By Charles Shack, Senior Reporter
The most-quoted number in coverage of Syracuse University’s stadium rebrand is $118 million. It is also the wrong number to quote.
That figure describes the new roof, the new lighting, and the air conditioning installed in 2020 and 2021. It is the construction cost of the venue’s biggest renovation in four decades. It is not the value of the naming-rights deal Syracuse signed with Liverpool-based JMA Wireless on May 19, 2022. The university and JMA have never disclosed what JMA paid for the name on the building.
This story came from public records we pulled ourselves
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Three football seasons into the new identity, that distinction matters. Syracuse walked away from a 42-year naming agreement that the previous occupant, Carrier Corporation, had paid $2.75 million for in 1979 and held in perpetuity. The replacement is a 10-year contract, signed at the height of a 5G manufacturing buildout that has since cooled. What the public can verify about the trade is mostly the cost side, not the revenue side.
The numbers Syracuse actually disclosed
When the deal was announced in May 2022, the university issued a joint press release with JMA Wireless that named the building, set the term length, and stopped there. Sportico, ESPN, and the Daily Orange all reported the same gap: terms beyond the 10-year length were not made public. For comparison, in 2011 PNC Financial Services bought the naming rights to PNC Arena in Raleigh, home of the Carolina Hurricanes and NC State basketball, on a 20-year, roughly $80 million extension at about $4 million per year. PNC’s deal expired in August 2024, and the venue has since been renamed Lenovo Center under a new 10-year agreement.
That gives a public benchmark for a major college-and-pro shared facility. JMA’s deal at the JMA Wireless Dome covers a single-tenant college venue at a school in the ACC, a smaller media market, and a Syracuse-only football and basketball calendar. The two are not directly comparable. Without disclosed numbers, the only honest answer to the question of what Syracuse is collecting per year is that the public does not know.
What Carrier paid, and what it bought
The Carrier Dome opened on September 20, 1980. Syracuse University Libraries records the total construction cost at $26.85 million, including a $15 million state grant in 1978 and a $2.75 million naming gift from Carrier Corporation. The Carrier gift was the first naming-rights agreement on a major college sports stadium and one of the first in any sport. It granted Carrier its name on the building in perpetuity. Carrier never paid annual fees. The deal was, in modern naming-rights terms, a one-time transaction.
That structure is the reason the rebrand happened at all. By the late 2010s, the going rate for college-stadium naming rights had moved into the millions per year, and Syracuse Athletics was leaving an asset on the table. The Daily Orange reported in October 2017 that Syracuse was actively studying a path out of the perpetual deal. In April 2022, the school confirmed it had reached an agreement with Carrier to end the original arrangement, freeing the building for a new sponsor.
JMA Wireless: who they are, what they sell
JMA Wireless is the doing-business-as name for John Mezzalingua Associates LLC, founded in 2012 by John Mezzalingua. The company is headquartered in Syracuse with operations in Liverpool and Clay, plus offices in Dallas, Austin, Chicago, Boulder, Richmond, and Europe. As of its most recent public disclosures, the company employs roughly 1,000 people worldwide.
JMA’s product line is open-RAN compliant 5G radio access network gear, 5G millimeter-wave radios, distributed antenna systems, and the XRAN software-defined RAN platform. The company says it built the first fully virtualized RAN for carrier and private networks and the first indoor 5G millimeter-wave radio in the United States. JMA gear is installed at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, the Golden 1 Center in Sacramento, and Stadio Olimpico in Rome.
Mezzalingua’s previous company, Production Products Company, was sold to Belden in 2012 for $515.7 million. That sale funded JMA’s launch.
JMA’s 5G campus and the staffing question
In June 2022, Governor Kathy Hochul cut the ribbon on a $100 million JMA Wireless 5G manufacturing campus on Salina Street in downtown Syracuse, billed as the first U.S. 5G manufacturing facility. JMA originally projected hundreds of jobs at the campus and hosted job fairs in 2022 and 2023 to fill manufacturing, business, and technology roles. Public state and county announcements paired the campus with major incentives.
The trajectory since has been less linear. Employee reviews on Indeed and Glassdoor reference a corporate restructuring beginning in 2024. Specific layoff totals at JMA’s Syracuse-area sites have not been confirmed in local news coverage as of this article.
What the dome itself looks like at year three
The 2020-2021 roof and renovation project replaced the original air-supported inflatable roof with a fixed cable-truss roof supported by an external steel crown truss, designed and engineered by Geiger Engineers, the same firm that built the original. Two-thirds of the new roof is translucent. The roof was completed for the football season opener against Georgia Tech on September 26, 2020. Air conditioning came online in 2021. A second phase of interior renovations, costing about $45 million, finished ahead of the 2024 football season and reduced overall capacity to widen seats and aisles for ADA compliance.
Current capacity figures, per Syracuse Athletics and the dome’s own public materials:
- Football: 42,784
- Basketball: 33,000
- Hockey: 39,925
- Concerts: 56,250
The football capacity is down from a single-game record of 50,564 set on the building’s opening day in September 1980. Basketball still holds a Carrier Dome era single-game record of 35,642 set on February 23, 2019, and a 1989-1990 average of 29,918 per game. Concert attendance topped out at 47,319 for a Metallica show on April 19, 2025.
Did Syracuse get the value it expected
The honest answer is partial. On the venue side, the value is real and visible. The dome operates year-round, plays host to ACC football and basketball, men’s and women’s lacrosse, the New York State public high school lacrosse championships, and major concerts. The roof project added air conditioning and modern engineering. The 2024 second-phase interior work upgraded seating and concessions.
On the sponsor side, JMA Wireless has gotten a building name, a domain, and signage on a venue that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. JMA’s manufacturing campus sits a few blocks from the dome. The brand visibility is not in question.
What no one outside the deal can verify is whether Syracuse Athletics is collecting the per-year figure it underwrote the rebrand on. Without disclosed terms, neither the Daily Orange nor the local commercial press has been able to compare the JMA contract to peer ACC deals. The university’s most recent public Athletic Department revenue numbers do not break out naming rights as a line item.
The 2026 view
Three years in, the building works. The roof is a national engineering case study. Football attendance has stabilized in the high 30s under second-year head coach Fran Brown. Basketball moves enough seats to keep the Atlantic Coast Conference happy. The concert calendar has gotten busier, including the largest paid attendance in venue history.
The naming-rights bet is harder to grade. Syracuse traded a permanent name for a 10-year sponsor whose corporate trajectory has been bumpier than expected. The university got modernization money. JMA got brand recognition. Both sides can credibly claim a win, and neither side has shown the receipts.
The next data point arrives in 2032, when the contract comes up for renewal or replacement. By then the public will probably have a better answer.
Sources: Syracuse University news release May 19, 2022; Syracuse University Libraries Carrier Dome history page; Sportico naming-rights coverage 2022; ESPN dome rebrand coverage; Daily Orange 2017 and 2022 reporting; Wikipedia entries for JMA Wireless Dome and JMA Wireless; Geiger Engineers project page on the new roof; JMA Wireless company materials at jmawireless.com; Lenovo Center / PNC Arena Wikipedia and Axios Raleigh coverage; CenterState CEO member-news pages on JMA Wireless. Hero photo: MattCC716, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).
