PBR today announced the PBR Team Series, a new team-format league complementing its successful Unleash The Beast premier tour, launching in June 2022.
It’s being called a transformational change for a sport that has grown continually for 28 years, as well as a huge victory for cowboys in offering them new money, professional coaching, and the incomparable camaraderie understood by anyone who’s ever played team sports.
The PBR Team Series, which will span June to November 2022 in its inaugural season, following the May conclusion of the Unleash The Beast, will launch with eight founding teams playing a 10-weekend regular season culminating in a team playoff.
Each team will be based in a home market to be named, playing host to an annual bull riding event and Western lifestyle festival.
There will also be two “neutral site” league-produced events and the season playoff and championship.
The teams with their respective ownership and home market selections will be announced early in 2022.
The PBR Team Series will host a player draft prior to the 2022 season, drafting bull riders from any PBR rider member who has declared for the draft based on League rules. The team lottery will be held when PBR visits Madison Square Garden in New York in early January.
Fans can expect the world’s best bull riders to join the new teams.
Riders and team owners will compete for separate prize pools that will reward team performance at each event and in the final season standings.
“Adding to an already thrilling sport, recent PBR team format events produced even more rider passion and better competition in an electric atmosphere,” said PBR Commissioner and CEO Sean Gleason. “We anticipate the PBR Team Series will make the riders better, and our sport overall will get better. Fans will have new rooting interests, host cities and home-team partners will deliver new marketing programs, and we will create additional value for every PBR stakeholder.”
Event competitions will be structured as head-to-head games between teams. Each game will feature five riders per team squaring off against another team. The team with the highest aggregate score of qualified rides among its riders will be declared the winner of each game.
Most competitions will be staged as three-day events featuring three games per team. The team with the best game record across an event will be declared the winning team. Rider and Team event payouts and season standings will be based on Win-Loss records and tie-breaks throughout the entire season.
PBR has decades of experience promoting and producing enormously successful bull riding events. The PBR Team Series builds on the existing structure of PBR with the same basic rules for judging and scoring qualified bull rides. The most significant change is events will recognize team performance rather than individual performance – with riders and owners winning as a team.
In recent history, bull riders competing on teams debuted with the PBR Global Cup in 2017, with PBR hosting the global competition in Edmonton, Sydney, and twice in Arlington, Texas. PBR team competitions continued with the Monster Energy Team Challenge (METC) in June 2020 at South Point Arena in Las Vegas, culminating in the METC Finals in Sioux Falls in July. In addition, PBR staged “Cowboys for a Cause” team charity events aboard the USS Lexington aircraft carrier in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 2020 and 2021.
“I grew up in the format of team competition when I played soccer in Brazil, and I loved the brotherhood of being on a team and having strategies to beat another team,” said reigning PBR World Champion Jose Vitor Leme. “I’m very excited for the draft and finding out who will be my partners on the team. People cheer for teams. This will bring a lot more fans to this sport.”
“I’m really excited for this new opportunity in our sport,” added 2016 PBR World Champion Cooper Davis. “Teams bring a great new element to bull riding. Guys feel the responsibility to ride for their teammates, and it makes everyone ride better. You’re riding for more than yourself.”
The PBR Team Series will be televised by CBS and CBS Sports Network and carried on RidePass on Pluto TV.
Recognizing the added drama and excitement when riders join teams, PBR had been considering the Team concept for years.
Then the Coronavirus pandemic brought significant restructuring to the Unleash The Beast schedule, most notably a pivot over to bring the World Finals to AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.
The push to make Teams a reality picked up speed.
Now the sport will have two contiguous tours – the individual Unleash The Beast competition from January to May, culminating in World Finals in Fort Worth at Dickies Arena, followed by PBR Team Series, running from June to November, reaching a crescendo in what is expected to be a thrilling playoff.
Nearly 30 years ago, 20 rodeo cowboys founded PBR to increase their earnings and ensure a strong and growing sport for the next generation of cowboys.
Similarly, the first riders to declare for the inaugural Teams draft will be forging a better, more lucrative future for generations of bull riders to come.
“This is a big victory for bull riders – a huge effort to grow the sport in the biggest way yet,” said PBR co-founder Cody Lambert. “The team format is a game-changer to improve an already exciting sport, make it even better, and give riders more opportunities.”
