The University of Arkansas athletic department has reached a new sponsorship agreement with Tyson Foods that athletic director Hunter Yurachek is calling “the most lucrative true corporate sponsorship deal in college athletics” while not releasing financial specifics.
According to Whole Hog Sports, the five-year deal will place the Tyson logo on jersey patches in all of Arkansas’ 19 sports beginning with the 2026-27 academic year. The Tyson logo will also appear on playing surfaces across campus, including those in Razorbacks' baseball, softball, volleyball, soccer and gymnastics venues.
The Tyson logo, as well as that of Bentonville-based Walmart, has been displayed on the football field at Reynolds Razorback Stadium and the basketball court at Bud Walton Arena as part of a five-year agreement signed in 2024, Whole Hog Sports reported.
Under the new agreement, the Tyson Foods logos will continue to appear on backdrops for the Razorbacks’ press conferences, and some Arkansas athletes will serve as brand ambassadors for the company through NIL deals, Christina Long reported.
“It was really important to the Tyson leadership team and is really important to me and our leadership in our department that every single student-athlete in our department and every sport was positively impacted by this partnership,” Yurachek said, “and that's happened.”
In January, the NCAA Division I Cabinet approved a proposal allowing teams to sell jersey patch sponsorships for regular-season games. "Schools are permitted to sell up to two jersey patch sponsorships," Long wrote, "but Yurachek said the deal with Tyson Foods makes the company the exclusive jersey sponsor for all sports. Arkansas could still sell additional playing surface sponsorships outside of football and basketball."
According to Long, Arkansas is the fifth school to announce a sponsor for jerseys worn in competition. UNLV became the first when it unveiled a jersey patch partnership with Acesso Biologics in December, before the proposal was even approved, worth $2.2 million annually for five years. It includes patches on jerseys for football, baseball, and men’s and women’s basketball.
Other schools include Louisiana State, Louisiana-Monroe and the university of Nebraska-Omaha.
Per Long's reporting, the values of many such sponsorship deals go unreported, but according to a January report from Sports Business Journal, citing research conducted by Learfield and Wasserman, patches for college football and men’s basketball programs alone could be worth between $500,000 to $12 million per year depending on brand and market.
