Canzano: Oregon State parting ways with Brent Blaylock... and Blueprint Sports
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Oregon State’s football team was winless in early October and preparing to board a charter plane from Eugene Airport to Boone, N.C.
This was the first Thursday of the month. The Beavers hadn’t even buckled up for the plane trip to play against Appalachian State, but turbulence was already brewing.
Not far from the tarmac, OSU was in damage-control mode. Brent Blaylock, the school’s deputy athletic director and chief operating officer, had been ordered to perform a media blitz by his boss, Athletic Director Scott Barnes.
Blaylock was sitting in his car in the airport parking lot, conducting a series of phone interviews. The subject: Blueprint Sports.
In August, Blueprint announced it bought Dam Nation — Oregon State’s official NIL collective — from founder Kyle Bjornstad. The entity then struck a three-year operating agreement with OSU. That deal came with a less-than-optimum revenue-split structure and confusion about whether the first $750,000 in fundraising was guaranteed. I spoke with Blaylock as he sat in his car at the airport that day.
He told me: “That first initial tier — that $0 to $750,000 — Blueprint is taking zero of those dollars.”
Blaylock is meeting with officials at Oregon State on Monday, I’m told. How much will Blaylock be paid on his way out? What’s the public messaging? What’s clear is that the relationship between OSU and the deputy AD is about to come to an end.
The agreement Blaylock helped orchestrate between Oregon State and Blueprint Sports is also being unwound, sources tell me. A formal announcement that the sides have “mutually” agreed to part ways is expected as early as Tuesday.
According to a source with knowledge of that deal, “What will eventually come out is that the $750,000 ‘guarantee’ was not actually guaranteed. At least it’s not written in the contract that way.”