The perfect sports video does not exi...

An ode to Pavlov's Dog, Gladiator and the internet's best sports video series.

Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we breakdown the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Eben leads off this week…

The Oregon football team is undefeated and ranked No. 1 in the nation, but the Ducks have caught my eye recently for something else.

Every week, the athletic department’s video team releases a cinematic recap of the Ducks’ most-recent game. They’re cut with behind-the-scenes clips from team meetings, audio from the coaches’ headsets and video shot from the sidelines. Each has a narrative arc, centered around whatever head coach Dan Lanning is using that week for motivation.

And they’re great. The most recent involves Pavlov's Dog, 90s hip-hop group House of Pain, and a tradition at Wisconsin's Camp Randall Stadium that's meant to intimidate visitors. Here’s a condensed version 👇

This is cool! We're entering a new golden era of sports shoulder programming. There are cameras everywhere, and teams/leagues/athletes finally seem to understand the assignment. Fans want access. They want to know what happens on the team bus, in the pre-game meetings, and in the athletes’ homes. They want to see a different side of the people they root for.  

But understanding that and doing it effectively are two very different things. There's a camera on pretty much everything happening at Deion's Colorado Buffaloes program, but it's not condensed, edited or curated like what Oregon is doing. I struggle to engage with it.

Athletes sometimes strike gold, too. I’ve written previously about Giannis Antetokounmpo live-streaming his trip to Chick-Fil-A with the NBA Championship trophy back in 2021. Hours after dropping 50 points in the deciding Game 6, he orders 50 chicken nuggets—“not 51, not 49.” The look on the order-taker’s face when he tells her 150,000 people are watching her on Instagram live is amazing.

But for every one of those, there’s a whole bunch of silly dances, hastily put-together docuseries and bad live streams (Ja Morant, c’mon).  

To me, the best pieces of sports content are short, to the point, and revealing. I've always loved this 53-second clip from 2016, when UFC president Dana White has to tell Daniel Cormier that his title fight against rival Jon Jones is off because Jones failed another drug test. Look at how quickly he breaks down 👇

Oregon, for my money, is doing this better than anyone else right now. Two weeks ago, I learned that the play call for a pass to 310-pound freshman lineman Gernorris Wilson is “G-Baby! G-Baby! G-Baby!” And the sideline goes nuts when G-Baby scored a touchdown against Maryland.

Here's another example, from the Ducks’ road win over defending-champion Michigan. Lanning uses a famous scene from Gladiator to help his players manifest a future where Wolverines fans leave the stadium early. The video shows the point in the game where it all clicked—Lanning calls a timeout just to let his players savor the moment 👇

It's hard not to root for Lanning. In an era where coaches and (finally) players switch schools freely for a bigger a check, the 38-year-old has proved surprisingly sticky at Oregon. He was an early candidate to replace Nick Saban at Alabama last off-season, but made a point of publicly taking himself out of the running. Even that announcement came with a catchy video from the athletic department, with the tagline: “If you’re scared your coach is leaving… then come play for us.” (He’s now under contract through 2031, thanks to a $9.4 million extension).

Oregon is also not nearly as dominant financially as many fans might think. It has flashy uniforms—one of many benefits from a tight relationship with Nike founder and alum Phil Knight—and it has won a lot of football games in the past decade, but neither confers blueblood status. The Ducks athletics budget ranked 27th among all public schools last year, according to Sportico's database, sandwiched between Minnesota and Arizona. Its football tickets sales were 20th.

Oregon’s social media team, though? Club Sportico has them ranked No. 1.

tl;dr: 🦆📹🏆

P.S. We’re now on Bluesky, posting our favorite videos!

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🚨🚨🚨🚨 FIRST CLUB SPORTICO EVENT 🚨🚨🚨🚨

Folks, we’re hosting our first Club Sportico members event in New York City in two weeks. Join us on Thursday, Dec. 5 in PMC’s ground floor studio. We’ll have a live Sporticast recording, a live Business Behind the Game with a former athlete (TBA), plus some games and contests. Revelry! Networking! What else do you need!? Our headcount is capped so sign up soon if you’re interested!

Its free for paid Club Sportico members, $20 for those who aren’t. Register here 👇

https://www.sporticolive.com/clubsportico/7211047

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Now turning it over to Jacob for additional thoughts on LeBron’s latest announcement, Madden’s curious decision, and more for our favorite people, Club Sportico’s paid members…

Story of the Week 💸: A cottage tech industry popped up in the early days of college NIL, including NFT supporter platforms, sponsorship marketplaces, player valuation tools. It’s long been a question of what would happen to those startups as players came to be paid directly by schools in some sort of revised system. We’re starting to get a taste of that, as Daniel Libit reported in this story on Opendorse going through another round of layoffs.

Story of the Week (Non-Sportico Division) 🏀: For better or worse (likely worse), transgender athletes are about to become a huge point of debate—even if it’s actually way down the list of safety risks for youth competitors. Anyway, The Washington Post found the former community college basketball player, now 62, who was featured in nearly $40 million worth of ads during the campaign season, including airings during football games and the World Series. Her story brings some perspective to the rhetoric.

What Made Me Laugh 🤡: I’ve become an unabashed women’s basketball fan these last few years, in large part because the growing WNBA offers moments of humanity that you just don’t get as often in the overly corporatized, traditional men’s sports world. Like a star player asking her incoming coach about how he will incorporate his style of play with the athletes already on the roster—in the middle of his introductory press conference (video posted by Meghan Hall). ⬇️