LSU Athletics made a historic announcement on Monday morning by revealing a sponsorship jersey patch that’ll be worn by all 21 of its sports teams’ uniforms next year. The partnership is with Woodside Energy, and the patch is specifically in LSU’s purple and gold colors. On some uniforms, the patch matches the jersey, while it has the reverse coloring on others. Either way, though, the patch is always some variation of purple, gold, and white. For what it’s worth, Woodside Energy typically has a red logo, but is changing the coloring for LSU’s uniforms.
The university will begin wearing the jersey patches in every sport during the 2026-2027 athletics season.
“LSU Athletics, in a precedent-setting, multi-year deal, has announced a first-of-its-kind jersey patch partnership with Woodside Energy, marking a significant milestone in the new collegiate model,” LSU Athletics wrote in a statement on Monday.
Here’s what the uniform patches will look like:
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Prior to the 2017-2018 season, the NBA became the first major sports league in the United States to adopt jersey patches on its uniforms. MLB and the NHL have also adopted the uniform sponsorship patches, while the NFL has not.
From the college perspective, LSU’s move is a landmark announcement considering the copycat nature of the sport. With the announced timeline on Monday, the Tigers’ football team will be wearing its Woodside Energy uniform patch when LSU rolls into Knoxville for a November game next fall.
The question now isn’t if other college programs will adopt a similar model, but when we see the dominoes continue to fall. For instance, since the NCAA gave the approval for teams to use on-field sponsorship logos on their football fields in the summer of 2024, we’ve seen many universities across the country add those to their playing surface – Tennessee included. The University of Tennessee announced a partnership with Pilot in August 2024 that saw the Pilot logo placed on the 25-yard lines of Shield-Watkins Field.
Not every program has done so, but there are plenty that followed in the same footsteps. Kentucky has a Kroger Field logo on its field and Florida has a Geico logo on its field, to name a few.
While there’s no public information on it currently, perhaps Tennessee will follow in the same path and adopt its own sponsorship patches down the road, potentially even as early as the next athletics year. Maybe it won’t. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Either way, though, this is a massive moment for the college athletics landscape and could be the first movement for a landslide of copycat programs.
