No, Michigan State Spartans basketball teams have not been renamed.
However, the fact that a sentence like this needs to be typed is a sign of how ridiculous things have become. Two MSU graduate billionaires are using the basketball / athletics team as a battleground for the Detroit mortgage war.
Just before the Spartan men’s basketball team played its first – and only – Big Ten Tournament game, extremely curious news hit the networks. According to several reports, based on a press release from MSU, the Spartans would be known as the “MSU Spartans Presented by Rocket Mortgage.
Stories have been written. Jokes were made (including some truly stellar father-joke-mortgage puns). But it was not exactly an accurate report.
Approximately 24 hours later, MSU Athletics clarified what was really going on – more or less.
In a press release, MSU Athletics said no, the basketball team was not getting a new name. Instead, Rocket Mortgage was just becoming the primary sponsor.
From the full press release:
Under the new five-year deal, Rocket Mortgage, based in Detroit, will sponsor the famous men’s basketball team, which will now be known throughout the Breslin Center as “MSU Spartans presented by Rocket Mortgage. “
Get it now?
See, they are not the “MSU Spartans presented by Rocket Mortgage”, but inside the Breslin Center they are the “MSU Spartans … Presented by Rocket Mortgage.”
As if all of this isn’t silly enough, it is very easy to track how exactly all of this happened.
All of this happens just over a month after former basketball player Mat Ishbia donated $ 32 million to the athletics department. An extremely generous gift. But, imagine what does this have to do with Rocket Mortgage? See, Ishbia earned all that money as CEO of United Wholesale Mortgage, a competitor for Rocket Mortgage. Oh, and the majority shareholder in Rocket Mortgage is former MSU student Dan Gilbert.
Coincidentally, last week, Ishbia announced that UWM would no longer work with brokers who send loans to competitors – namely, Rocket Mortgage. The most recent sponsorship announcement came from notoriously spiteful Gilbert exactly a week later.
It turns out that this was just part of a tough day for MSU men’s basketball (luckily women did their part in the deal). Something that will probably be a joke around the Big Ten for anyone who remembers. But not much more.
Fortunately, this means that there will be a lot more money in the MSU Athletics coffers. We can all just hope it will eventually lead to Ishbia and Gilbert going one-on-one right there at Tom Izzo’s Court presented by UWM while using MSU Spartans presented by Rocket Mortgage t-shirts.