What Is a Jersey Worth?

Editor’s note: If you know one thing about Justin Southwell, it’s that he has a burning passion for uniforms. With news that Oklahoma State student-athletes will wear sponsorship patches this upcoming school year, Justin jotted down some thoughts and shared them on The Reload, but it was so thoughtful that I had to share it here. Justin also made note before giving these thoughts that he has nothing against the Osage Nation. These would’ve been his thoughts no matter the sponsor.

Let me tell you what that jersey is worth.

Not in dollars. That’s the mistake everyone keeps making. They see a jersey and ask what can we get for it? I’m more interested in a different question. What does it mean?

Because the moment you stop asking what something means and start asking what it’s worth — you’ve already changed your relationship with it.

That jersey represents over a century of Saturday afternoons. It’s your parents watching Barry Sanders with a thrill that can’t be replicated anywhere else. It’s you and your spouse sitting in silence after a missed shot at the national championship — and then showing up the next September louder than before. It’s your kid wearing eye-black and a No. 1 jersey on Halloween with the belief that one day he’ll run out of that tunnel in Boone Pickens Stadium in front of 60,000 fans. No dollar figure exists for that. And the moment you try to assign one — something shifts.

There’s a difference between a symbol and an asset. An asset exists to generate value. A symbol exists to represent something larger than itself. For generations, that Oklahoma State uniform was never inventory. It was identity. The same reason you’d never put a sponsor patch on an American flag — not because a jersey and a flag are equal, but because they belong to the same category: symbols that derive their meaning from existing outside of commerce.

In the middle of all this modernization and commercialization, more teams are moving back to traditional uniforms. Classic fonts. Original color schemes. Throwback designs. Why? Is it simply because nostalgia is powerful, or is it because people are longing for the way college football used to look and feel before it became all about the money? Fans don’t want less tradition. They want more of it. And yet somehow the answer to that longing is to put a sponsor patch on the very thing fans are hoping to preserve.

Now — I understand why they did it. This “adapt or get left behind” landscape is brutal. The financial pressure is real.

I’m not naive enough to think passion pays the bills. There are other naming rights. There are facility deals. There are dozens of other avenues that don’t require putting another brand’s name on the one sacred symbol of the program. The uniform should be the last thing you touch. Not the first.

And somewhere in that boardroom, when someone slid a contract across the table and said we’d like to put our name on your jersey — someone should have paused. Not because the money wasn’t good. Because nobody stopped to ask what the uniform actually represents. And why an identity built over generations through blood, sweat and tears should never be shared with another entity’s brand.

And before you say it — yes, the Nike swoosh is on the uniform. That’s different. Nike designed it. Nike manufactured it. Their presence was earned. What we’re talking about now is purchasing visibility from something you had no hand in building. One was earned. The other was simply sold.

I’m all for NIL and partnerships. There’s a place for all of that. But there’s a reason the pros can get away with jersey patches where universities should not. A professional franchise is openly a business. Fans know what they’re engaging with. A university is something different — it’s a community, a tradition, a shared identity that runs deeper than any transaction. When you start treating it like a professional organization, you don’t gain their revenue model. You just lose what made you worth watching in the first place.

My concern was never the size of the patch or how tacky it looks. It’s the philosophy behind it. The assumption that visibility is inventory. That the uniform — the closest thing an athletic program has to a flag — is just another surface nobody had gotten around to selling yet.

Some things are worth more than what they can generate. And once you sell them, you don’t get them back.