Florida Atlantic Football Stadium Will Be Named For Private Prison Company

For more than two years, Florida Atlantic University has been searching for the name of a corporate sponsor to adorn its new 30,000-seat, palm-ringed football stadium.

The public university on Tuesday announced an unconventional partner: the nation's second-largest operator of for-profit prisons, the GEO Group Inc. The newly christened GEO Group Stadium came as part of a $6 million donation from the prison company's charitable foundation, which will be paid out to Florida Atlantic over 12 years.

America has a long tradition of unusual corporate athletic sponsorships -- Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena and Houston's Enron Field (now Minute Maid Park) come to mind. But the GEO Group Stadium puzzled several experienced sports marketing experts.

Stadium sponsorships usually involve a product that a company wants to market to consumers: Cars, in the case of the Mercedez-Benz Superdome in New Orleans; or bank services, with Citi Field in New York. GEO Group's customers are government agencies offering contracts. Prisoners don't have a choice of where they land behind bars.

"It appears to be a charitable gift that is trying to be a marketing vehicle, and it just doesn't make a lot of sense," said Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon's business school. "To link themselves with an athletic department when their business is locking people up, it just doesn't connect to me really well."

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Florida Atlantic Football Stadium Will Be Named For Private Prison Company:

breath out....is this a real place on a real planet?#@!#?!??