In case you missed it, the NCAA approved uniform jesey patches for Division 1 sports back in January. As the college football season has been spooling up, you might have noticed one school or another announcing their jersey patch. For example, Wisconsin has partnered with Culver’s for football, men’s basketball, and men’s hockey. Probably means that everyone’s favorite purveyors of butter burgers and frozen custard is off the table as a patch option for Marquette, huh?
In fact, Marquette hasn’t announced a jersey patch sponsor yet. This isn’t a blog about that fact, I came to the conclusion that if MU was going to debut a patch for only men’s basketball, that announcement was going to come at the very least after the fall semester started (that’s still not until Monday) and probably much closer to the start of basketball season in November. If there’s not a department-wide patch sponsor — Notre Dame has an all-sports deal with SoFi, for example — then there’s no reason to announce anything before the women’s soccer season got the 2026-27 athletic calendar going back on August 12th.
All of this brings me to Thursday’s newsletter from Matt Brown over at Extra Points. I’m a proud Day 1 subscriber to Extra Points, and Matt’s writing helps me contextualize a lot of things going on in college athletics. As you can probably tell, I don’t usually use his newsletters to generate ideas over here, but this one made me start thinking, and here we are. The topic from Thursday?
Why DePaul’s jersey patch deal with Desert Cactus could pay off in multiple ways
Yep, DePaul has a jersey patch deal. According to the Extra Points Jersey Patch Tracker, it’s only for men’s basketball, but it’s also currently the only announced jersey patch in the entire Big East. The Blue Demons are leading the way in this department, getting out ahead of not just Marquette, but also UConn and St. John’s, two of the more successful men’s basketball programs in the country over the past couple of seasons.
This isn’t a new announcement, either. DePaul announced the partnership back in mid-July, so they were first to market in that regard by a wiiiiiide margin as no one else has joined them yet. Because I know you’re asking about Desert Cactus:
Desert Cactus is a Rolling Meadows, Illinois-based licensing company that designs and distributes officially licensed merchandise for 650+ colleges and universities, professional sports leagues, and pop culture brands. Since 2012, we’ve built long-term partnerships with consumers and organizations that trust us to create high-quality, on-brand products at scale.
From flags and headwear to stickers, keychains, and party supplies, Desert Cactus produces a wide range of custom, on-brand products for the organizations we partner with. Every item starts with an official license, giving retailers and fans confidence that what they’re buying is authentic. We also work directly with teams, schools, and brands on custom designs, low minimum order quantities, and quick turnaround times which is outlined in more detail on our wholesale page. It’s part of how we keep every order, big or small, moving quickly without sacrificing quality.
Matt got a chance to talk to both DePaul Athletic Director DeWayne Peevy and Desert Cactus president and founder Joe Stefani about their partnership, and I’m going to cherry pick a couple of quotes along the way here that are going to make my point for me here:
The majority of Big East schools don’t actually have a staffer just dedicated to handling licensing. But DePaul bucked the trend by hiring Lindsay Martin away from Big East peer Butler to become the department’s senior associate athletics director for merchandise and licensing back in 2021.
And:
“This is not just branding; this is a testing ground for us. That’s really, really important. Testing different ideas, trying new products, new packaging and new pricing. … Essentially, this is one giant focus group for us. It’s been awesome.” Stefani said.
Here’s a concrete example: Next week, DePaul will host the powerhouse Nebraska Cornhusker women’s volleyball team ahead of a series of matches at Wrigley Field.
Stefani told me, “I went to Lindsay, and I said, ‘I think we need to do co-branded merchandise for when Nebraska volleyball comes to play DePaul at Wintrust Arena.’ Usually a retailer will not take a chance on that in venue, but I said, ‘hey, we’ll do it on consignment.’
“We’ll do it for free. If it doesn’t sell, I’ll eat it. But I at least want to see if it’s going to work or not. Let’s try posters and keychains and stickers and stuff. So it’s things like that that we’re willing to take the risk and try it. Because if it does work, now we can take that lesson and apply it to other schools.”
And:
Essentially, if the partnership is successful, DePaul gets paid twice. Once via the original sponsorship fee and then again as university licensing revenue increases. And then Blue Demon fans benefit too, since they’ll be able to buy new stuff, and in more locations than before.
And:
Beyond just cash, products and shared expertise, Stefani told me, the company also wants to hire DePaul students for paid internships to assist with graphic and product design projects. “We’ve done this before with some of our HBCU partners, like Jackson State, and the students helped create some of our best-selling products,” he said.
Now, let’s go ahead and break some of this down. This isn’t a “Marquette is getting beat by DePaul” blog. The biggest reason why? Larry Birkett is Marquette’s Director of Retail & Licensing for the athletic department. He’s been with Marquette for 25 years, and he’s had that specific title since 2022. Marquette also has a Director of Athletic Business Affairs in Mason Darling, and while his job leans more towards keeping a hand on the tiller of the overall business that is Marquette athletics, you’d have to figure that the “financial planning and policy” part of his job description on the athletic department website would at least wind into the idea of signing a jersey patch sponsorship, one way or another.
In short: There are people in place to think about and work on these types of things, and that’s before you even consider the role of Learfield Sports and their multi-media services for Marquette in all of this.
Here’s where I’m going with all of this, and it’s not “Why doesn’t Marquette have a jersey patch sponsor yet?”
It’s “What is Marquette doing to maximize the value of their future jersey patch sponsor?”
Yes, future, not potential. A jersey patch is coming to a Marquette uniform near you. It might not be in 2026-27, but it is going to happen eventually, and we have to ask what the administration is doing to get the most out of it.
DePaul is doing something innovative with a local business to help the business get some attention and also use the athletic department as a bit of a product development laboratory. They get the paycheck to put the patch on the basketball jerseys, but more than that, they’re getting access to new and better information about what kind of products with collegiate partners are selling like hotcakes lately. That helps the Blue Demons make big executive decisions about what direction to take their marketing and advertising dollars, and on a long enough timeline, the partnership with Desert Cactus has the potential to provide financial benefits to DePaul for years and years to come, possibly even past which point the jersey patch sponsorship still exists.
That’s being creative to activate new revenue streams in a moment in time where every athletic department in the country could use extra money flowing in because of revenue sharing with the athletes. Marquette is not immune to that pressure, and look no further than The Athletic confirming that new men’s basketball transfer Sananda Fru will be picking up at least $3.9 million during the 2026-27 season to understand MU’s place in things.
For now, my question is not “Why doesn’t Marquette have a patch sponsor yet?” and it’s not “When is Marquette getting a patch sponsor?” My question is “What is Marquette doing to maximize the value of the sponsor partnership they will eventually sign?” I’m asking about what inventive and creative ideas are being thrown around the McGuire Center, because an athletic department can not survive on raising ticket prices and mega-donors footing the bill alone. There has to be something else, something new, something interesting in play.
I asked this same question about men’s basketball scheduling back when Duke struck their broadcasting deal with Amazon. For now, I don’t have any answers or signs or whatever you want to call it that Marquette is moving in a creative manner on that or on a jersey patch or on anything else. That’s fine, sometimes deals take a long time to marinate and develop. Immediate answers aren’t crucial here. But the longer we wait, the easier it is to say that a lack of anything creative coming out of the office is a notable problem, and once we get to that point, that problem is going to start growing exponentially.
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