THE BOWL ELIGIBLE BLOG
The Last Purists: FBS Stadiums Without Corporate Naming Rights
Only 29 of 138 FBS stadiums carry a traditional name with no corporate sponsor. Michigan Stadium, Tiger Stadium, the Coliseum, and the rest of the holdouts.
Naming rights are the default setting in modern college football. Of the 138 FBS stadiums in our data, 41 carry a corporate sponsor's name outright and 68 are named for a person or donor, which is its own kind of transaction. That leaves 29 stadiums, barely one in five, whose names are just names: a place, a school, a memorial, a bowl. No bank, no airline, no credit union. Here are the holdouts.
How we counted. We classified each stadium by the stadium's own name. Where a stadium name and a field name differ, the field deal did not decide it: Indiana's home is Memorial Stadium even though the field carries a sponsor (Merchants Bank Field at Memorial Stadium), and NIU's is Huskie Stadium under the Brigham Field name. Named-for-a-person stadiums (68 of them, from Beaver Stadium to Kyle Field) are their own category and are not counted here, and neither are hybrids where the sponsor leads the stadium name itself.
The giants
The biggest names in the sport are mostly purist. Michigan Stadium has no sponsor. Neither does Ohio Stadium, Notre Dame Stadium, LSU's Tiger Stadium, USC's Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, or UCLA's Rose Bowl Stadium, which is not even named for a school, just for the game that made it famous. Washington's Husky Stadium, Wisconsin's Camp Randall Stadium, Michigan State's Spartan Stadium, Nebraska's Memorial Stadium, Clemson's Memorial Stadium, Missouri's Memorial Stadium, and Boston College's Alumni Stadium round out the famous end of the list. When a stadium becomes a landmark, the name is the brand, and schools have mostly been smart enough not to rent it out.
The field-name loophole
The classification rule cuts both ways, and it should. Kentucky's home is Kroger Field: the sponsor is the stadium name, so it counts as corporate, as does Louisville's L&N Federal Credit Union Stadium. Georgia Tech's home counts as named for a person even though the field is Hyundai Field, because the stadium is Bobby Dodd Stadium. Indiana and NIU land on the purist list by the same logic, with sponsored field names sitting under traditional stadium names. Any list of "stadiums without naming rights" that ignores the stadium-versus-field split is counting a different thing than we are, usually a bigger thing.
What the other 41 look like
For contrast, the corporate column is not a row of identical bank bowls. It includes Hard Rock Stadium (Miami), Allegiant Stadium (UNLV), Acrisure Stadium (Pittsburgh), Lincoln Financial Field (Temple), Raymond James Stadium (South Florida), Snapdragon Stadium (San Diego State), the JMA Wireless Dome (Syracuse), and Pitbull Stadium (FIU). Some of those are NFL buildings where the college team is a tenant and never had naming say in the first place, which is a fair excuse. The trend line is still one-directional: when a school builds new or renovates big, a sponsor's name tends to be in the rendering. The 29 purists are mostly stadiums that became landmarks before the market for their names existed, plus the memorials nobody will touch.
The memorials
Eight of the 29 carry "Memorial" in the name: California Memorial Stadium, Clemson's, Indiana's, Missouri's, Nebraska's, Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium, New Mexico State's Aggie Memorial Stadium, and Wyoming's War Memorial Stadium. These were named to honor the war dead, and that turns out to be the most durable naming-rights defense ever devised. Nobody is rebranding a war memorial for a presenting sponsor, which is how some of the oldest names in the sport have outlasted every deal cycle around them.
The rest of the 29
Air Force's Falcon Stadium and New Mexico's University Stadium keep it purely functional. Delaware Stadium and Stanford Stadium do the same. Toledo's Glass Bowl is named for the glass industry that built the city, which is corporate-adjacent in spirit but not a sponsorship. North Dakota State's Fargodome, UTSA's Alamodome, UTEP's Sun Bowl Stadium, Troy's Veterans Memorial Stadium, and Sacramento State's Hornet Stadium complete the list. Note the pattern at the academies and the memorials: a large share of the purist 29 are public, old, or both.
Two of the three service academies are purists: Falcon Stadium and Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium. Army is the exception only because Michie Stadium falls in the named-for-a-person column. Two domes made the list as well, North Dakota State's Fargodome and the Alamodome, which suggests indoor football did not automatically mean a sponsor on the roof. What the 29 share is not nostalgia. It is leverage, or protection: their names are either worth more unsold than sold, or they honor somebody, and both of those turn out to age better than a ten-year presenting deal.
The honest counterpoint: the purists are a shrinking minority, and the 41 corporate names in our data include some genuinely strange bedfellows (FIU plays at Pitbull Stadium; that is a sponsorship, not a mascot). But the list above is the sport's memory. Once a stadium name gets sold, it almost never comes back.
If you want to test how many of the 29 you can recognize from a photo alone, that is Pin Drop Saturday. The corporate ones are easier. The sponsor does the naming for you.