Will Taylor

I’m excited to team up with @CoachCBell and @ImproveYourGame to host Elevated Game: The Rise of Athlete-Investor ⛹🏽‍♂️ This dynamic experience will explore how athletes are going from playbooks to portfolios during LA @Techweek_ 🌴 rsvp here: partiful.com/e/8nDYKP6EwaES… 🎟️

What happens when one of the NBA’s most storied teams—long run like a tight-fisted mom-and-pop shop—is taken over by a free-spending ownership group with a track record of building one of sports’ most sophisticated operations? “It’s a full rebuild and retool." New story, for @YahooSports: sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/wh…

CU Athletics is heartbroken to learn of the passing of Adam Munsterteiger. Adam was a light in our Buffs community who covered CU sports and shared student-athlete stories for more than two decades. Our deepest condolences go to his wife, Liz, and their family.

NAACP has nothing to give black families whose children trained their entire lives for a free scholarship. You never ever as a revolutionary in any capacity use children and vulnerable families like this. This does not mobilize anyone. especially in this economy.

The SCORE Act has been pulled from the House floor voting schedule this week, according to @YahooSports. MORE: ow.ly/lfMU50Z1AlW

Georgia Tech unveiled the new $90 million Fanning Center last week. I went down to Atlanta ahead of its opening to learn more about facility efforts as roster costs rise. “If you’re paying these athletes what we are, we have to invest in their bodies.” sportsbusinessjournal.com/Articles/2026/…

Under financial pressure in the post-House settlement era, some schools are cutting sports while others explore private-equity investment. Florida State University is trying a different approach through a deal meant to "flip the whole model on its head." frontofficesports.com/fsu-tests-new-…

It’s Saturday. Many parents spent most of today taking their kids to sporting events. Jackson Prince explains how today’s youth sports culture undermines teen’s self-image, reduces identity to performance, & how sports narrows their life experience creating an identity crisis.

Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. The point of this kind of marketing is that nobody is supposed to notice it. But lately, the machinery has started to show. In April, Justin Bieber headlined two consecutive weekends at Coachella. Coachella is the biggest stage in pop music save only for the Super Bowl, the kind of event that in theory generates its own attention. And yet on both weekends, a Discord server writer Lane Brown had been monitoring hosted paid campaigns for Bieber’s Coachella performances, offering clippers — people who are hired to turn a song, trailer, interview, stump speech, or whatever into short, social-media-friendly fragments — as much as a dollar per thousand views. “On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once, and every signal the platforms produce — a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that ‘everybody’ is suddenly talking about the same thing — can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas,” writes Brown. “Everybody is doing this now,” Lim says. “And if you’re not, you’re behind.” Brown reports on how the same techniques are now being used to fool people on every app they go to in order to find out what other people think, not just in music but across entertainment, politics, consumer products, and celebrity gossip: nymag.visitlink.me/w6Bu9N

Tristan Thompson investing early in Anthropic after having dinner with some employees is the AI age version Shaq getting into the Google Series A round in 1999 — 5 years before IPO — after overhearing two Google employees chatting at the Beverly Hills Hotel lobby.

Northwestern is creating a 2,000-student "Wildcat Wall" behind the end zone of its $862M stadium, modeled after European soccer supports sections. "No one's ever imported a supporter section from European football to create a student section."

College basketball rosters keep getting more expensive. Donors keep giving, knowing they won’t see a direct financial return. Why? I talked to donors and coaches about NIL motivation, ROI, & what programs are really selling. New for @basket_review: basketunderreview.com/nil-donors-are…

NEW: As athletic departments scramble for athlete-pay revenue, Digital Brands Group is signing deals that include NIL $ and shares in the publicly traded micro-cap. But the company has a checkered history and its stock has cratered. w/ @novy_williams 👇 sportico.com/leagues/colleg…

Naismith Hall of Famer Tracy McGrady has taken a role with Wagner College as strategic advisor for the men's basketball program, joining his son Laymen who committed to the team, per ESPN sources. McGrady will lead Wagner's basketball operations, recruiting and name, image and likeness efforts, and joins a number of current and former NBA players to take administrative positions in college, such as John Wall (Howard), Stephen Curry (Davidson), Shaquille O’Neal (Sacramento State), Trae Young (Oklahoma) and others.

If you were curious as to how college athletes ‘earn’ their payments from multimedia rights companies for a signed deal (aside from rev-share) Here is an example, from the arbitration case with Nebraska $7.5 million in deals with Nebraska’s MMR

RT @davidubben: Everybody in college sports is looking for more money. @MattBakerCFB and I looked at one strategy a growing number of sch…

Wrote today about Digital Brands Group and its Avo apparel, which issued millions of $DBGI shares to its college sports partners. The stock jumped, then it cratered. What's next for a co. with a volatile past and a lot confidence? More w/ @DanielLibit 👇 sportico.com/leagues/colleg…

In his book, legendary UNC basketball coach Dean Smith wrote a whole chapter called 'One-on-One Meetings'. In it, he detailed his entire philosophy on when, where and how often he met his players, and what they'd talk about. I wrote about it here: coachcraft.codyroyle.com/p/dean-smith-o…

WNBA's 11-year media deal is now worth $3.1B, per @FOS.

Interesting: PwC's Global Sports Survey shows that sports executives expect team valuation growth to outpace growth in every major revenue stream over the next 3-5 years. A strong vote of support for the scarce asset thesis.

a founder has three jobs. everything else is serious amounts of noise. 1. you have to tell the story. roughly in three registers. first investors need inevitability. customers need to *feel* what you do/stand for. & your team needs a mission worth their best years. 2. you must secure the capital before you need it. running out of money is running out of options. you have to be relentless about it. 3. you must obsess over the product. product is the story made accessible for everyone. every shipped detail is a sentence back into the narrative in point number one. this is the entire job. everything else you either delegate or kill. early on with a really small team, delegation is a huge tax so you have to learn to kill more than you delegate.