Reflection on year two of the College Football Playoff

By Gina Lehe (@Gina_Lehe)

As Super Bowl 50 concluded, it felt like a good time to pause, stop and smell the proverbial roses. January quickly came and went amidst debriefing meetings, budget consolidation and customer surveys. All in all, year two of the College Football Playoff was another success.

Despite numerous accolades and accomplishments during our inaugural year, any time you dive into something unknown new, inherent challenges arise. Aside from that, I was not pregnant or due to deliver my first child, have a C-section and go back to work ten days later as I did in December 2014!

College football has, and continues to change rapidly and drastically. Players are bigger, stronger and better; technology is greater, further reaching and more encompassing; budgets are steadily increasing while revenue is skyrocketing. Staying at pace is alone a challenge, being proactive and ahead of the curve has become an art form. Social media is a prime example. College football has also gone from a seasonal sport to a year-round phenomenon and we have had to adjust to how and when consumers digest our product.

I have both the fortune and misfortune of media being extremely transparent and candid with their experience covering college football bowl games. We get everything from rooms being too far from meeting space to not having enough time with the quarterback at media day. I firmly believe there are three teams that arrive in any host city – the two competing on the field, and the media. After all, they are the ones who inform us all publicly (good or bad) as to the events taking place in this space. Tune in to Twitter and it becomes more entertaining than the event itself at times. For all the gripe they can often make and the headaches they can sometimes cause, they have been instrumental in providing dialog. Whether it be on television, sports talk radio, podcasts, online articles, traditional newsprint, they are helping shape the story of college football.

I am also a firm believer in constructive criticism. We can’t get better unless we know how. That’s not to say that I am going to spend hours figuring out how we can have more feather pillows at the media hotel headquarters for the sleeping rooms, but I will, for example, look into how we can provide electrical outlets near the auxiliary press seats that don’t have tables. Every media member that touches our event should have a chance to have their voice heard and an impact on how we can implement change to bring even greater success.

One of the challenges we face each year is picking up our operation from one host city and its venues and moving shop to an entirely new locale. The physical pieces change as do the faces who help structure the experience. I would, however, counter that it is the most rewarding part of what I do as well. The continuous growth of my network, watching the tremendous pride a community takes in showcases what it has to offer to the country – those are priceless benefits.

Most people don’t think of this as a year-round job. The best analogy I can give is to a jigsaw puzzle. There are hundreds of pieces. Some days I work on the sky, others on the house. When all is said and done, every single piece must be accounted for to finish the full picture and no one piece is more important than another.