NFL Fans in the Smallest Markets Are Buying the Most Merchandise
Cornhole is a staple at tailgates and backyard barbecues: Players toss square beanbags onto a two-by-four wooden board and into a round hole for extra points (you wouldn’t be alone if you’ve played it with a beer in hand). It’s typically played in teams of two, but it also can be one-on-one.
It may be familiar as pure entertainment in your favorite brewery—but if you’re good at it, it’s also surprisingly lucrative. In 2024, professional cornhole players in the sport’s biggest league collectively made roughly $7.7 million in prize money.
Jeremiah Ellis, a father of four from Columbus, Ohio—whose day job is delivering packages for UPS—pulled in $61,458 across all events last year. He’s second in earnings among all 300 American Cornhole League (ACL) players. “It’s brutal,” Ellis says of the balance between work and cornhole. “I just feel completely exhausted most times. But the mind’s more powerful than the body.”
The majority of ACL pros are like Ellis: squeezing cornhole tournaments into their weekends and vacation time away from their full-time jobs.
But ACL commissioner Stacey Moore, who founded the league in 2015, estimates that today, roughly 20% of its pros are able to play cornhole full-time. “My ultimate goal is for all of our players on the pro tour to be able to do it full-time,” says Moore. He believes that could happen within three to five years.
Cheyenne Bubenheim, the ACL’s top-earning female player and fifth-highest overall last year ($54,650), has relied solely on cornhole for her income for the past three years, after she stepped away from a house-cleaning business she owned.
But it’s not just prize money that pays her bills. “The biggest thing for me is sponsorship, just because that’s a guaranteed monthly payment,” says Bubenheim, who lives in DeLand, Fla., with her husband and 1-year-old daughter.
Titan Cornhole Bags, a manufacturer of the sport’s key instrument, is Bubenheim’s sole sponsor, but many top players have multiple endorsement deals. Bag manufacturers—as plentiful as companies that make golf balls—are the top player sponsor.
Moore, however, wants to see more players ink deals with non-endemic sponsors, like Jamie Graham and Matt Guy have previously had with Bud Light, for example. National ACL sponsors Overstock and Miller’s Ale House have also signed some players to individual deals. Sponsorship can sometimes prove more lucrative than prize money, but Moore says income for most ACL pros is split roughly 50-50 between these buckets.
Social media can also pay dividends for top cornhole players. Adrian Johnson has more than 294,000 followers on TikTok—topping the roughly 278,000 who subscribe to the ACL’s most-followed official social media account. Johnson has more than 900,000 across all his platforms, which he manages—and monetizes—on his own.
“I set myself up where I don’t have to rely on just winning the prize money,” Johnson says. “As a professional athlete in cornhole, it’s up to us to market ourselves in different ways. And I took the initiative and went that route.”
Johnson says his goal still remains becoming the No. 1 player in the world. For him, filming social media content can double as tournament practice, but not everyone gets to refine their craft as much as they want. “I used to take a day to myself and practice for about two to three hours, but that just doesn’t happen anymore,” says Ellis, who doesn’t have cornhole boards set up indoors and can’t train outside if the weather is bad in Ohio.
For Bubenheim, practicing in Florida is a little easier year-round, which she says is a must to stay atop her game. “If you’re not a full-time cornhole player, and you’re not putting in the time and effort, people will pass you,” she says, also citing the influx of younger talent into the sport who might have more free time.
Cornhole may seem niche, but it’s mainstreaming with increased visibility. The ACL has a media-rights deal with ESPN that will be up for an extension later this year. In 2024 more than 300 hours of ACL action appeared across ESPN platforms. Most of that came on ESPN+, but every once in a while pro cornhole ended up on the flagship ESPN channel or ESPN2.
But unlike most major sports in the U.S., the league isn’t counting on big media money to keep its cash flowing. “We believe that we deserve a significant rights fee for the amount of viewers we’re doing, especially on the streaming side,” Moore says. “But we’re not building our business model based on rights fees. We’re building it off of sponsorship licensing and memberships.”
As for the growth of the sport, most people probably won’t go pro from tossing beanbags at tailgates and league nights. But players such as Ellis, Bubenheim, and Johnson show there’s a path to competitive cornhole—and notable extra income—for top players who are willing to commit.
“My advice is figure out exactly what you want out of this game,” Ellis says. “If it’s to be the best, and you need all this practice time, make sure you are able to do exactly what you want in your day-to-day life, while juggling cornhole—because it is not easy.”
