PBR ANNOUNCES NEW TEAM-BASED THE PBR TEAM SERIES DEBUTS IN JUNE 2022
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rofessional Bull Riders recently announced the team owners, cities, names, and logos of the eight teams launching PBR Team Series, an elite new league featuring the world’s top bull riders competing in games beginning in June 2022. The PBR Team Series’ inaugural 10-event regular season will culminate in a team playoff at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas November 4-6, 2022. The league will launch with eight founding teams, each scheduled to host in their respective city an annual bull riding event and western lifestyle festival, building excitement and rooting interests in the sport. There will also be two “neutral site” leagueproduced regular-season events and the season playoff and championship. All PBR Team Series events will be carried on either the CBS Television Network, streaming live on Paramount+, CBS Sports Network, or Pluto TV. The league will host a PBR Team Series rider draft on May 23 prior to the start of the 2022 season, among PBR rider members who have declared for the draft during a league eligibility
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window. To determine the team selection order of the athletes, a draft lottery among teams will be held prior to the PBR Unleash The Beast event at Madison Square Garden in New York on Friday, January 7. The PBR Team Series complements the successful PBR Unleash The Beast premiere tour, which held its first championship in 1994 and in 2022 will be staged January – May, with its World Finals held in Fort Worth, Texas from May 13-22, 2022. “Over the past 29 years, PBR has grown to become a mainstream sport carried by CBS and Pluto TV and packing marquee arenas across the country,” said PBR CEO and Commissioner Sean Gleason. “The incredible lineup of passionate, highly successful team owners validates the new PBR Team Series league – a transformational addition to the sport that will help take PBR to new levels.” The PBR Team Series builds on the existing structure of professional bull riding with the same basic rules for judging and scoring qualified 8-second bull rides. Events will be structured in a
An Interview with Chad Blankenship, Senior Vice President, PBR CAN YOU EXPLAIN WHAT WENT INTO CREATING THIS NEW PBR TEAM SERIES AND WHAT IT MEANS TO THE SPORT OF BULL RIDING? For about a decade, we’ve really been thinking about the opportunity to create a team-based bull riding league, how it might work, how the riders might respond to competing in a team environment, which is obviously atypical for Western Sports and bull riding, and how fans would respond to it. We’ve produced a handful of team-based events to test and learn with the competition and live event formats. The most prominent example is the nation-versusnation PBR Global Cup, which PBR launched in 2018 in Edmonton, Canada. We then hosted the Global Cup in Sydney, Australia, and AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas for several years including this coming March. Another team-based event that we’ve held in recent history is Cowboys For a Cause. That’s been a military charity event that we’ve staged twice on the flight deck of the USS Lexington - an aircraft carrier in Corpus Christi, Texas - and televised nationally. Through all these events, we’ve learned a few things. First of all, when it comes to team-based bull riding, the riders love it, because it’s a different kind of challenge for them. We still have cowboy athletes, matching up against a big, powerful bovine athlete; but what the cowboys tell us when they participate in the team events is that being part of a team gives them a broader sense of purpose. With this new team
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series, they’re not just riding for themselves, their family, and their fans, they’re really riding for each other. I think part of that is the camaraderie that the guys report with the team. A little bit of it also, I think for some of the riders, is having a coach. Then there’s also a dynamic with the team format in which bulls are drawn to the teams and then the coaches and riders decide who’s going to get on what versus a blind draw, which is what we typically see in individual bull riding events now. That helps, too, because bull riders have an opportunity to match up better with a bull that fits their riding style. CAN YOU DIVE A LITTLE DEEPER INTO THE MISSION OF THIS NEW LEAGUE? When it comes to growing the bull riding ecosystem, a big part of our mission as a league, and as a business, is to grow the sport, to create new and additional earning opportunities for the riders, and to continue to stoke fandom across the country and other parts of the world for bull riding. The PBR Team Series is a significant catalyst toward the mission. Historically there is a bit of an off-season for PBR from June to mid-August. We sanction plenty of really great PBR events in that window, but in terms of the PBR premier series and our owned and operated events, we typically take a summer hiatus. To create a continuous schedule for our riders and fans we’ve restructured the Unleash the Beast premier series season, which will now run from November to May in a typical season without a two and a half month break in the summer. That will better serve our fans, allowing us to create a dramatic crescendo in the Unleash the Beast culminating in a terrific World Finals in Fort Worth in May, and then move right into the PBR Teams season.
