There is no more perfectly targeted advertising real estate in America than the front of a football jersey. Americans have spent years of making fun of soccer stars for their corporate logo-filled kits, but now he NCAA and college football has decided to get in on the action.
Temple Athletics announced a multi-year deal making Grungo Law, a personal injury firm serving South Jersey and Philadelphia, the Official Jersey Patch Partner of Temple Football. The Grungo Law logo will appear on the Owls’ game and practice jerseys beginning with the 2026 season and running through 2028. Per the school, it’s the first jersey patch partnership in Temple Football history, the first law firm to land on a Division I collegiate jersey in any sport, and the first corporate patch on a Division I football jersey anywhere in the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Delaware tri-state area.
The NCAA approved commercial uniform patches in January, letting Division I teams sell up to two logos of no more than four square inches on their regular-season uniforms, effective Aug. 1. The blue bloods cashed in immediately and enormously. Notre Dame took roughly $18 to $20 million a year from SoFi, the richest such deal in college sports history. Ohio State took a reported $17 million from JPMorganChase. LSU went with Woodside Energy, Arkansas with Tyson Foods, Memphis with FedEx. Fortune 500 logos, all of them.
Temple, a proud member of the American Conference, got a personal injury firm. And honestly? Better fit.
Because unlike a bank patch, a Grungo Law patch actually makes sense in context. A football Saturday is one of the most target-rich tort environments the calendar produces — 60,000 people, cars, alcohol, stairs, and the drive home — and personal injury law is fundamentally the business of being the name already lodged in someone’s head when it all goes wrong. A college football jersey is a billboard with much better placement.
The school, for its part, is leaning into the hometown angle rather than the ambulance-adjacent one. “Our partnership with Grungo Law represents another exciting step in the continued growth of Temple Athletics,” said Arthur Johnson, Temple’s Vice President and Director of Athletics, in the announcement. “As a respected organization with deep roots in the Greater Philadelphia region, Grungo Law shares our commitment to community, excellence and creating meaningful experiences for our student-athletes and fans.”
Firm founder and CEO Richard Grungo Jr. kept it civic. “We are proud to be the first NCAA football patch sponsor in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the communities where we serve and where a large portion of Temple students and graduates call home,” he said. “For nearly 150 years, Temple’s student-athletes have carried Philadelphia’s work ethic and discipline onto every field where they compete. This is our community, and supporting the communities where we work, go to school, and play is something we take great pride in.”
The legal industry’s slow-motion invasion of the sponsorship world has been building for a while, though it’s mostly been the legal tech crowd doing the invading. Legal practice management company Clio jumped into the NHL as a jersey sponsor for the Vancouver Canucks, and it didn’t stay lonely for long — Filevine followed with a helmet deal for the Utah Mammoth, a sport where, as we noted at the time, game-time assault and battery is a feature rather than a bug. TransPerfect went ahead and put its name on an entire college bowl game. What’s changed with Grungo Law is the actor: this isn’t a software vendor chasing brand awareness among lawyers, it’s an actual practicing law firm chasing something considerably more direct.
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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1
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