OTE offers the world’s most talented basketball players a better pathway to becoming professional athletes.
Source: Overtime Elite – Media Assets | A Transformative New Sports League
In 2017 Tom Brady and his agent began the move towards launching the Pac Pro Football League. Since I cover the sneaker industry, the story was intriguing because adidas had signed on to be the league sponsor. Tom Brady was involved, so what could go wrong? I wrote a post discussing the narrative around startup sports leagues for high school level athletes:
adidas Subverts Nike and Under Armour in Sponsoring the Pac Pro Football League
In this post, I explained that adidas had subverted Nike and Under Armour. My logic was rooted in grassroots basketball. That post written in 2018 ignored my own experience in launching basically what Overtime is getting ready to attempt with their basketball league. When I ran Center Court Basketball I had challenges because I was making my own sneakers and uniforms, but at the same time, in 2004 no one else was really covering high school basketball in the same manner that I was.
Above is a video from 06-07 from my All-American camp. Please forgive the grainy video, but I dug into an old hard-drive to post this to YouTube. Overtime isn’t posting from an old hard-drive. Overtime was a part of adidas’ incubator and the YouTube and Twitter are extremely active with cameras in every gym of every major prep prospect. Their YouTube has 2.1 Million subscribers and the people working on the project for the Overtime Elite League is a “Who’s Who” of basketball.
This is not a one man operation functioning as a grassroots business trying to bring attention to both the players and a start-up sneaker company. This is a machine that already has athletes committing to play in the startup league:
Why Will This Be Difficult?
Maybe I’m wrong, but when I take a moment to visit the Pac Pro website, it’s no longer active. There isn’t anywhere to follow up on what’s happening with the league. The idea is silent. Football is a difficult sport, however. There are far too many moving parts and CTE is a constant in the discussion of how the game is played. Covid didn’t help, but the SEC allowing players to capitalize on their names and likeness has basically diminished the ability for that league to truly exert itself. Football isn’t a digital chunk sport.
In 2017 the Breaking2 event changed the world in my opinion. It verified my digital chunk concept and also proved that a captive crowd would sit in front of a computer for longer than a chunk. Digital chunks is a discussion created by an Ivy league professor who was discussing the problem with students at college who can’t work for longer than 10-15 minute spurts before picking up their Playstation controllers or deviating to social media via their phones. I added that the NBA viewership was down because of digital chunks in sports and that the NBA and other sports are suffering because leagues weren’t monitoring streaming platforms and the viewership of highlights.
Above is a rendering of the Overtime Facility. When I ran CCB my biggest issue was always where I would host my camps. I had to constantly broker deals and work out relationships to get gym time. The NBA bubble in 2020, I’m certain, was the confirmation needed by Overtime to move forward with this idea. My second issue was funding. Overtime recently raised an 80 million dollar funding round that included investors like Drake and Jeff Bezos… and that second name is where the company has a real chance of succeeding. Amazon streaming services and their Firestick along with Ovetime’s YouTube and IG viewership gives the company the ability to harness ad revenue. Bezos gives the league a chance to feature full length games and more developed content. Throw in an adidas sponsorship and while I say there is difficulty… Their only issue will be convincing a player that has just learned that the Supreme Court is on the side of the athlete. That’s a big hurdle and a new wrinkle. It will be interesting to watch how this plays out.