In this week's P.O. Box:
A recap from L.A.
Content roundup: Week 2 prep
On Tap: Week 2 Cram & ShipCast
Book Club: Playworld
It’s been a week now since my trip out to L.A. to help YouTube with their pregame broadcast for the Friday Night Football game in Brazil, which drew a global audience of over 17.3 million viewers.
I’ve received lots of questions about the experience (and also selfishly would like to document some more of it so I don’t forget), so here’s a combo FAQ/diary…
😺 How did this happen?
Alex Piper, who is YouTube’s Executive Producer of Sports and Creator Content, reached out to me through Steph Miller in June (they play in some dynasty leagues together!). I initially thought I was getting catfished (he didn’t have his official Google email yet) and I nearly brushed him off when asked if I would hop on a call to learn more about an “opportunity.” Because I thought I was getting catfished, I asked if he could give me more details over email first (whoops). We eventually got on a call and he explained what was happening and that he wanted me to be the fantasy analyst for the pregame show. He then asked me to pitch him a bunch of ideas for segments, so I sent him like 10 different ideas. I got the gig.
📺 What about the podcast you hosted on your channel?
Initially the plan was for me to monitor the live chat during the pregame show and flag a few questions to toss to Derek Carr, Brandon Marshall, and Tyrann Mathieu in real time. That plan later got scrapped, but we were still looking for questions that we could use on the Friday show. Alex suggested that I host a stream on my channel on Thursday that we could mine for questions. Once again, it sounded way too good to be true…and yet that is exactly what happened.
ICYMI, here’s the roundtable podcast I got to host from the NFL studios on my channel with those guys. I thought it went really well. I wish we could have gone another 45 minutes as everyone got more and more comfortable as we went, but we were on a time crunch. My favorite part was this very funny “fantasy” story from Derek:
🎙 NFL studios? I thought you said YouTube…
Anyone else here have 20% Bhayshul Tuten?
YouTube used the NFL studios in Inglewood, Calif. (right next to SoFi stadium) for the broadcast. We were in the same studio that they shoot “NFL Total Access” and “NFL GameDay” in. It is a massive space and looked very cool decked out in the YouTube red:
Yes, that is a lot of rugs. It is for acoustics