ticket holders the last few years by doubling ticket prices instead of bringing in more butts in seats. This new MMR team can not do that and be successful.
It would be nice if they could take our games to market for over the air with the local stations.
But I imagine that would violate our current media deals?
Haven’t seen the contract of course, but it just comes down to whether or not ESPN allows local stations to option games.
I view this as great news, couple of questions though/thoughts.
Why in the hell did it take us so long to fund a dedicated department to do this with people with proven results? We have seen this landscape changing for about 3 yrs now and just did the same ole.
Caddell looks like a great person to lead this based on his experience. Did a similar job with Clemson and looks like he signed Optum as lead sponsor when with the PGA Tour for Presidents Cup here in CLT. He must have great Corp Contacts with his work with the Panthers and Hornets.
My biggest question now is, what is Mike Hill’s job now? When he was hired, IIRC, he was pitched a person that had this skill, he was supposed to the the rainmaker. Is he now just the king of PPT’s and showing up at softball games?