🪪 Meet the College Student Who Fixed the NFL Draft

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I spent last night taking in the NFL Draft in my hometown, and as a sports marketer, only one thing stood out to me.

The NFL is the greatest storyteller of all time.

For what other reason would you cram 250,000 people into a town of just over 100,000? More on that at the end.

In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: Meet the College Student Who Fixed the NFL Draft

📉 Biggest Loser: Nike Made the Most High-Tech Shoe Ever, Then They Got Banned

🏆 Winner’s Circle: The (Forgotten) Reason Hockey Is the Only Sport With 3 Periods

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🗞 The Big Story

This college student might have just solved the biggest problem in professional sports with a single DM — let me explain.

Background: In 2008, Adam Gold was watching his favorite team, the St. Louis Blues, when he noticed something about his fandom that he didn’t like:

He was rooting for them to lose.

Unfortunately, cheering against your favorite team isn’t all that uncommon in American sports, since almost every major professional league awards teams with a better draft pick the more games they lose.

However, this practice of “tanking” also leads to large percentages of teams in every league becoming virtually unwatchable by the end of every season.

For example, after Week 14 of last year’s NFL season, 22% of the league had already been eliminated from playoff contention, meaning for the final two months of the season, almost a quarter of the league’s teams were incentivized to lose to get a better draft pick.

But what if there was a better way to design a draft system so that teams were still trying to win games even after they had been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs?

Well, that’s what Adam Gold set out to create with the Gold Plan.

In 2012, while Adam was a Ph.D student at the University of Missouri, he presented his idea for a new draft system at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

The way it works is once a team is mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, they immediately start earning what he calls “draft order points” for all remaining games in the season:

• 3 Points - Win in regulation

• 2 Points - Win in overtime

• 1 Point - Loss in overtime

• 0 Points - loss in regulation

Then, at the end of the regular season, the eliminated team with the most “draft order points” is awarded the first overall pick in the upcoming draft.

Idea in Practice: While this idea might sound far-fetched, Adam was actually DM’d on Instagram by an executive at the Professional Women’s Hockey League at the beginning of 2024 to make their league the first to implement his plan.

And it worked.

Instead of teams tanking at the end of the season to increase their chances at the No. 1 overall pick, every team was playing like they had something on the line.

The PWHL even added their own wrinkle that awards the second-overall pick to the team that actually has the worst record, so genuinely bad teams aren’t totally disadvantaged by this new plan.

And honestly, after learning more about it, I think every league should consider adding it ASAP.

📉 Biggest Loser

This is the most high-tech shoe ever created, but not in the way you might think.

Running Shoes: For as long as running shoes have been around, the companies that design them have all tried to accomplish the same thing:

Make them as light as possible.

Traditionally, this was done by limiting the thickness of the middle part called the midsole, because the material used was often the heaviest piece of the whole shoe.

However, in 2019, that all changed with one race.

Record-Breaker: In October of that year, Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge did something that no human had ever done before: he ran a marathon in under two hours.

For context, that meant he ran at over 13 MPH the entire time, something that most people can’t even do for a few seconds.

However, immediately after his record-breaking time, fans started pointing out that the shoes he was wearing may have given him an unfair advantage.

The Controversy: During his run, Eliud was wearing a prototype of the not yet released Nike Alphaflys. These shoes drew so much controversy because, unlike traditional running shoes, which were designed to be as thin as possible, Nike had designed a shoe with a super-thick midsole.

The advantage of this design was that Nike could fit three carbon-fiber plates into the shoe, which act as a sort of spring when someone is running, snapping back into place after every stride and helping propel the runner forward.

Nike used a special kind of ultra-lightweight foam for the midsole, most commonly found in airplane insulation, so that the thicker shoe wouldn’t be noticeably heavier. However, this combination of lightweight cushioning and performance caused runners around the world to question whether these shoes should even be legal.

And the science backed them up.

According to Nike’s own studies, the Alphafly helped runners increase their speed by over 3%, which in the competitive running world can be the difference between first and last place.

After these shoes were released, professional marathon times saw their most significant improvement in over 50 years, begging the question:

Should these shoes be banned?

Gaining Clarity: When the Alphaflys were released in 2019, World Athletics didn’t have a good definition of which shoes were legal or illegal; all they said was that they “couldn’t provide an unfair advantage.”

But after the Alphaflys hit the market, it was clear that there would need to be more specific language around what is or isn’t allowed, so World Athletics modified their rules and implemented a 40mm height limit for the foam in the midsole and said shoes can’t have more than one carbon fiber plate.

These rules were clearly targeted at Nike and required them to modify their original, record-breaking design.

I guess there is such a thing as “too good.”

🏆 Winner’s Circle

Why is hockey the only sport with three periods?

Back in Time: Well, to answer that, we have to go back to 1910, a full seven years before the NHL was even founded.

See, before the National Hockey League was formed, there was a small league up in Canada called the Pacific Coast Hockey Association.

It was started by two brothers, Frank and Lester Patrick, who risked their family’s lumber fortune to start this new league, which only had three teams:

• New Westminster Royals

• Victoria Senators

• Vancouver Millionaires

Still, wanting to make a name for themselves, the Patrick brothers quickly began experimenting with various innovations that still exist in the sport today.

For example, the brothers are credited with being the first to introduce:

• Blue lines

• Goal creases

• Penalty shots

• Jersey numbers

• Playoffs

• Forward pass

Today, the NHL rule book contains at least 22 different rules that were first introduced by the Patrick brothers all the way back in the early 1900s.

However, maybe the most overlooked impact they had on the game has to do with why hockey is the only sport to have three periods.

The Problem: Before 1910, hockey was played like every other sport in the sense that it was split into two 30-minute halves. This left one intermission for a crew armed with shovels and hand flooders to get the ice ready for the second half.

The only problem was that skating on the same ice for 30 straight minutes caused it to melt and get uneven fast. In fact, players would often lose the puck in the ice at the end of each half due to the rough conditions.

The Solution: So the Patrick brothers had the idea to split their 60-minute games into three, 20-minute periods instead, giving the rink crew an extra intermission to fix the ice.

Not only was their idea a massive success on the ice, but it was wildly successful off it too, as fans suddenly had an extra break to spend money at concessions, skyrocketing revenue for teams in the league.

And even though the brother’s Pacific Coast Hockey Association would fail 14 years later, in 1924, it’s impossible to watch a hockey game today and not see the impact they’ve had on the game.

⏱️ In Other News

• Maybe athletes aren’t getting paid after all…

• Portland’s (genius) plan to bring an MLB team to town

• The first victim of Trump’s tariffs

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👋🏻 Happy Friday!

We discussed it in last week’s newsletter, but the biggest advantage the NFL has in taking the draft on the road isn’t ticket revenue, or media rights deals — it’s about creating a three-day commercial for some of the league’s least commercialized markets.

It’s why a lot of time during this weekend’s broadcast will be spent on bike rides and cheese.

Places like Green Bay, Kansas City, and Pittsburgh will never host a Super Bowl, but that doesn’t mean the NFL can’t show them off.