How two ex-Nebraska football players jump-started a social-media revolution for athletes

How two ex-Nebraska football players jump-started a social-media revolution for athletes
By Mitch Sherman
May 21, 2019

LINCOLN, Neb. — Before the end of breakfast hours Dec. 19, the first day of the early signing period, Tennessee quarterback signee Brian Maurer shared a video produced by the university aimed to sell the program to future recruits.

In the minutes after he was drafted by the Arizona Cardinals, No. 1 pick Kyler Murray shared content on Twitter of his rookie trading card, generated by Panini America, and an hour later of a video that featured him promoting EA Sports’ Madden NFL 20.

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Indiana baseball star Matt Lloyd, after his walk-off homer to beat Minnesota last month, let the public into the Hoosiers’ locker room to see almost real-time video of their celebration.

All of this was made possible by a company headquartered two blocks from the Nebraska campus.

Opendorse, founded by former Nebraska football players Blake Lawrence and Adi Kunalic, does not create a single post for clients on Twitter or Instagram. Its platform, though, delivers content from universities to student-athletes, former players, coaches and administrators and from sponsors, player associations and pro leagues to the world’s biggest sporting stars in a way that is revolutionizing your social media feeds.

In college athletics, the recruiting implications of Opendorse technology is significant. And for athletes — amateur and professional — the ability to more easily share authentic, curated content can be a game-changer for their personal brands.

“It’s a new frontier,” said Lawrence, the 30-year-old CEO. “It’s the next phase of social. Over the last five years, it’s transitioned for us with schools from, ‘I think we should have this,’ to ‘This is something we need to be investing in heavily.’

“The entirety of college athletics understands and values what it means to have a good social-media presence. They’re creating great original content. All the content in the world that student-athletes need to build their brands already exists. But most of it is sitting on a shelf somewhere.”

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Opendorse serves as a conduit to funnel that content into the hands of the people whose endorsements matter most.

Here’s how it works: Let’s say USC shoots 200 photos at a spring practice. Its creative team then parses through the material and generates social content for players or coaches to share. But instead of sending the posts directly to the players in a clumsy process, the school uploads the content to Opendorse.

Opendorse then forwards the post to the player or coach, who receives a message that a piece of streamlined content is ready for his approval or edits.

Clemson, Nebraska and Michigan were the first to sign up with Opendorse to push content to former players.

In 2017, after productive discussions with the NCAA to ensure compliance, Opendorse began to work directly through schools with current student-athletes. It has 44 college partners today, including recent additions USC, Virginia and BYU. Ohio State, Oklahoma, Texas, Texas Tech, TCU, Penn State, Stanford, Duke, Louisville, UCF and Auburn are among the other schools on board.

The company gets about an 80 percent acceptance rate on content delivered to student-athletes — higher than any other group. Imagine sending a text message or email to 100 college students. If more than 50 respond, you’re doing something incredibly right. Needless to say, young athletes like the control that Opendorse offers them on social media.

Colleges pay per user login, and may send posts to an unlimited number of student-athletes. So if a school employs six full-timers to work on social and creative content in addition to a team of students, similar to Clemson, it’s beneficial to buy multiple logins and make efficient use of the creative power.

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Opendorse is free for amateur and pro athletes, Lawrence said, “and always will be.”

“It’s built to help them share content and work with partners in a way that doesn’t distract them from what the majority of them are focused on,” he said, “which is the field, not their phones.”

College conferences use the product in addition to pro leagues, agencies and sponsors like Coca-Cola, Titleist and Campbell’s Chunky Soup. Opendorse struck an agreement early with the NFLPA and recently partnered with the MLBPA to drive content to their members like sponsors, teams and leagues.

Naturally, Opendorse has branded its own process — #athletedriven. Social posts distributed by athletes, Lawrence said, have proven to vastly outperform the same content when sent by a team or league.

Houston Texans receiver DeAndre Hopkins, a former Clemson star, delivered a message from his school through Opendorse to his Twitter following of almost 400,000 on the morning of the national championship game in January.

It resonated, said Mark Majewski, Clemson’s associate director of creative solutions.

“I think people forget how small and secluded Clemson is,” Majewski said. “Having someone who has (that reach) spreading that message to a whole group of people who may know about the Clemson brand — that’s obviously valuable for our program.”

It’s same process that NCAA tournament hero Mamadi Diakite used to post from Virginia’s national-title celebration. Or for Nebraska quarterback Luke McCaffrey to achieve an engagement rate more than 400 percent the size of his Twitter audience with a simple video one month after enrolling early in college.

“You can’t compensate them,” Lawrence said. “But content for this generation of student-athlete is just as good as compensation. You can’t get endorsements. But they can seek out engagements. Those things are the new way of bringing value to student-athletes.”

Lawrence spends two weeks out of every month-long period in Lincoln. The other two weeks, he’s in New York, working with TJ Ciro, Opendorse vice president of business development. They occupy two desks inside a sports marketing agency in West Soho.

Lawrence shares an apartment in the financial district with his girlfriend, Ibby Zimmerman. He figured she was a keeper after they met as students at Nebraska and he discovered that she attended multiple national championship games in which the Huskers played in the 1990s

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For Opendorse, his presence in New York serves as a boon. Instead of matching schedules to plan a trip, Lawrence can walk a few blocks, he said, for a meeting with the Women’s National Basketball Players Association. “Things happen a lot faster,” he said, “because we’re right down the street from the biggest decision-makers in sports.”

This is a far cry from what the Opendorse co-founders envisioned 10 years ago.

Lawrence, from Overland Park, Kan., and Kunalic, Bosnian-born and out of Fort Worth, Texas, struck a friendship as members of the 2007 freshman class at Nebraska. Kunalic handled kickoffs for four seasons and made his lone field-goal attempt. Lawrence started three games at linebacker as a sophomore but quit football after a fourth concussion, suffered in October 2009.

He graduated in 2½ years and teamed with Kunalic in 2010 to found Hurrdat, a digital marketing agency. A few months later, former teammate Prince Amukamara — one of seven members of their recruiting class to play in the NFL — was drafted 19th in the first round by the New York Giants. Amukamara recognized the importance of social media early in his pro career, and asked Lawrence and Kunalic for help.

“We would text him and say, ‘Prince, here’s a video or a photo. Share it at 5 o’clock,’ ” Lawrence said. “Then 5 o’clock rolls around and he doesn’t do it — because he’s busy or he doesn’t know how to cut and paste it; he’s not confident. Basically, we were doing all this work and nothing happened.

“So we built the software. We just eliminated that back and forth, and gave him control.”

They launched software for other athletes in 2013, and Lawrence and Kunalic shortly thereafter sold Hurrdat. In 2014, they signed a contract as the official media activation partner of the NFLPA. And in July 2018, the company moved into expanded offices in downtown Lincoln for most of its 35 employees.

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An entire wall inside the front door pays homage to the first 3,000 athletes to use the Opendorse technology. It includes Odell Beckham Jr., Saquon Barkley, Patrick Mahomes, Victor Oladipo, Draymond Green, Michelle Wie, Nneka and Chiney Ogwumike, Jose Altuve and David Ortiz. As it expands in pro and college sports, Opendorse is actively seeking partners at the high school level, too. They’ve already had some success.

“For a long time, it was just professional athletes,” Lawrence said, “and they were invited to use the platform by their agents or their association or maybe a brand that they were working with. Now, there are more and more athletes that are being invited to use Opendorse while they’re in college.

“They go the next level, then their agent most likely is already using it. The union is probably using it. There’s a good chance that the team they’re playing for or a league is using the platform.”

You begin to see why they’re bullish on business ahead.

Majewski, the Clemson associate creative director, walks cautiously into future.

“I think what you’re going to see at the collegiate level — and in the pros, you’re already seeing it — instead of promoting the team, you’re going to see a lot more individuals hire brand managers,” he said.

Scary? Not for Lawrence. If handled responsibly, individual brands don’t impede the objectives of a team.

“There’s a number on a screen that matters to a kid today,” he said, “as much as the numbers on a stat sheet. Like it or not, this generation lives and breathe social (media). Their attachment to their username, their handle and the content they post, the people that follow them — it’s been ingrained in them since they were 10 years old.”

A few football programs embrace the concept, led perhaps by Ohio State, which created “Brand U” as a way to connect with recruits.

But good luck convincing Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz of the benefits. Ferentz, 63, in his 21st season as Hawkeyes coach, bars his players from posting on Twitter as soon as they arrive on campus. No posting in the offseason, either, though Facebook and Instagram are allowed.

Ferentz said last year that he discussed the policy with team leaders and that the players approved. “There’s no temptation to do something that might be regrettable,” he said. “It’s a good thing. We’re not trying to be czars or anything like that.”

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Ferentz chuckled at the notion of personal brands in college athletics.

“I think ‘brand’ is one of the more comical terms that’s been created over the past decade,” the coach said. “Somebody had to explain it to me when I first heard it. I hope our guys are going to be known as good members of the community, have good careers here, do a good job in the classroom and earn their degrees.

“To me, that’s the ‘brand’ that sells to any employer. It’s one thing that’ll never change, if I’m a principal hiring a teacher or an NFL GM trying to draft somebody.”

Ferentz posed a question. What was Bob Sanders’ brand? What was Dallas Clark’s brand?

“Marshal Yanda makes it in the NFL as an offensive guard because they appreciate his brand,” Ferentz said, “what he brings in the locker room every day and what he brings to the field. They’re paying significant money, inflated money, for his brand.”

Lawrence knows he won’t convince Ferentz and those of his kind that Twitter is a good thing for student-athletes, schools and their fans.

“Bob Sanders, Dallas Clark — they came from a generation that didn’t have this,” Lawrence said. “What we should show is proof of highly marketable players selecting schools that are offering services that help them expand that marketing acumen. If you were big into architecture and the coach said, ‘You cannot study architecture here,’ why would go to that school?

“The majority of incoming student-athletes have built an audience on social. People care what they say. And if they’re choosing to go to a school that tells them to shut that off, it’s like someone telling them that what you’ve built doesn’t matter.”


Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz isn’t a fan of talk about players and their brands, saying, ‘I think ‘brand’ is one of the more comical terms that’s been created over the past decade.’ (Jeff Hanisch / USA TODAY Sports)

Former Iowa tight end Noah Fant kept Twitter on his phone during his time in Iowa City. He declared for the NFL Draft on Nov. 30 and resumed tweeting right away after nearly three years of silence. Over that time, contemporaries grew their followings.

At the conclusion of the draft, in which the Broncos drafted Fant with the 20th pick, he had 15,800 Twitter followers, ranked 67th among all selections, data gathered by Opendorse show. The top four first-rounders, in combined Twitter and Instagram audience, attended schools that partner with Opendorse.

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“Marquise Brown was building his brand while he was at Oklahoma,” Lawrence said. “And he’s got a head start. (Fant’s) opportunity was cut short. If a brand wants to work with Marquise Brown, he can command a rate five times that of Noah Fant. … Whatever you do with your audience, it’s quantifiable.”

Fant was not a fan of Iowa’s Twitter policy when his career began, but he grew to appreciate it. As for his personal brand, Fant said last summer that he wasn’t worried about missed opportunities.

“College football is about your team,” Fant said. “It’s about the camaraderie. It’s about what we can do collectively as a group. Inevitably, you’re going to build a name for yourself on the field. And the best way for anyone to do that is through your production. I feel like that’s the best and only way to do it.”

Lawrence counters by suggesting a brand built in college is arguably more valuable for former athletes who do not enter pro sports.

It should be noted that Clemson coach Dabo Swinney, 49, whose Tigers have won two of the past three national titles, also bars his players from Twitter — but only during the season. And Swinney is not suffering in recruiting. His class for 2020 currently is No. 1 nationally, with five five-star commitments.

Majewski said his staff has not used Opendorse to push content to current players, though he expects it will happen as soon as this summer. And during the season, when the team goes dark, players still provide input for Clemson’s social team in determining how they’re portrayed through the team Twitter handle.

As long as Clemson continues to collect trophies, don’t look for Swinney to change policy.

“We’re not going to tell him what to do,” Majewski said.

After all, it’s really all about winning. Victories accumulate today, though, as often in the digital space as on the playing field.

(Top photo of Blake Lawrence (left) and Adi Kunalic: Courtesy of Opendorse)

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Mitch Sherman

Mitch Sherman is a staff writer for The Athletic covering Nebraska football. He previously covered college sports for ESPN.com after working 13 years for the Omaha World-Herald. Mitch is an Omaha native and lifelong Nebraskan. Follow Mitch on Twitter @mitchsherman