🔊 The NFL’s Biggest Problem (That Nobody’s Taking About)

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🗞 The Big Story: This New Cleat is Designed to Prevent Knee Injuries

📉 Biggest Loser: The NFL’s Biggest Problem (That Nobody’s Taking About)

🏆 Winner’s Circle: How a Smaller Stadium Equals More Profits

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🗞 The Big Story

These cleats could help prevent the NFL’s most common injury, so why is nobody talking about them?

Background: 10 years ago, a college freshman named Jack Rasmussen was watching a game with his dad when they saw something that’s all too common in football:

A player tearing their ACL.

That’s when the two had the idea to create a cleat to help prevent this. There was just one problem:

Jack knew nothing about engineering.

Version One: After dropping out of college and spending a year building a prototype in his parent’s garage, Jack finally had a product that he could start testing.

So he took it to multiple universities across the country where they tested the cleat design on machines and athletes, and they all found the same thing:

Jack’s idea worked.

How it works: The concept for these cleats is simple. Instead of having studs that are meant to stick into the ground and put unnecessary pressure on an athlete’s knee as they’re trying to turn, Caddix cleats have patented “SmartStuds” that can flex in any direction as an athlete is cutting and turning without losing any speed.

The movement of these studs helps reduce:

• The force put on a player’s knee

• The risk of severe, non-contact knee injuries

So far, Jack has raised around $4.5 million, with a majority coming from former Ravens tight ends Todd Heap and Dennis Pitta.

The company just delivered its first release of:

• 3,000 women’s soccer and lacrosse cleats ($250)

• 3,000 men’s football and lacrosse cleats ($225)

And while Joe Flacco has already been wearing a pair for every practice and game so far this season, the NFL says it needs to do its own testing before allowing every player in the league to wear a pair.

📉 Biggest Loser

The NFL has a major problem that no one is talking about, but there’s already a rule change being tested that could fix it.

Background: The average length of an NFL game is around 3 hours and 10 minutes, which is longer than any other professional sport.

This accounts for an average of 50 minutes of commercial time and just 18 minutes of live action, which makes up less than 10% of the entire broadcast.

Now, the NFL and its networks obviously don’t mind the extra time to sell advertising, but if you look at other sports, like baseball, there might come a time where football games get too long.

So what’s the solution?

Well, one is already being tested in the spring football leagues, and I’d love to see it added to the NFL.

The UFL’s Strategy: The UFL just finished a season in which it allowed up to eight players on each side of the ball to wear helmets with speakers so they could also hear the play calls.

This is obviously different from the NFL, which only allows the quarterback and one defensive player to have a speaker in their helmet. And in the NFL, that speaker is cut off at 14 seconds on the play clock.

Meanwhile, the UFL allowed play callers to talk to all eight of their players for the entire duration of the play clock (a rule which they took from the XFL, which took things a step further and just gave every player on the field access to a speaker in their helmet). 

Now, the results of this test in the UFL were games that lasted less than three hours but without a drop off in the total number of plays since teams could now run each play more efficiently and by taking fewer delay of game penalties, time outs, and huddles.

But if I’ve learned anything about the NFL, it’s that they’d sooner take away the speaker helmets before letting more players on the field wear them.

🏆 Winner’s Circle

How is this 12,000-seat stadium making more money than a venue 4x its size?

Well, there is a reason, and it actually has nothing to do with location…

Background: Northwestern University will play at this temporary lake-side field for the next two seasons as its actual stadium, Ryan Field, is being rebuilt as part of an $800M project.

The Wildcats will only play five of their seven home games here this year, but each one will reportedly make them more money than games played at the old Ryan Field last year.

Even though this current field only holds 12,000 fans, compared to Ryan Field’s old capacity of 47,000. So what’s the difference?

Premium Seats: Ryan Field, which was originally opened in 1926, had only around 500 premium seats; this new temporary stadium has double that number.

This is important for the university because they profit around $450 per season ticket on these premium sections, which cost fans $1300 for five games or $600-$700 for one game.

These tickets are all-you-can-eat and drink and now include the sale of in-venue alcohol, which wasn’t allowed at Northwestern games until this year.

The university has already said that the new 35,000-seat Ryan Field will feature more than 1,000 premium seat options, allowing the program to start cashing in even more.

⏱ In Other News

• RIP, Colts fans.

• Introducing the sports bar that has better seats than inside the stadium.

• Has player empowerment gone “too far?”

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👋 Happy Friday!

A cool full circle for me as a creator just happened. A few months back, I was approached by a brand called Vestible to promote their unique offering of investing in an NFL athlete.

One of the videos I made for them went viral (and not just on TikTok), resulting in an 800% increase in app usage. And just recently, Baron Browning’s first offering closed!

• Raised $656,730

• Sold 65,673 shares ($10 each, minimum of 10 shares)

• Browning received 80% or $525,384 of his IPO

They’re not paying me to say this, but that’s pretty cool.