Texas A&M dived into the film business

The 1975 college football game I attended was at North Carolina and the 1975 game ended in a 17-17 tie. Both head coaches in that game, Duke’s Mike McGee and UNC’s Bill Dooley, subsequently became ADs.

Nowadays, it is common for athletic departments to operate as 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 on the creative frontier?

Texas A&M launched a new department called The 12th Man Films, which made its first major production earlier this month — a documentary called “Standing Room Only: The Legend of the 12th Man.” The 12th man culture of the university is a one hour and 42 minute film celebrating 100 years. A&M premiered the film on August 20 in front of a full house of 2,500 people. They stood and applauded as the credits rolled, cheering Chris Sabo, the assistant AD/12th Man film who directed and edited the project.

Sabo: “As a filmmaker, this was unique. The energy from the audience really seemed to be agin’.

The film is complete, but the business plan around it is still developing. The two big questions that need to be answered are related to income and dividends. The original purpose of the 12th Man movie was to tell the story of A&M. But there are likely to be some sources of revenue that could flow from major projects of such broad interest. That can come from donations or sponsorships that support scholarships.

“We want to make the film as accessible as possible to anyone who wants to see it,” said Chris Park, A&M’s Vice AD/External Relations and Business Development.

LEAD1 organized a panel of sports media professionals yesterday to discuss trends in the college business. The session was led by my colleague John Aurand and myself. Here’s what I got out of the panel:

• Notre Dame will remain independent as long as it can generate $60-70 million a year from its media rights deal with NBC and has clear access to the college football game. That situation is very important to the Fighting Irish.

• Digital players such as Amazon, Apple and YouTube do not appear to be a legitimate threat to college rights in the Power Five. Even Amazon’s aggressive bid for more money won’t win over CBS or NBC when it comes to Big Ten rights. And a digital player has no chance of winning the Pac-12 or Big 12. But if the goal is to bring more bidders to the table, Amazon brings value.

• The experts don’t seem to think that combining the Pac-12, Big 12 and ACC into one football property would make a lot of money. Because there will be so many games, the combined property will probably have an NFL approach where each window is regionalized. There aren’t enough distribution windows in the day to make it work.

• The ACC’s grant of rights has proven to be an effective tool in holding the conference together. Breaking a grant is costly, tedious, and potentially damaging in other ways. Who wants to go to court to test the legality of a provision just to make more private conversations public?

John Anthony, host of the Aer Lingus College Football Classic, was beaming after Saturday’s Northwestern-Nebraska game in Dublin. Going down the checklist, here’s how it scored:

• Perfect weather: prove it. You never know what you’re going to find in Ireland, but the weather held up all week, making for great site seeing and great fan events downtown.

• Close game: prove it. Northwestern rallied from 11 down to beat Nebraska 31-28.

• Good people: prove it. The 15,000 Americans in attendance at the Aviva Stadium were 42,699, including 3,000 travelers from other areas to Dublin.

• Feeling–A good story: Northwestern QB Ryan Hilinski revealed he wore a patch of jersey from his late brother’s game in Ireland in 2012. Tyler Hilinski’s high school team played in the Emerald Isle Classic.

Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren presented the trophy to Northwestern, whose players passed around the Waterford Crystal without a hitch or a drop. “The producers were very excited about it,” Anthony wrote in the article. “It’s been an amazing week.”

Notre Dame and Navy will play in a Week 0 game to open the 2023 season.

(lr) Padraic O’Kane and John Anthony, founders of Aer Lingus Classic, with Paul Kane, President of On Location

A handful of NIL teams have purchased official school sponsorships, which provide the community with school signs, advertising and signage — depending on the package they purchase.

The most recent is Pokes with a Purpose, which works with Oklahoma State athletes. It was announced earlier today that it is the official joint venture for the Cowboys through a deal with Cowboys Sports Properties, a local Learfield multimedia rights business.

The deal comes from 1Oklahoma Collective, another collective that contracts with the Learfield property that represents the Sooners.

Learfield has bought official school sponsorship from five common communities in all. In addition to OU and OSU, Florida (Gator Collective), Ohio State (Cohesion Foundation) and Memphis (901 Fund) have joint school agreements.

• Fox Sports wrapped up its debut on Saturday. The broadcast network won an average of 4.42 million viewers in northwest Nebraska from Ireland, SBJ’s Austin Karp reported. This is up 35% from Nebraska-Illinois in Week 0 last year. Meanwhile, FS1 drew 517,000 viewers for UConn-Utah State, marking the fifth-best Mountain West game ever for the cable network.

• Speaking with my colleague John Ourand of ESPN, Burke Magnus didn’t outline concrete ideas for how the NIL should grow, but said conferences and colleges need to address some of the issues surrounding it. “It seems like it’s going to get tougher before you get better. But ultimately, I think it’s a good idea for student-athletes to be able to participate in some aspect of the business of intercollegiate athletics.”

• The Big Ten Network turns 15 today, and the conference’s cable network (the only Nielsen-rated one) came out of the gate strong over the weekend to kick off the 2022-23 school year. The Week 0 football game between Illinois and Wyoming drew 512,000 viewers, making it the most-watched Illini non-conference game in network history. Later Saturday, BTN drew 140,000 viewers for Ohio State-Texas, the best volleyball season ever seen on the network (the previous record was Nebraska-Florida in 2018 with 118,000).

• “College Game Day” will have an increased presence on ESPN.com this year, including a new hub that will include weekly updates on campus tours, maps of set locations and more. A performance by rapper Jack Harlow on Saturday’s “Game Day” will even air on the hub.

• This week’s SBJ cartoon kicks off the college football season…