📉 Why the NFL (Purposely) Loses Millions on the Draft

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The NFL Draft is coming to my backyard, and even though plenty of homes are still available for rent, visitors will likely be paying over $400 per night each.

Luckily, my mom doesn’t charge me to sleep in my childhood bedroom (yet).

In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: Why the NFL (Purposely) Loses Millions on the Draft

📉 Biggest Loser: The Most Innovative Baseball Ever Created

🏆 Winner’s Circle: This Arm Sleeve Could Solve Baseball’s Biggest Problem

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🗞 The Big Story

The NFL is purposely missing out on millions of dollars with this year’s Draft, but it’s actually all part of the league’s much larger plan — let’s break it down.

On The Move: Ever since the NFL started rotating host cities for the Draft in 2015, in-person attendance at the event has only continued to grow. What was once limited to the less than 6,000-seat capacity of Radio City Music Hall has now grown to as high as 700,000 people attending the event every year.

This is especially impressive when you consider the fact that an NFL team’s second largest revenue source is ticket sales, with teams raking in an average of $3 billion per season.

So, you might expect the league to cash in this year with the estimated 250,000 fans expected to travel to Green Bay, Wisconsin, to attend the draft festivities — but you’d be wrong.

Made-For-TV: The truth of the NFL Draft is that the league actually doesn’t make a single penny from ticket sales during the event. All general admission tickets are free, highlighting the league’s true goal for the annual event.

See, putting the draft in football strongholds like:

• Kansas City (2023)

• Detroit (2024)

• Green Bay (2025)

• Pittsburgh (2026)

It’s an intentional effort on the league’s part to increase fan interest outside of the football season.

It’s why you can expect the TV broadcast to rely heavily on the sort of “small town” aspects that make Green Bay such a unique home to an NFL franchise, from having the red carpet on Lambeau’s sideline to recreating the Packers’ iconic training camp bike rides during Saturday’s broadcast.

The NFL’s goal is to make the TV broadcast of what would otherwise be a pretty boring event as interesting as possible by leaning into some of the sport’s most unique and passionate cities.

To read more about how a town of just 105,000 is preparing for over twice as many visitors, check out Ben Fischer’s piece in the Sports Business Journal.

📉 Biggest Loser

This is the most innovative baseball ever created, but not in the way you might think.

Background: Starting in 2019, the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball, an independent league on the East Coast, began testing new technology and rule changes in partnership with Major League Baseball.

The league’s first big test was in 2019, when they became the first pro baseball league in the country to use an Automated Ball-Strike system. In fact, in their 2019 All-Star Game, the league even tested having the computer system call balls and strikes on every pitch.

The Atlantic League was also the first to pilot rule changes that eventually made it to the big leagues:

• Limiting defensive shifts

• Adding “ghost runners” in extra innings

• Increasing the size of bases

They also tried some failed rule changes that never made it past the testing stages, such as:

• Moving the mound back 12 inches

• Letting players steal first based on a wild pitch

However, one innovation that executives at the Atlantic League are currently most excited about has to do with the new baseballs they’re rolling out this year.

It Takes A Lot of Balls: It’s no secret that during a given season, a professional baseball team goes through a lot of baseballs. The Atlantic League says that each team goes through around 8,000 balls every season.

Across all 10 teams, that’s 80,000 baseballs the league uses every year, with a lot of those being lost to foul balls that end up in the hands of fans.

But what if there was a way for teams to make money on those lost baseballs?

QR Code Baseballs: That’s the idea league president Rick White had after the league started sourcing its own balls in 2022. This gave them the power to add custom QR codes to every baseball for every team before the start of the season.

Teams can use these QR codes to reward fans for collecting foul balls, and potentially sell sponsorship tie-ins that could change daily, or even within a game.

One club has already sold its QR code to a local law firm, which is hoping to build its identity and website traffic, but the possibilities for custom promotions are endless.

🏆 Winner’s Circle

This arm sleeve helps prevent the most common injury in baseball, so why is nobody talking about it?

The Issue: 10 years ago, a former JUCO baseball player named Jason Colleran was working at his sports performance facility in Atlanta when he started noticing a disturbing pattern:

More and more players were coming to him with arm pain.

And this problem was personal to Jason since his own career was cut short due to overuse and arm pain that he had to deal with starting at the age of 11.

However, the more that athletes at every level came to him with the same problem, the more he realized that there wasn’t a good way to prevent these types of overuse injuries.

The Idea: So, in 2015, Jason borrowed an industrial sewing machine and started working on and testing early prototypes for an arm sleeve that would help take the stress off an athlete's arm when they needed it most.

As Jason points out, a baseball player’s elbow and shoulder are weakest and at the greatest risk of injury in this position (below). And as athletes have started focusing their training to throw harder and harder, their bodies haven’t been able to keep up.

It’s why we’ve seen such a sharp increase in Tommy John surgeries at the MLB level over the past 10 years, and why 50% of youth players now report some kind of elbow or shoulder pain while throwing.

The Solution: Jason’s design works by using a web of high-performance polymers that are built into an arm sleeve to provide extra support around an athlete's elbow and shoulder without restricting their movement.

You can think of it like an extra layer of muscle that’s there to absorb up to 30% of the stress around your elbow and shoulder while you throw; the only difference is this “muscle” doesn’t get tired from overuse.

Today, the Kinetic Arm has multiple patents and is backed by countless studies, with doctors recommending it for players at all levels across the country.

Shohei Ohtani was even rumored to be wearing during his recovery from Tommy John.

The only reason you might not have heard about this product specifically is that Jason hasn’t spent any money on:

• Sponsorships

• NIL deals

• Licensing agreements

Meaning every athlete you see wearing one of these things is doing it because they genuinely believe it works.

Talk about incredible marketing.

📚 Required Reading

If you’re looking for a fun read to stay up to date with business & tech, here’s a newsletter I’ve really enjoyed reading recently 👇

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👋🏻 Happy Friday!

I said last week that we’d dig a bit more into the Masters’ social strategy, so I wanted to give you some quick thoughts for your next marketing quarterly:

1. @TheMasters on Instagram posted over 30 times on Sunday, in a social environment where most content is delivered via recommendation algorithms, there is no such thing as “too much.”

2. Every piece of content was created with somebody specific in mind.

   1. Golf fanatic? Here is every shot Rory McIlroy hit in the final round.

   2. Only here for the story? They have something for you. 

   3. Like a bit of pomp and circumstance, here’s something you might like.

3. Platforms are differentiated communication channels; use them as such. Twitter serves a much different purpose for the Masters (live updates) than Instagram (brand and narrative building). Identify ahead of time which platform does what for your brand.

As always, hats off to the Masters’ team — they are truly the best in the business.