This week’s Club Sportico focuses on the “golden era” of sports content, with particular emphasis on a video series published by the University of Oregon athletic department.
Each week, Oregon releases a cinematic recap of the undefeated football team’s most-recent game. They’re cut with behind-the-scenes clips from team meetings, audio from the coaches’ headsets and video shot from the sidelines. Each has a narrative arc, centered around whatever head coach Dan Lanning is using that week for motivation.
They’ve created some viral clips, including Lanning using Pavlov’s Dog to help his players weaponize Wisconsin fans and their “Jump Around” tradition.
Here is an excerpt of this week’s Club Sportico essay ✍️:
“We’re entering a new golden era of sports shoulder programming. There are cameras everywhere, and teams/leagues/athletes finally seem to understand the assignment. Fans want access. They want to know what happens on the team bus, in the pre-game meetings, and in the athletes’ homes. They want to see a different side of the people they root for.
“But understanding that and doing it effectively are two very different things. There’s a camera on pretty much everything happening at Deion’s Colorado Buffaloes program, but it’s not condensed, edited or curated like what Oregon is doing. I struggle to engage with it.
“Athletes sometimes strike gold, too. I’ve written previously about Giannis Antetokounmpo live-streaming his trip to Chick-Fil-A with the NBA Championship trophy back in 2021. Hours after dropping 50 points in the deciding Game 6, he orders 50 chicken nuggets—’not 51, not 49.’ The look on the order-taker’s face when he tells her 150,000 people are watching her on Instagram live is amazing.”
The weekly newsletter also touches on a few other sports business topics. They include:– 📉 Are NIL platforms struggling to adapt to the next wave of change? – 🏀 A WNBA player grilling her coach– 🏈 ESPN’s new use of AR/VR– 🏀 LeBron James leaving social media
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Club Sportico is a sports business community launched in September 2024 via Substack. There’s a weekly newsletter every Thursday afternoon, a news quiz every Monday morning, and a number of other benefits. It is written and designed each week by Eben Novy-Williams, Jacob Feldman and Matt Palacio.
The goal is to present the latest in sports business with a bit more opinion and a bit more humor than exists elsewhere. One less shirt button closed. There’s a members-only chatroom, members-only audio, and hopefully soon, members only events. If you’re an existing Sportico subscriber looking for free access, or a reader with a comment or suggestion, email us at club@sportico.com.