Next League hoisting up Heisman’s new digital efforts

First, a quick story: Before I was your friendly neighborhood sports tech newsletter writer, I was a college athletics beat reporter who, at one point, voted for the Heisman Trophy. In my two years submitting ballots, I’m proud to say that both of my first-place choices (Alabama’s DeVonta Smith in 2020 and Bryce Young in 2021) went on to win the award.

The Heisman Trophy is the sport immortalized in 45 pounds of cast bronze, given to college football’s best player. But as Jeff Price took over as CEO of the Heisman Trophy Trust late last year, he recognized a need to grow Heisman’s presence across the whole football season. “We started with the premise that the No. 1 thing we could do would be to be a part of the season-long conversation,” Price said.

That work will spread across multiple efforts but stepped into a spotlight earlier this month with “Heisman Hopefuls,” a landing page for the fan vote (which opens Sept. 9) threaded with stats and metrics to help people follow the season’s evolution. “Heisman Hopefuls” is the first of many projects that will come with the help of tech consultancy Next League, which launched as Heisman’s AI and technology services provider with this project.

“Heisman Hopefuls” connects Genius Sports official NCAA data, EA Sports player ratings from its College Football franchise, and a voting system created with the Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Center that will weigh the votes being cast Canadian tech company. Yangaroo is helping to run the ballot process.

Matt Reinhart, Next League’s director of strategy and solutions, oversaw the project that came together in a couple of months, which Reinhart pridefully pointed to as an example of Next League’s capability to build, break and iterate quickly. This project will continue to evolve, he added, to infuse more analytics and develop more features to attract interaction throughout the season.

“This first year we’re trying to just stay on the road and not get too far [out]. We want to execute, get a good product out there, and then build upon that in the future,” Reinhart said. “So the things we’re doing and the experience we’re providing the fans this first year, I’m super happy with.”

Having a modernized and scrollable platform, plus more opportunities to dive into data for fans, is a crucial step to reach a younger group of fans, Price said. Heisman carried out a college football fan survey while Price was still just consulting with the trust, revealing that the group had work to do with millennials, Gen Z and Alpha.

Because media has always been part of the voting process, Heisman also benefited from the eventual content produced by voters (writing about a certain player’s Heisman campaign, the reasons why they voted the way they did, etc.). Now under Price’s guidance, the content arm of Heisman is stocked with a growing crew of people and avenues of outreach (like a new YouTube channel). Even that effort will be bolstered by Next League, Price said.

“I looked at that as a much better investment in buying into Next League as our fractional CTO and our consultant and advisers on all things that we’re going to do,” Price said. “And it’s certainly paying dividends in a very short amount of time.”

Article: Next League hoisting up Heisman’s new digital efforts