Earned Relevance

A Goldmine in College Sports Archived Vaults

College football’s bowl season marks the end of what normally is a thrilling 4-5 month-long ride of competition, triumph, and learning humility through defeat. Seeing this year’s seniors play their last football games brings back the bittersweet memory of my last college football game. At the conclusion of that thrilling game, where we came from behind to win, my close friend LaMorris Bacote would not return to the locker room because he knew he would have to take off his jersey for what would be the last time. He kept repeating, “I’m not taking my jersey off. You’re not going to see me cry!”

We all felt Bacote’s sense of imminent permanence. Unfortunately, besides a few photos and indelible memories, I don’t have any concrete reminders, like video or audio, from my four-year college football career.

Athletes that emerge as elite players on a national level and produce ESPN-worthy highlights have no trouble acquiring compiled season footage from their universities or boosters. The rest of the thousands of student athletes that ‘give it up’ on the fields and courts of schools across the country walk away from their college careers with little concrete memorabilia to share with their future children. The only evidence my family has of my college football career are a few television interviews and select highlights compiled by my agent after my senior season.

Universities are sitting on potential goldmines if they would open-up their video and audio archived content of historic athletic games.

Here’s how an average athletic department can turn their video and audio archives into a revenue producer. For those athletic departments that operate with small budgets, these low cost tactics can help generate much needed revenue to off-set sports marketing expenses, thus helping them to compete with programs that have bigger budgets.

History Pays Well
Convert all old film and video taped footage to digital format. Offer alumnus the opportunity to purchase their complete four-year game history as well as highlight reels comprised of their best plays from their individual careers. Current athletes should be able to purchase their footage as well. Families will surely be willing to fork over $750-$1,000 for that history. Also make the finished products available for purchase by fans.

Historic Individual Stars
We’re suckers for nostalgia. Compile a DVD of outstanding past performances by individual athletes by sport. Generate apparel and ancillary products incorporating images and taglines that were used over the years and associated with the aforementioned performers. Many athletic programs have been around for decades, so there is plenty of content from which to select to create contemporary products.

New Way to Educate
From the game video footage, create teaching DVD’s and online educational content for each player position. For football as an example, one for quarterbacks, wide receivers, kickers, etc. Use the video footage to highlight true game-time experience where athletes used proper technique and demonstrated excellent skills. For example, create a defensive back training video from game footage where the team’s cornerbacks used great footwork to take away a receiver’s inside release, punched the inside of the receiver’s shoulder to disrupt their timing, or opened their hips up-field to recover from being beaten by the receiver. Learning these kind of details is invaluable to an athlete’s success.

Most team video and audio products that are available for public consumption are mostly highlights, thus  only good for entertainment. By narrowing the focus of the video and audio content to point out consistent technique and skill for training purposes, university programs can create new revenue streams and expand others. Most college and university programs already conduct athletic skills camps, but the majority are limited to kids that can travel to the camp locations. The DVDs and online content would be available worldwide by anyone who can access the content. Programs at the high school and Pop Warner levels as well as general fans would be the targets.

The Artist Known as Coach
Athletic coaches are known to give great pre-game and halftime motivational speeches. The best one I’ve heard came from Coach George Wheeler and went something like this: “..every football game lasts an average of sixty plays, each play lasts an average of seven seconds. The total damn game last an average of four minutes and twenty seconds, can you bust your ass for that long?!!” That was enough to motivate us to victory.

Athletic departments can compile the historic speeches of coaches that have been recorded into an audio book/CD. Sell the audio products to other coaches at association clinics, conferences and online. Turn the wittier content into ring tones. Can you imagine, when your friend’s cell phone rang, you heard, “Get your ass out there and give ‘em all you got!”?

If you’re a former college athlete, share your thoughts and experiences here.

College archival footage exists not just for football programs; these above approaches can work for volleyball, soccer, basketball or any other sport supported by schools.