PBR’s New Bull Riding Team Series

THE PBR TEAM SERIES DEBUTS IN JUNE 2022

Professional 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

ARIAT TEXAS RATTLERS

ARIZONA RIDGE RIDERS

AUSTIN GAMBLERS

CAROLINA CHAOS

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 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.

KANSAS CITY OUTLAWS

MISSOURI THUNDER

NASHVILLE STAMPEDE

OKLAHOMA FREEDOM

tournament-style format with all teams competing in head-to-head matchups against a different opponent each day. Each game will feature five riders per team squaring off against another team. Full team rosters will comprise seven riders on the core roster and up to three practice squad members. The team with the highest aggregate score of qualified rides among its riders will be declared the winner of each game. The event winner will be the team with the most game wins across an event, with a special bonus round designed as a tie-breaker to determine final event standings.

Team-formatted bull riding events have been growing in popularity since the debut of the PBR Global Cup in 2017, which pitted nation against nation in the name of national pride. The successful event format continued in June and July 2021 with the PBR Monster Energy Team Challenge, presented by U.S. Border Patrol. In addition, PBR has staged multiple Air Force Reserve Cowboys for a Cause team charity events.

JULY 25-26

AUG. 5-7

Cheyenne, WY

Cheyenne Frontier Days

Kansas City, MO

T-Mobile Center

AUG. 12-13

Anaheim, CA

Honda Center

AUG. 19-21

AUG. 26-28

SEPT. 3-5

SEPT. 9-11

SEPT 16-18

OCT. 7-9

OCT. 14-16

Nashville, TN

Bridgestone Arena

Austin, TX

Moody Center

Ridgedale, MO

Thunder Ridge Amphitheater

Winston-Salem, NC

LJVM Coliseum

Oklahoma City, OK

Paycom Center

Fort Worth, TX

Dickies Arena

Glendale, AZ

Gila River Arena

NOV. 4-6

Las Vegas, NV

T-Mobile Arena

NEUTRAL SITE

KANSAS CITY OUTLAWS

NEUTRAL SITE

NASHVILLE STAMPEDE

AUSTIN GAMBLERS

MISSOURI THUNDER

CAROLINA CHAOS

OKLAHOMA FREEDOM

TEXAS RATTLERS

ARIZONA RIDGE RIDERS

CHAMPIONSHIP

WE KNOW THAT THE RIDERS PICKED FOR EACH TEAM WILL BE DONE THROUGH A LOTTERY DRAFT, BUT ARE THERE ANY CONDITIONS IN WHICH A COWBOY CAN APPLY FOR THE DRAFT? SHOULD WE ANTICIPATE SOME PRETTY BIG NAMES APPEARING ON THESE TEAMS?

PBR Team Series is designed to broadly create opportunities for more bull riders within the PBR and rodeo ecosystems. PBR Teams is a shorter season than Unleash the Beast. It’s 10 regular season events plus a Playoff in Las Vegas, so 11 total events. It will span July to the first weekend of November. In order to have the potential to compete on a team, a rider has to have either a PBR member card or a PBR Draft card; that provides the opportunity to participate in the draft. Anybody who wants to participate in the 2023 season has to declare by May 6th and then we’ll have the initial draft on Monday, May 23, which is the day after our PBR World Finals.

There will be a multi-round primary draft and then a few days later, a supplemental draft for Team GMs and Coaches to finalize their rosters of 7 core riders. In order to participate in the Primary Draft, bull riders must declare that they are available for all 11 events in the series. The Supplemental Draft creates an opportunity for bull riders who aren’t available for all 11; these riders can declare eligibility for a partial season, the minimum requirement is six regular-season events plus the playoffs. That was specifically designed to create an opportunity for a rider who wants to participate in Teams but can make only a partial commitment. We anticipate that we’re going to have more bull riders from the rodeo ranks, who choose to participate in PBR Teams because it’s a smaller commitment in terms of the calendar year. This opportunity for all bull riders to compete in PBR Teams should also drive the interest of an even larger fan base.

THE EIGHT FOUNDING TEAMS ARE BACKED BY SOME PRETTY BIG PLAYERS AND NOT JUST COMPANIES IN THE WESTERN INDUSTRY, WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE BRINGING IN A VARIETY OF SPONSORS TO THE SPORT OF BULL RIDING?

In our inaugural season, the ownership groups that we’ve assembled are incredibly validating to Western Sports and bull riding specifically. If you look across our ownership groups, not only are there a couple of established and new players in the Western Sports space but all major league sports are also represented. Our Team owners and operators include successful sports leaders in the NFL Pittsburgh Steelers, MLB Oakland A’s, NBA Knicks, MLS Earthquakes and NYC FC, EPL Manchester City, and NASCAR among others. Our owners are also successful operators in western sports and lifestyle including The American, NBHA, Road to the Horse, Better Barrel Races, and Western Horseman magazine among others.

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE LOOK LIKE FOR THE PBR TEAM SERIES?

The sky’s the limit. As we’ve tested our trial events with a team format, it’s proved to be incredibly engaging and fun for fans and bull riders alike. Sponsors also love the Team format. Right now we’ve assembled such a compelling collection of owners and team operators, we feel great about starting with eight teams and eleven events. We’re also really leaning into the opportunity to stoke local fandom. For the first time ever, fans have a rooting interest not only for their favorite rider, but their entire hometown team. That’s very unique to Western Sports and bull riding, and we want to lean into that opportunity to really get fans excited about flying the flag, literally and figuratively, for their home team.

Q&A WITH AUSTIN DILLON

‘God, Country and Cowboy’ BY JARED TURNER

Growing up around a grandfather – legendary NASCAR team owner Richard Childress – who one could argue is the embodiment of a cowboy, NASCAR Cup Series driver Austin Dillon embraced the cowboy and western lifestyle from his youth.

Now a 31-year-old competing in NASCAR’s premier division for his grandfather’s team, Dillon has continued to immerse himself in cowboy culture – whether it be his proclivity for sporting a cowboy hat at the race track or his affinity for professional bull riding.

Earlier this year, Professional Bull Riders officials announced Dillon would oversee the Carolina Chaos – one of eight teams participating in the PBR Team Series, a new league featuring the world’s top bull riders competing in games beginning this June. The Chaos will represent Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which is near Dillon’s hometown of Lewisville, North Carolina, and the same city where his famous grandfather spent his earliest days in racing at fabled Bowman Gray Stadium.

The Chaos – run by Richard Childress Racing, with Dillon as its general manager – will host a competition at Wake Forest University’s Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum as part of the PBR Team Series’ inaugural 10-event regular season.

In the following Q&A, Dillon talks about why he decided to pursue this new venture, his love of the cowboy lifestyle and much more.

• NASCAR Driver Austin Dillon is the

General Manager of the Carolina Chaos in the newly-formed PBR Team Series.

WHAT CONVINCED YOU TO TAKE ON YOUR ROLE WITH THE CAROLINA CHAOS?

My grandfather and I had talked with Sean (Professional Bull Riders CEO and commissioner Sean Gleason) a couple times … and we thought it was very awesome and something we would want to be a part of when it all came to fruition. I love sports in general. I keep up with football, baseball, basketball and NASCAR and PBR. Having met friends in the PBR industry, like Cooper Davis and Luke Snyder, I think it just all kind of ties together with stuff that we love – God, country and cowboys.

HOW MANY PBR EVENTS DO YOU ANTICIPATE ATTENDING WITH YOUR BUSY RACING SCHEDULE?

It’s going to be tough. I’ll have a live feed for some of them that I’ll be able to watch at the track. We race on Sundays, and they ride on Sundays, but I’m going to try to attend some Thursday/Friday events when we don’t have Cup practice. My grandfather and my business manager are also involved in this, so they’ll be going to some events.

WHAT ARE YOUR MAIN DUTIES AS GM?

I have a budget I have to stick to. Our owner is the PBR, so they’ll be keeping up with what we’re spending and then, obviously, I’ll be trying to keep all the riders healthy and happy. … We’re running the team basically. What does that entail? We’ve got some of the guidelines, but it’s a new league and a learning process, and hopefully we learn the fastest.

HOW DID YOU COME TO LOVE THE COWBOY LIFESTYLE?

I think it’s my grandpa. From an early age on, my grandfather has pushed me, and I’ve watched John Wayne movies since I was a kid. My grandfather has taken me out to Montana to hunt, fish and ride horses. I remember riding horses in our backyard, getting horse lessons, getting bucked off a horse and told to get back on the horse when I was just a little kid. It’s just those building blocks of life around the outdoors and cowboys, because my grandfather is a cowboy in my mind.

The cowboys I’ve been around with PBR, man, they’re different. They’re unbelievable. Everybody just looks at what they are as tough, but a lot of them are God-fearing men that set good examples, and they’re super-polite, good ole boys that just want to go out and ride some rank bulls and have a little fun and meet some good people in the process.

HOW MUCH ARE YOU MOTIVATED AFTER A DISAPPOINTING 2021?

A lot. We were able to bring back a bunch of my same team guys this year and added some new guys I’m excited about. And then just having this opportunity with the Next Gen car, I think it’s a clean slate for everyone. The competition is stout at the top level of motorsports, so we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, and I’m as motivated as I’ve ever been.

HOW HAVE YOU CHANGED SINCE YOU JOINED THE CUP SERIES 8 YEARS AGO?

A lot. I think you go through the phases of Austin Dillon. You just look at my beard and my hair change over the years, and the mindset changes with it. It’s funny, though: When you have a bad day, you feel like experience after a while helps you cope with certain days … but your stomach still churns because you want to perform.

And I think that’s what drives us all as competitors is you’ve got to hate to lose. … You get to this point and sometimes you get comfortable. You have to push yourself to get uncomfortable because you’re not here for a long time, and you want to do good while you are here, so I’m still pushing myself. If you think I’m comfortable, I’m not.