Kansas State exploring beer sales, naming rights and more in new era of fundraising
Gene Taylor is facing one of the biggest challenges he has come across since he took over as Kansas State’s athletic director eight years ago.
It has nothing to do with a coaching contract, conference realignment or even wins and losses.
This challenge revolves around money. Lots of it.
Over the course of the next few months, Taylor must find a way to add more than $20 million to the K-State athletics budget ahead of the 2025-26 academic year, when colleges are expected to begin sharing revenue with student-athletes.
NIL collectives and wealthy boosters have funded the Wildcats in recent years. But that job is about to shift to the athletics department, assuming the House vs. NCAA settlement is approved in the spring.
Every power-conference school in the country will soon be adding scholarships and raising funds to compete at the highest levels.
K-State’s athletic budget for the 2023-24 fiscal year was $93.251 million. Next year, it will need to be closer to $114 million if the Wildcats hope to match their peers when it comes to sharing revenue with athletes.
“This is a new budget-line item that we didn’t know we were going to have,” Taylor said in an interview. “It wasn’t anything that we created. It was courts and lawyers and judges. So we now have a new budget-line item of $20.5 million that we have to try to cover if we want to be successful and continue to win.
“Like anything else, whether it’s team travel or coaches’ salaries or equipment, we’ve always tried to fund this as high as we can possibly fund it. This is another one, so we need to do everything we can to get to the $20 million.”
Taylor has a game plan.
His main focus is on raising funds from loyal K-State donors. They have stepped up to help the university in the past — when the school needed to renovate Bill Snyder Family Stadium, build a new football practice facility and construct a state-of-the art volleyball arena.
Now that those projects are complete, and K-State is no longer eyeing any major facility projects, the hope is that boosters will funnel their donations into revenue sharing. Anyone who has been donating to the NIL collectives that support K-State can also move their money to this new cause.
Taylor and K-State have launched a three-part video series aimed at educating fans about the changing landscape of college sports economics. But he will also get creative with how K-State can cut spending and raise funds within its existing budget.
“We have got to find any new revenue sources that we may have and that are available to us,” Taylor said. “What haven’t we considered? What are we missing? We have to look at the expense side and see if we can trim. It’s going to be a combination of all the above.”
Fans can expect a few changes in that regard. Taylor said that K-State is exploring the possibility of selling the naming rights to Bramlage Coliseum, adding on-field advertisements at Bill Snyder Family Stadium and selling beer at more than just a few designated areas during football games.
K-State has tried, unsuccessfully, to sell naming rights for its basketball arena since the summer of 2023. Taylor said the Wildcats were close to a deal with one partner, but negotiations fell apart at the finish line.
They are currently exploring other options.
“There is still a lot of interest in those naming rights,” Taylor said. “We’re still working at it. It’s just not going as fast as we thought it would.”
Taylor said K-State will “definitely” try to have business logos appear on its football field next season. The only question is whether the Wildcats can find a partner that makes sense for the university and is willing to pay the right price.
When it comes to beer sales at Bill Snyder Family Stadium, Taylor said the only remaining obstacle is that “there are some physical limitations to our building that we may have to work through before we do it.”
But he is more open to the idea of widespread beer sales than ever before.
“We are looking at everything we can possibly look at,” he said, “to generate as much revenue as we can.”
One other possibility for boosting revenue is raising ticket prices. K-State made $15 million off football tickets in 2023-24, plus $4 million on men’s basketball tickets. The Wildcats have already announced some increases for basketball. The seats on the north end of the football stadium are also switching from general admission to reserved.
But Taylor is hesitant to raise prices across the board.
“You have to be really careful about that,” he said. “You don’t want to price yourself out of the market. We want it to be affordable.”
This is the delicate dance Taylor must manage as K-State looks to increase its athletic budget by $20 million.
This story was originally published February 13, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Kansas State exploring beer sales, naming rights and more in new era of fundraising."