As mentioned late last week, I was asked to be part of the , a group of online media who will put our fantasy football wits against one another for blogger supremacy. The league is sponsored by Proctor and Gamble (P&G for short) who — FULL DISCLOSURE — are giving us a ton of swag, some of which we’ll be sharing with you, dear reader, during the season.
The winner of our league will be going to the Super Bowl on P&G’s dime — FULL DISCLOSURE — and that’s pretty awesome.
With that, we went up to the NFL offices in New York last week to do our draft in their conference room. See:
With that, I’m happy to have on the show (audio link at the bottom of this post). Brian is the lead voice behind The Jets Blog, covering the NYJ for SNY. We talked about our experience up in New York…and no, it’s not about who we picked in our fantasy drafts.
The folks at Taylor PR (and Don from HHR who is now one of their pitchmen) set up a great day for us that wasn’t just about fantasy football and what the NFL.com platform has to offer, but more about getting our faces in front of those inside the NFL. We met with those in charge of grading officials. We met with marketing people and .com people and fantasy gaming people. Most importantly for a bunch of bloggers, we met with the PR staff.
, and a few other members of the staff took the time to talk with us about not only what we do, but how what we do can be enhanced by the league. This came down to one major topic: embeddable video. For me, it’s imperative to have video content I can use and trust won’t be excommunicated from the internet in a few hours. For Bassett, it’s less important (we discuss our differences on this episode).
We tried to explain how allowing sites to embed video can actually help the league (something I liken during this show to the government legalizing drugs in order to regulate the quality and turn a profit). The biggest pullout from the conversation may be the simple fact that we had it at all. Twelve online writers sat with the PR staff of the NFL to talk about how to make our relationship more beneficial for both sides. THE NFL. This is a progressive — and greatly appreciated — move by the league. Let’s hope we’re invited back every year.
Brian and I run down a list of some of the highlights of the day, including Aiello’s chuckle when Dan Shanoff mentioned he writes TimTeblog.com and Josh Zerkle trying on every single helmet on the table. Oh…and they had a mini hot dog cart. It was simply too good to be true.
While we had Brian on, we took some time to talk about the Jets and the Darrelle Revis holdout situation and how Tom Brady hates the Jets.
Thanks to Brian and to you. And a huge thank you to Taylor PR, P&G and the NFL. There will be more on this during the season…you can bet on it. (Full disclosure).
(Note: I stole this right from The Jets Blog) If you would like to learn more about the league or the league’s writers, here’s some links that will help:
- Dan Shanoff: DanShanoff.com
- Will Brinson: CBSSports.com
- Dan Levy:
- Jerod Morris: MidwestSportsFans.com
- Josh Zerkle: WithLeather.com , KissingSuzyKolber.com
- Kyle Bunch: BlogsWithBalls.com
- Brian Bassett: TheJetsBlog.com
- Steph Stradley: FanHouse.com
- Philip Van Der Vossen: Gunaxin.com
- Diana Klockova: NationalFootballPost.com
- Aaron Schatz: FootballOutsiders.com
- Matt Sebek: JoeSportsFan.com
Thanks for letting me join the double header today! It’s been great to see how Blogs With Balls / Hugging Harold Reynolds have really helped to bridge the gap in making what we do more mainstream with interested advertisers and with the leagues themselves.
Look forward to seeing what those guys can do next!