SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Marcus Freeman opened training camp with Notre Dame’s latest business partner over his shoulder. As the Irish head coach fielded questions about a football team with national title aspirations, the LED board behind him flashed the Notre Dame monogram alongside the logo for personal finance company SoFi. When the Irish took the practice field two days later, they had SoFi patches on their jerseys, sewn below the right shoulder.It was a new look to match a new era of college athletics, where revenue generation has become the sport within the sport. Notre Dame and SoFi signed a six-year patch deal for all Irish sports that is expected to bring in between $18 million and $20 million annually, according to sources briefed on the deal but not able to speak publicly about its details.Notre Dame’s football jersey is expensive and sacred real estate, which is part of the reason the deal is believed to be the richest patch contract in college sports. The cash infusion should help Notre Dame defray the ever-increasing costs of running a competitive athletic department, including a football roster budget that’s near the top of the market.“You have to be a shark, you have to keep moving,” Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua said. “Sharks stand still, they die. We have to be aggressive and progressive. We have to try to stay a step ahead of the game.”In return for their money, SoFi gets a fabric billboard to put itself in front of millions of potential customers on fall Saturdays. SoFi already has its name on the NFL stadium in Los Angeles, in the middle of a 20-year deal worth more than $600 million. Part of its agreement with Notre Dame included consideration for the Irish to play at the home of the Rams and Chargers in the future. SoFi CEO Anthony Noto grew up an Irish fan and was a Notre Dame parent for the past four years, his daughter Ellie graduating last May after playing on the women’s lacrosse team.But it takes more than a good story to make a nine-figure deal make sense. These patch deals are common practice in other sports, notably European soccer, where kits feature a club’s sponsors more prominently than the club’s crest. In American sports, jersey patches are more discrete but growing in ubiquity. Jersey patches are common in the NBA. In Major League Baseball, sleeve patches are regular. In the NFL, jersey patches are mostly limited to practice gear. In college football, where Michigan just announced the 99-year-old Big House’s first in-stadium advertising partners, it’s just the next frontier of revenue generation.College patches are new this fall thanks to a new NCAA policy adopted in January, and the early participants range from banking firms like SoFi and Chase (Notre Dame and Ohio State, respectively) to a casino resort (New Mexico State) to a Mexican bakery (UTSA). The Big 12 sold a conference-wide jersey patch to Monster Energy, at a price point roughly equal to Notre Dame’s exclusive deal.Like everything else in college football, there’s a line between the haves and the have-nots, with Notre Dame among the former. What’s less certain is the return on investment for these deals, for both the schools and the companies.“One way to build brand awareness and that trust is to be associated with these iconic brands like the NFL, like the NBA,” Noto said. “And Notre Dame is more than just the sports brand, obviously. It’s an iconic institution. When we did the SoFi Stadium deal, people would ask, ‘How many credit cards do you sign up on a Sunday or how many checking accounts?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t know.’ They’re like, ‘Well, then why are you doing the deal?’ We’re doing it for national television.”Lauren Anderson, the director of the Warsaw Sports Business Center at Oregon, built expertise in global marketing through her experience working at Nike and General Motors. While the market for college jersey patches might feel irrational, Anderson said there’s a dearth of schools with the brand awareness to make a national deal worth it, and there’s a scarcity of companies with the right reach to make a deal smart business.“How valuable is our brand? This exercise is a hard look at yourself if you’re a school,” Anderson said. “I’m not surprised that Notre Dame got what it got. And it pays to be a first mover. This market may come down in the next five years.”Notre Dame began its hunt for a jersey patch sponsor in late May, working with Creative Artists Agency, where Bevacqua previously worked as Global Head of Golf. SoFi was already mulling an entry into college sports sponsorship. Early ideas included sponsoring SEC football conference-wide. SoFi discussed naming rights to a series of Saturday SEC slates, but it was never quite a match.“The problem with that is that not every Saturday is an SEC Saturday. There may not be good matchups,” Noto said. “And not all the schools are schools that we would necessarily want to be with.”When CAA introduced the idea of working with Notre Dame, Noto said his initial reaction was “just tell me the number,” although the deal was a little more complicated than that. Still, it didn’t take long for Notre Dame and SoFi to come to terms on a contract that will change how the Irish look and how they’re funded.“My experience in the world of putting these types of deals together, when deals are meant to be, they usually come together very quickly,” Bevacqua said. “And they’re usually, quite frankly, pretty easy to put together. And that’s how this came about. We did not go into the broad marketplace.”Noto said his familiarity with Notre Dame — as the parent of an athlete, not as a fan — didn’t make the deal happen, although a look at how a high-level athletic department operates helped. Football drives the revenue bus at Notre Dame. Olympic sports are under a different kind of financial pressure as schools pick and choose different ways to fund them.Bevacqua has made it clear around Notre Dame that the school can’t commit to all two dozen of its sports at the same level. Basically, that means while some sports will be funded at a level that comes with the expectation of competing for championships (or at least making the postseason), other programs like baseball and softball will be maintained more than prioritized. It’s not clear how the money from the SoFi deal will flow to some of Notre Dame’s non-revenue sports, but all new revenue helps. Just this week, Notre Dame announced a $20 million donation from an alumnus for naming rights to the Notre Dame Stadium tunnel and media room.“If I’m a Notre Dame fan or alumni, I recognize we need an economic foundation to compete,” Noto said. “I think the old-school thinking or legacy thinking has to go away. Because the business model has changed, what it takes to be successful has changed.”For all the economic forces driving the Notre Dame-SoFi partnership, Noto would be lying if he didn’t admit at least some part of the deal dates back to his upbringing in Catholic schools around Poughkeepsie, N.Y. In fourth grade, a nun told him that he could skip a spelling test if he could memorize Notre Dame’s starting offense over the weekend.“Quarterback Blair Kiel and running back Hiawatha Francisco. Kiel was No. 5,” Noto said. “I was easily motivated by Notre Dame football and just became a fan then and have stayed that way since.”Noto played football at Army and would still root for the Black Knights over the Irish, as he did in person when the two programs met at Yankee Stadium two years ago. He’s already thinking through the conflicts of this year’s Army-Air Force and Notre Dame-Miami games falling on the same Saturday (Nov. 7) and with identical kickoff times. Still, part of the SoFi deal’s upside for Noto is where this season might go for Notre Dame.“Of the schools that could win a national championship this year, Notre Dame is in the top of that class,” Noto said. “Predicting who’s gonna win the national championship is like predicting who’s going to win the Super Bowl, but Marcus is just a world-class coach, great leader, great person. He’s going to get everything he can out of the team.”SoFi will be at least a part of that, and it’s paying for the privilege.