Washington's $70M Columbia Bank deal tops what both its venues once fetched

Seven million dollars a year. That's what Columbia Bank has agreed to pay to put its name on Husky Stadium, the University of Washington's football home, under a 10-year, $70 million deal. Matt Fortuna of Sports Business Journal reports it is the largest football stadium naming rights deal in college sports history. If the university's Board of Regents approves it, the stadium becomes Columbia Bank Stadium in 2027, and the Tacoma-based bank also becomes a signature partner of the university.

The record makes the headline. The more useful number for anyone who sells or buys venue names comes from the contract Washington just retired. Starting in 2015, Alaska Airlines held the names on both the football stadium and the basketball arena under one 10-year, $42 million contract. Washington has now sold the two names separately, and the football name alone brings in $28 million more over a decade than the old pair did. That gap is simple subtraction on the reported figures.

One sponsor became two contracts

The arena deal was signed first. In March, Washington renewed with Alaska Airlines for the basketball arena only, on a 10-year, $28.4 million deal. The airline stays on one building and the bank takes the other. SBJ reports that the Huskies will now earn close to $100 million over the next 10 years from their football stadium and basketball arena naming rights deals. Add the two contracts exactly and you get $98.4 million.

The football search was already public that month. SBJ reported on March 15 that Washington was looking for a new Husky Stadium naming-rights partner, so the arena renewal and the stadium search ran side by side. By September, the school had opened a $25 million broadcast hub at Alaska Airlines Arena, a sign it keeps putting money into the building whose name the airline renewed.

Per year, the gap is even clearer. The 2015 package came to about $4.2 million a year for both buildings. The two new deals come to about $9.84 million a year, roughly 2.3 times as much: $7 million from football and about $2.84 million from the arena. We got those yearly figures by dividing the reported 10-year totals.

SBJ frames the record the same way, calling the Columbia Bank agreement the largest annual college sports stadium naming rights partnership. The per-year yardstick is the fairer one whenever contract lengths differ, and it is the number a rival school's negotiator can actually hold up against its own deal.

Alaska Airlines' renewal for the arena alone, a 10-year, $28.4M deal, is about two-thirds of the $42M it paid for both venues under the 10-year deal signed in 2015. That suggests the arena name was always worth real money by itself. The football name brought the premium that set the record.

In 2015 one sponsor paid $42 million for a decade on both of Washington's venue names; sold one at a time, the same two names now come to about $98.4 million over a decade, by our arithmetic on the reported deals.

Splitting the deal versus a decade of change

Eleven years separate the 2015 contract from the 2026 pair. The reporting doesn't say how much of the increase comes from splitting the deal and how much from a market that has simply moved since then.

The packages also differ. Columbia Bank gets a signature-partner title on top of the stadium name, so the $70 million pays for more than the name on the building. That limits what the numbers can prove. They show that splitting the deal didn't leave Washington worse off, and that each name found a buyer willing to pay real money for it alone.

Venue-linked sponsorships are taking other shapes too. On the same day as the Washington news, SBJ's Bret McCormick reported that the Kansas City Chiefs named HNTB their official architect. HNTB is the architect of record on the Chiefs' new stadium in Kansas, scheduled to open in 2031, and the deal lets the firm use Chiefs marks in content about the project. It is HNTB's first sponsorship with a venue design client. Neither that deal nor Columbia Bank's is just a name on a facade, which is why headline totals compare cleanly only when the packages match.

Washington leaned into its Seattle roots for the process. SBJ reports that the school worked with Tod Leiweke of the Kraken and One Roof Sports & Entertainment to help facilitate the deal. That adds a third variable to the comparison: the 2026 result also reflects a different sales effort, so a school copying the split without similar local connections could see a different price.

A naming deal rents a building's name for a while

Nashville offers a reminder of how long a building lasts compared with any one name on it. Tennessee State University plays its final game at the original Nissan Stadium on Nov. 14, 2026, against Eastern Illinois, before moving to the new stadium going up next door. In a farewell piece for TSU athletics, Nick Guerriero counts four names on that one building since it opened in 1999, including LP Field from 2006 and Nissan Stadium from 2015.

The full sequence is more instructive. The stadium opened as Adelphia Coliseum and became The Coliseum after Adelphia's name was removed, before LP Field and then Nissan Stadium. That interlude under a generic name shows a building can sit between sponsors. Nissan's name went up in 2015, the same year Alaska Airlines signed its two-venue Washington deal.

Washington, D.C.'s RFK Stadium stretches the timeline further. It opened on Oct. 1, 1961, carried the name District of Columbia Stadium from 1961 to 1969, closed on Sept. 15, 2019 and was demolished between 2023 and 2026. Across those 58 years of use, a 10-year naming term would have covered less than a fifth of the building's working life.

Every name change gives the owner a chance to change the price and the package. Washington used its renewal to split up names that had been sold together. For a corporate buyer, the lesson runs the other way. A 10-year deal covers only part of a building's life, and the seller can change what's for sale the next time the contract ends. A bank marketing chief or airline sponsorship lead weighing a multi-venue package should expect the seller to test both options: one bundle or separate deals.

The unit for sale can be smaller than a building, too. Central Washington University's game notes for its trip to Angelo State list the venue as 1st Community Credit Union Field at LeGrand Stadium, a field name layered inside a stadium name. That layering suggests owners weighing a bundle against separate deals have a third option: pricing parts of one venue on their own.

Next comes the Board of Regents vote, then the new name in 2027. After that, watch whether other schools with mid-2010s naming deals covering more than one venue split them at renewal, and whether $7 million a year becomes the number their negotiators quote.