Details about how Spartan Ventures will fulfill its mission to promote MSU athletics are still unclear, and Friday’s meeting introduced greater confusion with word of a new, separate entity: Spartan Media Ventures.

"This is a different animal. This is the for-profit media company within the athletics department that's truly the groundbreaking thing," Trustee Mike Balow said of Spartan Media Ventures, which hasn’t even been established formally. 

The move towards connecting Spartan Media Ventures with Spartan Ventures coincides with a $100 million investment that university benefactors Greg and Dawn Williams made earlier this month "in an entity to be formed by the affiliated organization Spartan Ventures."

Although the move was approved by the majority of the board, several trustees said they had not been given access to information about the financials of either Spartan Ventures or Spartan Media Ventures.

"The board has not yet seen those documents. I've been working with the general counsel to get a copy of those, but as of last night, we haven't been able to get them yet," Balow said.

Balow also took issue with the idea of voting on creating a business connection between Spartan Ventures and Spartan Media Ventures before the latter organization was brought into existence.

"I would prefer we do not move forward yet with this resolution the way it is, until we vote on the creation of Spartan Media Ventures and have a complete review of those organizational documents, as our fiduciary duty and our general oversight would require," Balow said.

Trustee Dennis Denno echoed Balow’s holdups, saying that he had concerns about "a continued lack of seeing important documents for the board."

Denno and other trustees stressed their trust in university leadership and gratitude for the investment made by the Williamses. However, he added, "I think it’s also our responsibility to trust and verify."

Trustees Sandy Pierce and Kelly Tebay, however, expressed support for the plan, with Pierce saying that the board has received "quite a bit" of information on the structure of both organizations.

"I choose to put my trust in President Guskiewicz, the administration and certainly J. Batt, our athletic director, on bringing what I believe will be game changing in higher education," Pierce said.

The potential creation of a for-profit organization associated with the university's athletics department comes as higher education institutions face increasingly higher costs associated with NIL and revenue-sharing with student athletes.

As schools have fallen deeper into debt to cover these costs, some have looked to partnerships with private corporations to supercharge their revenue. The University of Utah earlier this week became the first school in the country to partner with a private equity firm to create a for-profit entity that would manage revenue generation for its athletics.

The Big Ten Conference, of which MSU is a part, is also toying with the idea of partnering with the California-based UC Investments to create a new entity that would house the entire league’s media rights and sponsorship deals and inject $2.4 billion into the league’s athletic departments in exchange for the firm receiving a 10 percent stake in the entity. That plan has faced intense opposition from the University of Michigan and the University of Southern California.

While not every school might partner with a private equity firm, Balow expects that most big schools are going to move in the direction of Spartan Ventures-like entities.

"We need to be a leader, but we need to make sure the board is fully briefed with all of the documents," Balow said. "I will not compromise on that."