Inasmuch as big-time college football is to the National Football League as triple A minor league baseball is to Major League Baseball, a team’s branding rights can become an important asset. Along those lines, this interesting Austin American-Statesman article reports on the surge in royalty income that the University of Texas is enjoying from its athletic teams’ recent successes:

The Longhorns’ Rose Bowl victory over Michigan in January and the baseball team’s national title in June helped boost University of Texas merchandise royalties 29 percent to $4 million in the last fiscal year, . . . So far this year, [UT] has collected more royalties than any of the 200-plus schools affiliated with the Collegiate Licensing Co., which coordinates licensing for most major universities.
To license its trademarked logos, UT charges 8 percent of a product’s wholesale price. If a $20 Longhorns T-shirt has a wholesale price of $10, UT would get receive 80 cents. It might not sound like much, but consider that retail sales of collegiate merchandise topped $3 billion last year, according to Collegiate Licensing.
Add a football championship to that, and last year’s $4 million could end up looking like a paltry sum.

The article goes on to note that UT’s annual royalties from merchandise sales had fallen to a mere $600,000 as of the end of the John Mackovic era, which suggests that UT’s considerable investment in Mack Brown has been pretty darn savvy, after all.