“Football combines the two worst features of American life: violence and committee meetings.”
George Will
Football
Football
It is the beginning of the NFL playoffs so here is an idea to make it a little bit safer: Quarterbacks should wear a different color since there are different rules for tackling them. This is how they saved the goalies in Soccer.
Last year BC (Before Covid) I predicted that football would have at best another ten years before it became indefensible as a blood sport. Covid might move up that schedule. I like football and I think that sports generally are a net positive for the world in many ways but there are too many injuries in Football the way it is played today for it to survive intact.
Football Prediction
In the next decade a major university with a big time college football program will stop playing football.
Probably as a result of a law suit regarding a head injury.
The plaintiff will argue, that in the same way that tobacco companies knew about the health risks of smoking, colleges know about the concussion risk of playing football and therefore are liable. The defense will collapse and the university will fold.
After this event football will fairly rapidly vanish like bear baiting, cock fighting,dog racing and Rodeo. And it won’t be missed much.
Football for Multitaskers
Build an app for multitaskers that sends an alert when there is a significant play in the football game your watching. All you have to do is look up from your other task when your phone plays the selected sound. The revenue stream could be an ad in the tone and or the icon. The sponsor could be somebody like Charles Schwab or Starbucks.
Advantages: Easy to build an MVP. Easy to roll out. Built right it would be very sticky.
Disadvantage: Low barrier to entry.
Yes “multitasker” is a word in Websters. “Multi-tasker” is also acceptable.
College Sports Thoughts
Graduates of UCLA often send their children to USC.
Where do the graduates of USC send their children?
This weekend UCLA plays Stanford in their last regular season game. If they lose they may have to play Stanford again the following Friday in the PAC 12 conference final.
Note to Sports Conference organizers. Don’t use a number in your name. That way when the number of teams in the conference changes as it surely will you won’t need to rebrand.
How about just : The Pacific Athletic Conference
Or if you need a superlative:
The Big Pacific Conference
or
The Great Pacific Conference
No numbers. Ask Rick Perry.
Super Parade Opportunity
Most holidays have parades. People like parades. They like to be in parades. But Superbowl Sunday doesn’t have a parade even though it is close to being our countries biggest holiday. This oversight seems like a big opportunity for a sunbelt city like San Diego, Albuquerque, El Paso or Tucson.
How would it work. Bands, Floats and Sponsors followed by a chance for all the participants to watch the game on the Jumbotron in the local enclosed stadium. I imagine a Rose Parade type event without the flower theme. Floats with fashion, entertainment, commercial and technology based themes. More high tech than Macy’s balloons and definitely more TV friendly than the Rose Parade. Each float and band would have three minutes or so in the limelight. Half of the time the camera would be on the parade entry and half would be on their commercial. Some examples:
- Victoria’s Secret no brainer
- Waffle House Tasting float
- Ace Hardware National band
- Whatever the hot new movie is.
- The State of Colorado Tourism bureau.
- Emirates Air
The main attraction for the sponsors would be a chance to have an affordable ad near the Super Bowl. The TV Network would have a very low cost but potentially high profit product. The bands would be delighted to march and the sponsoring city would sell 100,000 hotel room nights at very little cost after the initial roll-out.
The only question in my mind is why hasn’t someone thought of this before.
So far this year I have had three football ideas and two parade ideas and it is only February. You can see all of the ideas here.
World Football
The teams playing in the “Superbowl” this year are New England and New York. Which is hardly even a national game. Let alone an international game. Substantially all of American football is played in the USA. Which doesn’t sound like a problem until you start to think about the future of sports. Sustainable sports in the next fifty years will be ones that have a global span. The National Football League is trying a few things to grow the world audience mostly in Europe. The St Louis Rams are going to play a “home game” in London this next season. But their first attempt to have an NFL Europe league failed a few years ago and they have pretty much given up trying new things. But the Ideapreneur hasn’t. Following are three ideas for the NFL to create a world market for their product:
1. Go to the third world. Start children’s programs in India, China and Africa. Promote it as a way to get to emigrate to the USA. Use baseball in the Dominican Republic as the model.
2. Build Football programs at Universities in Latin America. Have a league. Bring the best teams to the USA for the final games each year.
3. Make every team in the current NFL do what the St Louis Rams are doing. Each team gets a sister stadium in another country and has to play five games there in say the next six years.
Football has many attributes that make it a better sport for mass consumption than soccer, cricket or baseball but it has to become worldwide. It is up to the NFL to make it happen by making real long term investment in building the sport internationally.
The Twelfth Man Plays Football
This is week two of the Ideapreneur’s football focus. This week we’ll look at getting fans more into the game.
Imagine that it is late in the fourth quarter, your team is behind by two points and they are driving. What they need is to be able to stop the clock but they don’t have any time outs left. What can they do? This is where the fans come in. Under this new proposal, that we call Reality Football, the fans can purchase an extra timeout for $50,000.
In recent years the football industry has been growing at about 6% per year. The Reality TV business has been growing at about 12% per year. We here at simonburrow.com/ want football to be more important than reality TV so we have come up with an idea we call Reality Football.
Meta World Peace on Dancing with the Stars
Reality Football will allows football fans to be far more involved in games and therefore will significantly improve ratings and revenue.
One of the reasons that Reality TV is gaining popularity is that on many shows the fans have a say in the outcome. In Dancing With the Stars for instance the viewers vote on who they want to stay on the show. Reality Football will allow football fans to have the same kind of participation in games and to possibly affect the outcome.
Under the Reality Football proposal the fans can purchase an extra timeout for $50,000. They can text in their contributions on a mobile phone and the maximum individual contribution will be $5.00. So if 10,000 fans will text in $5.00 the team can purchase an extra timeout and possibly win the game. The money will go to charity. The fans will be more involved in the game and the teams that have the best fan support will have a slight edge in close games.
Of course the actual cost for a timeout and the maximum contribution would have to be set by experimentation and the charities that would benefit would need to be worked out.
In the long run Reality Football will mean that teams will have to think a little bit more about keeping their fans happy. So the owners, the coaches and the players will have to be more accessible and inclusive. They will have to be working extra hard so that they will appear to deserve the extra timeout from the fans when they need it.
Imagine a super bowl that is decided because Patriots fans bought a timeout for five million dollars to beat the Giants. Did I mention that the money will go to charity.
Let me know your thoughts about this idea and forward it to all of the NFL executives you know. I had the original Reality Football idea a few years ago this is the updated and improved version.
Making Football Better
It is week two of the NFL playoffs the perfect time for the ideapreneur to apply his right-brain thinking to the venerable game of football.
The NFL is constantly making lots of small changes to the rules. For instance, this year, they moved the kickoff spot forward five yards. The explanation was that this would reduce the number of injuries on special teams. I’m not sure if it worked but it gave Howard R. and me an even better idea for making NFL football more fun, faster and less expensive. Like many good ideas it is really simple: Do away with kickoffs completely. Instead have one of the cheerleader babes spin a wheel, a la Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune, and the result of the spin would be where the next series starts.
The advantages of the kickoff spin are obvious. Less injuries of course but also less personnel, a more important role for the cheerleaders who until this idea have been marginalized, and the game would be about five minutes shorter. All good ideas. It also gives a reason to leave the cameras on the cheerleaders during the spin and offers a great corporate sponsorship opportunity.
Naysayers will argue that the kickoff spin introduces an element of chance into a skill based game. The answer is that ultimately the game is about entertainment and if the kickoff spin makes game more competitive and fun for the fans then it is good for the game. It certainly is worth a try.
Next week: The twelfth man wins a game.