The first college football game I remember was in North Carolina at Duke University in 1975. The match he ended in a 17–17 draw. Both head coaches in that game, Duke’s Mike McGee and his UNC’s Bill Dooley, became ADs.
These days, it’s all too common for sports departments to function like media entities. Every day they create content that is distributed across digital and social channels, linear TV networks and video boards. So what’s next for the Creative Frontier?
Texas A&M launched a new division called 12th Man Films and debuted its first major feature earlier this month, a documentary called Standing Room Only: The Legend of the 12th Man. This is his 1 hour 42 minute film celebrating his 100th year in his 12th man tradition of college. A&M released the film on his August 20th to a sold-out crowd of 2,500. They stood and applauded, much to the delight of assistant AD/12th Man Films Chris Sabo, who directed and edited the project as the credits rolled.
Saho: “As a filmmaker, it was special. The energy emanating from the audience was really like Aggie.”
The movie is finished, but the business plan for it is still developing. The two biggest questions that need to be answered concern revenue and distribution. The first purpose of 12th Man Films is to tell the story of A&M. However, a major project with such broad appeal could provide several revenue streams. It could come in the form of donations that fund scholarships or come from sponsorships.
Chris Park, Deputy AD/External Relations and Business Development, A&M, said:
LEAD1 yesterday organized a group of sports media experts to discuss trends in college business. The session was moderated by my colleague John Owland and myself. Here’s what I got from the panel:
- As long as Notre Dame can generate $60-$70 million a year from its media rights deal with NBC and has clear access to the college football playoffs, it will remain independent. That status is extremely important to the Fighting Irish.
- Digital companies such as Amazon, Apple, and YouTube do not appear to be legitimate threats to the rights of Power Five colleges. When it’s time for the Big Ten rights, even if Amazon seriously bids for more money, it can’t beat CBS or NBC, and if the digital players weren’t he could beat the Pac-12 or Big 12 Not likely.
- Experts didn’t seem to think combining the Pac-12, Big 12 and ACC into one football property would yield significantly more revenue. With so many games, the combined properties will have to adopt an NFL approach where nearly every window is localized. I don’t have enough broadcast windows in a day to make it work.
- ACC entitlement has proven to be an effective tool for bringing conferences together. Dividing entitlements can be costly, laborious, and otherwise damaging. Who wants to go to court?
Aer Lingus College Football Classic organizer John Anthony was beaming after the Northwestern Nebraska game in Dublin on Saturday. Here’s how he scored it as he went through the checklist.
- perfect weather: check. You never know what you’ll get in Ireland, but the weather was great all week long which made for a great sight seeing and huge fan event in the city centre.
- close the game: check. Northwestern recovered from 11 to beat Nebraska 31-28.
- good crowd: check. Attendance at Aviva Stadium was 42,699 for him, including his 15,000 Americans who traveled to Dublin and his 3,000 travelers from other regions.
- felt–good story: Northwest QB Ryan Hilinski revealed after the game that he was wearing a jersey patch from his brother’s deceased game in Ireland in 2012. Tyler Hilinski’s high school team played in his Emerald Isle Classic.
Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren presented the trophy to Northwestern University, who made it through the Waterford Crystal without fumbles or drops. “The organizers were thrilled with it,” Anthony said in a text. “It’s been a great week.”
Notre Dame and Navy will play in the Week 0 game to kick off the 2023 season.
(Left) Padraic O’Kane and John Anthony, co-founders of Air Lingus Classic, and Paul Caine, president of On Location.
A small number of NIL collectives have purchased the school’s official sponsorship. This gives the collective access to school marks, advertisements and signage, depending on the package purchased.
The latest activity is Pokes with a Purpose, an organization that works with Oklahoma State University athletes. We announced today that we are the official collective of the Cowboys through a deal with Cowboy Sports Properties, a local rearfield multimedia rights business.
The deal follows another collective, 1Oklahoma Collective, doing business with Learfield Properties, which represents the Sooners.
In total, Leahfield says, five groups have purchased official school sponsorships. In addition to OU and OSU, collectives in Florida (Gator Collective), Ohio (Unity Foundation), and Memphis (901 Foundation) have school contracts.
- Fox Sports got off to a strong start on Saturday. According to SBJ’s Austin Karp, he averaged 4.42 million viewers for Northwestern’s victory over Nebraska from Ireland. That’s a 35% increase for him from Week 0 of last year’s Nebraska Illinois. Meanwhile, FS1 saw him draw 517,000 viewers in UConn-Utah State, while Cable posted his fifth-best Mountain West game ever on the network.
- ESPN’s Burke Magnus spoke with my colleague John Ourand and didn’t outline any concrete ideas on how the NIL should evolve, but conferences and universities have raised some of the issues related to it. Said it needed to be fixed. “I feel like it could get messier before it gets better,” he said.
- The Big Ten Network turned 15 today and the Conference Cable Network (the only network rated by Nielsen) came out of the gate strong over the weekend to kick off the 2022-23 school year. The Illinois-Wyoming football game in Week 0 earned him 512,000 viewers, making him the most-watched Illinois non-conference game in network history. Later on Saturday, BTN recorded his debut in volleyball history with 140,000 viewers in Texas, Ohio (his previous record was 2018 in Florida, Nebraska, where he recorded 140,000 viewers) 118,000).
- College GameDay will have an increased presence on ESPN.com this year. This includes a new hub with weekly updates on campus visits, set location maps, and more. A performance by rapper Jack Harlow on Saturday’s “GameDay” will also be streamed on the Hub.
- This week’s SBJ cartoon covers the start of the college football season….
