🏟️ Could L.A. Get a Third NFL Team?

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My favorite part of this whole torpedo bat craze is how obvious the design seems in retrospect.

Baseball has been around for over 200 years, and no one has thought to make the part of the bat where you actually hit the ball wider until now?!

It seems like it shouldn’t have taken an MIT scientist to figure that out.

In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: Meet the Biggest Winner of March Madness: Connor Sports

📉 Biggest Loser: Could L.A. Get a Third NFL Team?

🏆 Winner’s Circle: How a Surfer Turned $5,000 Into Golf’s Best App

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🗞 The Big Story

The most impressive team in March Madness doesn’t actually play basketball, but they’ll still earn millions of dollars this weekend. Let’s break it down.

Background: Since 1996, every Final Four has been played in a football stadium. This means that every year, a new court has to be made specifically for the three games played this upcoming weekend.

But the process of making these courts isn’t as simple as you might think.

That’s because production for this year’s court actually started last October, when Connor Sports, the company responsible for making every March Madness court for the past 19 years, started cutting down dozens of first-grade northern hard maple trees in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

The company, located in a small mining town of just 250 people, almost exclusively sources trees from within a 100-mile radius of its headquarters in Amasa, Michigan, and they specifically seek wood from closer to the center of the log since it’s better for flooring.

A Lengthy Process: This wood is usually delivered green to Connor Sports and then dried outdoors for several months before it’s placed inside one of 12 kilns to remove all remaining moisture.

By January, the wood is ready to be cut and sorted, which typically takes about a week and involves hundreds of workers running two 10-hour shifts for six days straight.

The wood planks are then packaged and shipped to facilities in Ohio or Texas, where the teams of eight will spend the next two months:

• Assembling

• Sanding

• Painting

• Sealing

Once that’s completed, the floors are disassembled and put on drying racks for at least 10 days before they’re eventually shipped to their final destination thousands of miles away.

Here, teams of ten will assemble the court inside the stadium in a matter of four hours. For context, just the Final Four court alone is comprised of 381 panels, weighing 200 pounds each.

Connor Sports, the company responsible for creating these courts, will build around 800 courts this year, most of them for high school gyms and local rec centers. However, they’re also responsible for about 25% of all NBA courts and all 12 March Madness courts for both the Men’s and Women’s Tournaments.

The Payoff: According to the New York Times, these removable courts can cost up to $250,000 each to produce. This means that just from their college basketball business, Connor Sports will make an estimated $3M this month.

I’d say that makes them the real winners of March Madness.

📉 Biggest Loser

Could Los Angeles be getting a third NFL team?

According to a recent study, LA might be the NFL’s best choice for an expansion franchise.

But how is that even possible when there are dozens of other cities across America without a single professional sports team? Let’s break it down…

Criteria: The research firm Windfall just conducted a statistical analysis of the characteristics required to sustain an NFL franchise based on current metro areas, and then they created a list of the top 10 most likely cities the NFL might expand to next.

The three main areas they looked at when picking these cities were:

1. Population

2. Median age

3. Average net worth.

The general idea is that you want to pick large cities with a young population that makes a lot of money.

Early Favorites: Unsurprisingly, this list of criteria made San Diego an obvious choice, given that they just lost an NFL team. Portland and Orlando were also listed since they’re both large cities that currently sustain other professional sports teams but don’t yet have an NFL team.

Austin, TX, was the number one city on this list because it has a young, growing population and almost no competition from existing sports franchises.

However, the most surprising city that came out of this study was actually the second-most likely place to get an expansion franchise, Riverside, CA.

Too Close? Riverside is located almost 70 miles east of SoFi Stadium, which is actually more than the distance between the Commanders and the Ravens stadiums (32 miles).

The Riverside metro area is also home to over 4.5 million people, making it the largest city on this list. Not to mention, the average age of a Riverside resident is under 36 years old, yet on average, they make over $86,000 per year.

But even though Riverside might seem perfect on paper, there’s no way the NFL would ever let this happen. Not only would fans hate it, but there’s no way the Rams or the Chargers want to split local revenue with a third franchise.

🏆 Winner’s Circle

This Venezuelan surfer turned a failed $5,000 experiment into one of the most popular apps in golf; let’s break down how he did it.

Background: In 2006, Jose Torbay moved from his home in Venezuela to the U.S. to earn his MBA at MIT. During his time in school, Jose became obsessed with data, which he used to get a job at the prestigious consulting firm McKinsey.

And for the next three years, it looked to everyone else like Jose was living the American dream, but he wasn’t.

In fact, Jose was miserable at his new job, so in 2012, he decided to quit and use all the money he had saved to go on a three-month surfing vacation in Mexico.

Here, he would surf twice a day while spending the rest of his time trying to solve one of the biggest problems with his second favorite sport: making it easier to calculate golf handicaps.

Democratizing Golf: For as long as golf has existed, the only way golfers could calculate their handicaps was by:

1. Joining a club

2. Physically dropping off their scorecard after every round

3. Waiting for someone else to calculate it for them

This outdated process meant that getting a handicap wasn’t accessible for most casual golfers. So Jose took $5,000 and hired a developer in India to work on an app where golfers could take a picture of their scorecards and get a free handicap calculation almost instantly.

And it worked.

From 2013 to 2020, golfers across the country started downloading Jose's app, mostly through word of mouth, to calculate their handicap for free. But then, in 2020, the app got so big that the USGA—the governing body of golf—said Jose couldn’t keep calculating people’s handicaps for free.

TheGrint: Luckily, over those 7 years, TheGrint had continued to develop even more tools for golfers, including:

• Live leaderboards

• GPS-enabled maps of over 40,000 courses

• Cool stat visualizations for every round

And even though Jose’s original experiment of offering free handicaps no longer exists, TheGrint has officially partnered with the USGA to continue offering handicaps to the millions of avid golfers who use the app every year.

Not a bad return on a $5,000 investment.

📺 Queued Up

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👋🏻 Happy Friday!

For long-time readers of this newsletter, you probably remember the story of Jack Rassmusen and Caddix cleats.

But since publishing that story in September 2024, Jack has made some impressive progress with his patented SmartStud technology, so I sat down with him for an hour last week to talk about it.

The result was one of my favorite YouTube videos I’ve ever made, I hope you check it out!