Tag: Darren Rovell

Beverage of the week: Surprisingly, Darren Rovell makes 3 pretty good canned cocktails (and one terrible one)

I regret to inform you Darren Rovell makes a pretty good cocktail. Except the raspberry. Don’t get the raspberry.

Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.

Darren Rovell is — how do I put this diplomatically — a divisive figure in the sports landscape. He’s a comprehensive reporter whose hustle never ends and helped popularize the sports business beat. He also carries himself online as the living embodiment of #brands and once emailed the University of Michigan to complain about one of its graduate students mocking him online, only to later be mocked online by the University of Michigan.

But what’s undeniable is the former ESPN talking head and current Action Network reporter has an expansive reach and an battle-tested understanding of influence and monetization across athletics. You can find this out for yourself if you’re willing to drop $89 on a Cameo from him. Or you can be like me, write a booze column and wait for your interests to intersect.

This happened back in February, because Darren Rovell, a man who charges nearly four times more for a recorded video hello than Olympic gold medalist, American hero, Figure It Out host and woman who makes Sixpence None the Richer songs play in my head each time I see her, Summer Sanders, founded his own canned cocktail line. Then he sent me some to try for this review.

KickStand isn’t your regular vodka-soda slim can. The baseline flavors are mostly there — lime, pineapple, cucumber and peach — but the twist comes with an infusion of “artisanal spice” aimed at blending elements of hard seltzer and spicy margaritas together in one drink. At 5.5 percent ABV and 103 calories it packs more of a boozy punch than most seltzers or light beers, so we’re already winning in that regard.

Hell, I like a good habanero stout every now and then. Let’s see if the flavor can match the hype.

Darren Rovell is a sham

His NIL argument makes no sense.

You all know Darren Rovell, the indefatigable sports biz bro currently plying his trade at Action Network. His frenetic tweets about anything and everything having remotely to do with the gargantuan and incredibly lucrative business of sports are … well, sort of impressive, if we’re being honest. He gets to a lot! That guy really has an engine.

What he lacks a lot of the time is a processor. Such is the case this week, as he’s decided to be offended by the fact that college athletes being allowed to earn money from their name, image and likeness has … resulted in college athletes earning money from their name, image and likeness.

More specifically, he is mad that athletes at the schools where boosters were already spending lavishly are now directly getting some of the profits.

Aha! Now you see where our headline came from. It’s a rhetorical device based on his tweet. Clever.

You can go ahead and read that story if you want, but I’ll summarize and dismantle his main argument for you:

But it’s one thing for boosters to set up business deals for incoming athletes. It’s another for boosters to set up a slush fund to lure certain players to the school under the guise of name, image and likeness.

And that’s exactly what Horns with Heart is.

A group of Longhorns boosters announced Monday a fund that will blindly give University of Texas offensive lineman under scholarship $50,000 a year to perform charity work for yet-to-be-disclosed charities.

A slush fund! Let that business jargon roll.

Blindly give! The fact that the coaches at Texas will spend countless hours evaluating and then wooing these players must mean absolutely nothing.

Rovell goes on to argue that this plan is a sham because it’s not based on what he believes the market rate should be for the name, image and likeness of a college football offensive lineman.

Why Rovell believes he should determine the market value of an offensive lineman instead of, you know, the people paying the money is anyone’s guess. Also a mystery: Why Rovell has appointed himself the arbiter of the “spirit” of a movement that has simply returned basic rights to athletes who never should have lost them in the first place.

Rovell sees the Horns with Heart plan as an illegal inducement, meant only to help Texas recruit better:

The very announcement of the fund that offers any Texas offensive lineman an automatic $50,000 is indisputably an inducement because, whether it is overtly mentioned or not, recruits who come to the University of Texas know that their scholarship is tied to a $50,000 a year cash windfall.

But here’s the thing (which Darren knows very well!): Boosters were going to spend big money on making their chosen teams more attractive to recruits anyway. They always have. It’s just that the money went toward things like hiring new coaches or building lavish facilities or outfitting those facilities with slides and barbershops and gourmet food options.

Or by establishing actual slush funds used for everything from $20 handshakes to moving a recruit’s parent into a better house.

Donors have been giving money to schools for this sort of goofy stuff for decades now, and the schools never stopped and said “Hey, what about maybe building a new wing of the library instead?” because … here it is … the football players they were going to recruit with those overpaid coaches and gleaming facilities brought tremendous value to the university, regardless of what their name, image and likeness ended up being.

Besides, you don’t think current recruits are already taking into account the possibilities for NIL deals as they make their decisions? They already knew that landing at Texas would create a better chance for a deal than going to SMU or Baylor or Rice. Codifying it changes nothing.

The abolishment of the idea that players shouldn’t be compensated for their name, image and likeness didn’t create some new possibility for boosters to influence the success of their schools; that’s always been the point of their giving. It just meant they could do so by directly compensating those actually playing the games.

Rovell has lived in the numbers underlying sports for so long that he seems incapable of understanding why the people with the money would see college athletes as being worth the investment, even if this is all something of an unknown. He just doesn’t get it:

The (awful) insinuation here is that Gatorade won’t get its money’s worth due to the injury and that this is a valuable lesson for companies considering investing in NIL deals. If Bueckers isn’t on TV getting buckets, how’s she ever going going to deliver on her “market value?!?”

Well, she has 948k followers on Instagram, and they’ll probably see her sip Gatorade as she doggedly works toward a triumphant return.

Rovell is sharp and usually understands what’s coming and how the landscape is shifting. This time, he’s simply missed it.

Here in America, it’s generally accepted that people should go ahead and try to get paid whatever somebody thinks they’re worth. Rovell’s spasm over college athletes came in the same week that news broke he had signed a new $2 million deal.

Good for him. The guy works incredibly hard and realized early on how important the sports business beat would be. I’m not about to question whether I think that’s “market rate” for any reporter anywhere. That’s not for me to decide.

So it is with the young men who eventually get those Horns with Heart deals. They’ve done the work to get recruited to the University of Texas, and a group of boosters there has decided that affiliating with them at the price of $50,000 per year is worth it.

That’s the market rate, and the players at the football powerhouses will be able to demand it, because that’s where the money is, just as it’s always been.

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One half of an iconic sports halftime show has died

If you’ve attended many basketball games, college or pro the last decade, there is a good chance you saw Mr. Maas’s memorable halftime show.

If you’re a college sports fan, specifically basketball, the name David Maas probably doesn’t ring a bell.

He didn’t lead a team to any Final Fours as a player or a coach and he wasn’t some inspirational walk-on that got to play a couple of seconds on Senior Day.

No, he wasn’t any of those things, but to anyone who has attended many college basketball games over the last decade-plus, there’s a good chance you saw Maas perform.

He wasn’t dribbling or dunking a basketball, but instead performaing as one-half of the “Quick Change” act that has entertained the masses at basketball games both professional and collegiately for years.

Maas, who made up one-half of the “Quick Change” act died on Sunday from COVID, according to the agency that represented him.

Maas and his wife Dania performed their “magical transformation” all over the world including London, Monte Carlo, and Japan just to name a few and the couple also helped teach Katy Perry their magic as she used it while performing the hit “Hot N Cold” years back.

Sports fans may not remember his name but they’ll certainly remember the performances Maas put on for them at countless games over the years.

That’s why upon news of his passing, the Oklahoma City Thunder, Xavier Muskateers, and Darren Rovell all shared their condolences and messages.

One of the professional caps I’ve worn included covering the Chicago Bulls for roughly two years.  It was a thrill when you heard that “Quick Change” was going to be the halftime entertainment because those nights you knew there’d be as much discussion in the media workroom asking, “how’d they do that?” as there would be a conversation of the actual game.

Rest easy, Mr. Maas.

And thanks for the great show.

Darren Rovell actually tried to buy a ‘(expletive) Rovell’ Johnny Manziel autograph

The seller wanted $10,000!

If you follow former ESPN business reporter Darren Rovell on Twitter, you’ve probably grown used to him sharing updates on the staggering sale prices for baseball, football and basketball cards.

And by staggering, I mean like Giannis Antetokounmpo cards going for $1.812 million. It doesn’t make sense. But there haven’t been too many high-priced cards that involve Rovell himself.

That changed with Johnny Manziel.

The former Heisman Trophy winner hasn’t played in the NFL since 2015. And after opportunities in the CFL and AAF both failed, Manziel has since given up on a return to professional football. In that time, Rovell has taken a few digs at Manziel’s football failures, which weren’t met kindly by Manziel.

But I don’t think anyone expected a “(expletive) Rovell” Johnny Manziel autographed card to end up on eBay with a $10,000 asking price. But nothing about the sports collectable market is predictable.

On Thursday, Rovell shared the listing and said that he was going to make an effort to buy the card. Those efforts, though, were unsuccessful as the seller ultimately took a $1,200 offer before Rovell had a chance to counter.

Who is paying $1,200 for that? And … why? I have no idea. The seller must have been equally as shocked because he or she settled on $8,800 below asking before Darren could even get a counter in.

Johnny will just need to sign another card.

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Darren Rovell shared footage of JFK’s assassination at 7:30 a.m. and his followers weren’t happy

“The Zapruder film goes great with eggs, D. Thanks.”

Looking to see some up-close footage of an assassination with your morning coffee? Then, dear friend, Darren Rovell has got you covered.

The former ESPNer, current Action Network “reporter,” who can find the dollar value amount of just about anything, has done so with one of our nation’s great tragedies on Friday morning.

It is the anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and to celebrate (?) that, Rovell shared a clip of the infamous Zapruder film, which shows the president being shot in the head.

He did this at 7:30 in the morning. He also shared the dollar amount that the Zapruder film sold for (including subsequent sales) because that’s what is really important here.

(Listen, I’m not going to go holier than thou and say that the footage is inappropriate. It’s a part of our nation’s history, etc. etc. HOWEVER, trying to tie in the bizness angle by including the dollar amounts of what the Zapruder film sold for makes me earnestly doubt that Rovell was trying to share an important moment from our history, and makes it seem much more likely that he was just doing this to tie it to his beat and get some Internet Clout.)

I’m not going to share the original tweet, but if you want to see a president get shot in the head with your eggs, by all means, go visit Rovell’s Twitter page.

What I will share was the reaction to the tweet:

Don’t worry, though: Rovell had a very good explanation for why he did what he did. See, there’s never a convenient time to talk about horrific parts of history … or share what the Zapruder film sold for.

Thanks, Darren!