Money baller: Ben Sutton turns his passion for athletics into a multimillion-dollar marketing business.

• Author: Burritt, Chris
• Position: PROFILE

Saturday, Nov. 29, was a big day for instate football rivalries in the South--University of Georgia versus Georgia Tech, Ole Miss versus Mississippi State and Alabama versus Auburn--and Ben C. Sutton Jr. was part of the action at each game. The president of IMG College LLC, the Winston-Salem-based sports marketing agency, hopscotched by private jet from Athens, Ga., to Oxford, Miss., to Tuscaloosa, Ala., for the pregame festivities and first half of each contest. Their staggered starting times allowed him to hobnob with school officials and the sponsors who spend big bucks to advertise in their stadiums, where his company controls marketing rights. Meanwhile, his crew in downtown Winston-Salem was transmitting 92 college football and basketball games and coaches' shows to radio stations across the country. IMG College's multimedia unit produces more than 35,000 hours of radio programming per year, making it the nation's largest independent sports network.

"We have lightning in the bottle," says Sutton, 56, who considers the multibillion-dollar college market--from sales of logo sweatshirts and stadium cushions to scoreboard advertising and schmoozing in luxury boxes--"still a very immature business." He cites this month's inaugural football playoffs, which are generating excitement among the 190 million fans of collegiate sports. "It is water-cooler talk everywhere," he says.

Last year, Sutton signed a five-year contract and added the title of chairman to that of president following the departure of his boss, George Pyne, who had been president of New York-based IMG Sports and Entertainment. Pyne was one of several executives who left IMG Worldwide Inc. after its acquisition by Beverly Hills, Calif.-based William Morris Endeavor Entertainment LLC and Menlo Park, Calif.-based Silver Lake Management LLC. Sutton has come a long way from Burlington, where he was born, and his childhood home of Murfreesboro, where his father and namesake was finance chief of what's now Chowan University. Back then, tickets to Atlantic Coast Conference games were relatively easy to come by, so father and son attended many --including N.C. State's overtime victory over Maryland in the conference tournament on the way to a men's basketball national championship in 1974--and Sutton became a sports nut. "I'm an ACC and Tobacco Road guy," he says, despite his company's licensing affiliation with more than 200 colleges, conferences and bowl games nationwide.

He...