You are here: Home / Archives for NFL

Boom Goes the Twitter: Manning-to-Denver News Takes Over Monday Morning

March 19, 2012 by

Here’s the tweet that started it all: ESPN’s Adam Schefter hit the innerwebs at 8:52 a.m. PT today with a missive that simply said, “From @mortreport and me: Peyton Manning will become the next quarterback of the Denver Broncos, barring unexpected snag in contract talks.”

And then Twitter hell broke loose. Not only was there instant reaction to the apparently successful recruitment by NFL Hall of Fame quarterback John Elway in bringing Manning to the Mile High City, but you also had the attendant fallout question of “what now for Tim Tebow,” the one-man twitterstorm who set the league’s social media airwaves aflame last fall when he unexpectedly found success with his unorthodox playing methods.

From @mortreport and me: Peyton Manning will become the next quarterback of the Denver Broncos, barring unexpected snag in contract talks.

As an old comrade of Schefter’s (our paths crossed briefly when I was a sportswriter in Boulder and he was starting his career with the Rocky Mountain News) it’s great to see him toeing the line on “not breaking news on Twitter” — if you’ve noticed lately a lot of his posts start with the wording “Filed to ESPN” at the start. Not the Manning one, though. Better to get the scoop first and worry about the internal politics later, we’re guessing. But see the WWL-correctedness in the follow up tweet:

Either way… a scoop’s a scoop, and this is definitely the biggest one of the NFL offseason. Now we are betting that Jim Harbaugh is on the line to Alex Smith, offering to carry his golf bag at the AT&T pro-am next year. Just guessing.

Filed Under: > Tebow, Denver Broncos, ESPN, Greater than Tebow, NFL, Twitter Tagged With: , , ,

Can ‘Gridiron Grunts’ Grow? App That Lets Players Talk to Fans Getting Pictures, Videos for 2nd Season

March 6, 2012 by

After a self-proclaimed successful rookie year, the team behind the “Gridiron Grunts” app — which lets NFL players and fans talk to each other via recorded voice messages — is beefing up for its second season with plans to add picture- and video-sharing capabilities.

According to ex-NFL lineman Jeb Terry Jr., who is co-founder and CEO of Grunts parent company Gridion Ventures Inc., adding picutre and video sharing is just another way of adding value to an app that was “built just to talk about football.” If you’re not familiar with the Grunts app, a “Grunt” is a short (less than 45 seconds) audio message that can be recorded from a phone to the app.

The big attraction are “Grunts” left by NFL players, though fans who download the app can send Grunts to players, as well as “Grunt” to other fans. Fans pay 99 cents per month to listen to grunts of a specific player, or $4.99 a month to listen to all pro grunts. Fan-to-fan grunting is free, and the app is available for both iPhone and Android devices.

The “Grunt” label comes from the way football players talk on the field, a language Terry and his co-founder Ryan Nece used often as teammates on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. “We used to knock heads in practice and then go out and have steaks afterward,” said Nece, who was a linebacker for Tampa from 2002-07.

After leaving the NFL following the 2008 season Terry went back to school to get an MBA, and then hit his old training partner with an idea for bringing fan-player interaction to a wider audience.

“It’s all about giving the fans the ability to engage with a player at their convenience,” said Nece. Terry said the pick-up-a-phone-and-grunt also makes it easy for players to participate.

“It’s convenient and easy to do, and gives players another way to control their own brand,” Terry said. “And fans can listen to a grunt at their leisure. You can’t always listen to radio talk shows when they are on the air.” The Grunts app can also deliver alerts to a fan’s phone when there is a new grunt to listen to.

Nece added that Grunts is a way for players who aren’t Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers to get some air time.

“There are a lot of players like we were, with shares of the limelight that were pretty small,” Nece said. “You could be a big fan of a certain player but never hear from him on ESPN. Now everyone can develop their own personality.”

According to Terry the Grunts app kicked off the season with just 15 pros participating, but ended with almost 80 players at the end of the season. One grunter who Terry really liked was Green Bay Packers breakout star Randall Cobb, who scored on both a kickoff return and a punt return last year.

“After that first game when he scored on the kickoff return he was very engaging, with some great postgame grunts,” Terry said. “He was perfectly candid and very excited for the fans.”

The Grunts team said it attracted 20,000 paying customers during the first year, a “beta” season total that Terry is happy with. For this year, after adding photo and video sharing later this spring, the Grunts team is still considering where to expand next, with perhaps a Grunt website and other sports on the drawing board. But first and foremost, the Grunt app will remain simple and powerful, like a blitz: A place to talk and listen football.

“Twitter is fun but tweets might be from friends or associates [of an athlete], so you never know,” Terry said. “We built our app to talk about football, and not about shopping or going to the club. We just wanted to erase the clutter and bring fans content that’s strictly from the players.”

Filed Under: Apps, ESPN, iPhone, NFL, Social Media, Sports Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: , , ,

The Viva! Vision: Former NFL Players Create ‘App Enablement’ Firm for Athletes, Celebs

February 21, 2012 by

Joe Tafoya (left) and Kerry Carter of Viva! Vision, at the AT&T Developer Summit. (Screen shot courtesy AT&T)

Anytime you go to a “developer’s conference” hosted by some large firm, you can pretty much count on at least several instances where groups of geeks are shepherded to the stage for their 15 seconds of fame. Look! The big-company execs will say. Developers who believe in us!

At the recent AT&T Developers Summit ahead of CES, however, there was a twist: During the meet-the-developers segment the audience saw 6-foot-4 Joe Tafoya take the stage and tell a quick tale about how he and some other ex-NFL players were getting into the development game, previewing a cool forthcoming “locker room” app featuring their friend, NBA star Jason Terry.

After shaking hands with some AT&T execs and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Tafoya was gone, but not after causing no small amount of buzz among the thousands in the audience. Ex-NFL guys? Doing sports apps? Cool! And then everyone went back to checking their email.

Tafoya, however, stuck around the summit, wandering the exhibit-hall booths with one of his partners, Kerry Carter, an ex-NFL running back who is still playing in Canada. Towering over most of the real geeks present, Tafoya and Carter were happy to stop and talk about Viva! Vision, a company formed in a unique manner and with a unique purpose. Over several phone and email interviews and some research we have a fuller picture of Viva! and what we think its purpose is: Though Tafoya and co. may not exactly agree with this definition, we see Viva! Vision as not a true app development company but instead an “app enabler.”

What do we mean by that? In Viva! Vision’s case it means that Tafoya and his partners aren’t doing any of the actual coding of apps but instead are bringing to the table their ability to bring people to the table — on one hand, corralling talented technology outsourcing firms to help develop cool, custom apps, and on the other hand bringing in athletes, entertainers and other celebrities who want to maximize their personal brand via online channels. How did this all get started and where might it end up? We’ll need more than a short blog post to tell you.

Next: From the NFL cut line to the command line

Pages: 1 2 3 4

Filed Under: Apps, AT&T, Athlete to Follow, NFL, Super Bowl Tagged With: , , ,

United Way Seeks to Leverage NFL’s Social Media Strength

February 20, 2012 by

The United Way, one of the largest charities in the United States is partnering with the NFL in an effort to leverage the football league’s huge social presence into heightened awareness of the charity and what it does.

The two entities are already long term partners, having worked together for almost four decades and it has been a common sight during NFL broadcasts to see one star or another stand up and talk about how he is working with the charity for the good of the community.

In addition players volunteer to work in the community one day a week performing a number of services including encouraging kids to stay in school, serving meals to the elderly, and helping to build homes for low-income families.

Now the United Way is seeking to take the relationship to another level, as the NFL’s success has helped it establish itself as a huge presence not just on the airwaves but also online and in a variety of social media outlets.
The charity is currently hiring people that it will call player promoters, and they will be assigned to promote specific NFL players, according to a piece in Mashable.

The NFL Player Promoter program will couple a promoter with a player in an effort to drive increased traffic to that player’s specific social media accounts. The players’ accounts will of course have a United Way message and so it will enable the charity to reach additional fans. According to Mashable the NFL has 4.6 million Facebook friends and 2 million Twitter followers.

Of course some players also have significant following in one or both of these places as well. Steelers’ Troy Polamalu has 2 million Facebook fans and 400,000 following him on Twitter, while Chad Ochocinco has a combined following of over 5 million, according to FanPagelist.com

However it should be noted that not all are United Way spokesmen. It is interesting to look at who are the most recommended accounts to follow on Twitter by CBS and to see how heavily followed some of the analyst and news sites are as well.

I believe that we will start seeing a fight in the future for additional partnerships, both charity ones such as the United Way as well as advertising ones in not only the NFL but in all major sports. Social media is an excellent way to reach fans, especially ones on the go, and it will be interesting to see how the leagues manage to monetize this trend.

Filed Under: Athlete to Follow, CBS Sports, Facebook, Mashable, NFL, NFL Network, Social Media, Twitter Tagged With: , , ,

Verizon Used Cisco Gear for Super Bowl Wi-Fi Network

February 15, 2012 by

Cisco Sports and Entertainment Solutions Group SVP and GM David Holland

Nobody’s talking yet about how much traffic it carried, but from a recent Cisco blog post we learned that Verizon’s Wi-Fi network used inside Lucas Oil Stadium for Super Bowl XLVI was a Cisco Connected Stadium deployment.

David Holland, the Sports and Entertainment Solutions Group SVP and GM at Cisco, revealed the partnership Tuesday in a company blog post where he claimed that the Super Bowl was the first time fans had used an in-stadium Wi-Fi network for the big game. Cisco representatives, however, declined to say just how well that network was used during the Giants’ win over the Patriots. If Verizon ever credited Cisco for being the gear behind the Wi-Fi network at the stadium, we haven’t seen it.

Verizon has also remained mum on just how much traffic traversed its in-stadium Wi-Fi network for the big game. In its follow-on press release Verizon did note that its own customers used “2.75 times more data than last year’s Super Bowl in Dallas and 4.5 times more data than a regular-season game at the stadium,” but without hard numbers it’s hard for us to judge how big a deal that really was.

Verizon did note that other cellular customers, and not just Verizon customers, were able to use the in-stadium Wi-Fi network during the game. And neither Sprint nor T-Mobile has yet to reveal any discrete traffic numbers from the game, unlike AT&T which provided a very detailed description of the cellular traffic its customers generated.

So the question of “how much wireless data did Super Bowl fans really use” remains unanswered. But as Holland said in his blog, it’s a practice that will quickly go from being unique to mainstream:

Most importantly it shows that this is headed mainstream, and a tipping point has been reached. Just as people walk into an airport today and expect to be connected to a Wi-Fi network, so fans in stadiums around the world are beginning to look for and demand the same thing.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, Cisco, NFL, NFL Mobile, Sprint, Super Bowl, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi Tagged With: , , ,

Does Cisco Have the Inside Sponsor Track for Niners’ New Stadium?

February 9, 2012 by

Fair warning: This is all conjecture, and not based on any interviews or inside information. But based on some cognizant observations as well as just sheer geography, it is our guess that networking giant Cisco might have the inside sponsorship track for the new football stadium being considered for the San Francisco 49ers.

Now with $200 million in NFL money in hand, it appears that the Niners’ planned move south to the Silicon Valley burb of Santa Clara is as close to a done deal as possible. For the moment, our question is, what corporate name will grace the concourses of the soon-to-be-built temple of football from among the many choices in cash-rich Silicon Valley?

At the top of the guess list you can put Cisco, whose main corporate campus lies just a few blocks down Tasman Drive from the new stadium site. Though Cisco’s historic bent has been to pursue sponsorship of a new baseball stadium for the Oakland A’s (first a failed attempt to build one in the East Bay town of Fremont, and now with hopeful plans for a new stadium in San Jose), the company’s Connected Stadium business would have some serious egg on its face if it couldn’t win the big deal just down the street. But we haven’t heard any rumors that Cisco is even the front runner, so which other companies might be in the race?

How about cash-rich Apple, which has nearly $100 billion stuffing its corporate wallet, or nearby search king Google? Though neither company has a history of sports sponsorships a “Google Stadium” or an “Apple Field” could be an international jewel of a marketing vehicle, acting as a base for either company to demonstrate devices, applications and other innovations in a setting that would regularly draw lots of foot traffic as well as national media attention.

Other candidates could include Oracle, whose leader Larry Ellison has been more involved than any other Silicon Valley in sports sponsorship — both via Oracle’s existing name sponsorship of Oakland’s Oracle Arena, home of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, and in Ellison’s out-front leadership in bringing the America’s Cup boat race to San Francisco Bay. And how about the idea of “Facebook Field,” a place where fans could “like” just by showing up. With a huge IPO on the way, Facebook might want to use some of that cash to show up its older Silicon Valley neighbors by sponsoring the Niners’ new home.

What’s your guess? Chime in via the comments. Gratuitous new-stadium video follows.

Filed Under: Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Google, NFL Tagged With: , ,
« Previous Page
Next Page »