College Basketball: Digital Pac-10 Preview, #1 Stanford

Welcome back to the final chapter in our digital journey through the Pac-10. I hope you've enjoyed the ride.

Come back tomorrow and I'll give you a full run down of the conference, at a glance. It's your wrap up day.

Our journey through the conference has shown us #10 USC , #9 Arizona State, and #8 Arizona, #7 Oregon State, #6 Washington State, #5 UCLA, #4 California, #3 Washington, and

#2 Oregon.

It's time to crown our champion.

#1 Stanford

The Digital Scouting Report

Strengths: Great URL. Fantastic call outs for just about every way to keep in touch imaginable (blog, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, photos). Good attitude through the site.

Weaknesses: Not much. Podcasts, while having good content, are set up for the department as a whole, not for individual sports.

Full Scouting Report:
Clicking into the Stanford Athletics site here, (Great URL in GoStanford.com), and you're hit with a pretty solid list of entry points including Multimedia, where we will begin our tour.



Highlighting Multimedia gives you a pretty thorough list of next stops. Let's start at the top, with the Facebook/Twitter/YouTube callout.



Clicking here takes us to this page, which is a pretty good overview of the Stanford presence (not just athletics but also university) on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Let's take a look at each of these...

First, the Stanford Athletics Facebook page is updated pretty regularly with news from the athletics department.



Similarly, the Athletics Department Twitter page is also filled with updates here. As of now, there are only around 600 followers. But I like the style of driving updates through many mechanisms.


Here's the Stanford Athletics YouTube channel. It's got a pretty active video wall, but it is lumped all together as a department, not as channels by sport. I'm hoping they fix this before the hoops season gets here and the video count exponentially grows.



OK, back to Multimedia and you'll see the Podcasts call out. Again, this is great to see another way to follow the program but, like YouTube, it is also not set up to be segmented by sport.



OK, moving onward to the next tab, Welcome Recruits. I like this callout a lot, more than just about any Recruiting tab outside of Oregon's aspirational "Be A Duck." So I dove right into Cardinal.Red.Sports.



This took me to a gateway page, which of course I moved into Men's Basketball.



Which took me to this page (below). This is a page that you really should experience too, so I am going to give you a chance by clicking here. It's the home of the Cardinal Men's Basketball program, and it is some kind of amazing.



Let's look around. First, they have an overview of the Academics of Stanford, set to a pretty powerful visual. I think this is important to cover as the University does have an outstanding academics reputation and they cover this alongside the athletics, at a similar level of execution. Solid.


Clicking on Players takes you to the image below, an interactive view of the Cardinal roster. Each player is clickable, and when you do it opens up a new level of content that, to be honest, we haven't seen in any squad yet...


Each player's page includes a Q&A, Stats, and.... Individual Player Highlight Packages! What? So if I go here, I get my own highlight reel on the Stanford site? NICE! Seriously, this is powerful, powerful stuff - and very much world class!



Moving on to the Coaches. Clicking into Coach Dawkins' profile takes you to a page titled, "Getting to Know Johnny." (Shown below).


You see his bio, across playing days and Olympics coaching days. And, of course you see the Twitter icon. You can follow Coach Dawkins on Twitter here, with around 600 followers... for now.



Back in the Cardinal.Red.Basketball section, you'll find a highlights button on the bottom of the page. Clicking in and you get the YouTube Men's Basketball experience I'd longed for earlier... and then some. Check the next two boxes and you'll see one of the better examples of how to integrate a YouTube channel into a team's site. First, with highlights...



... and then, with Features and Player Interviews. Solid. Wow.



Rounding out this amazing section are players in the Pros, a tour of their practice and weight room facilities, and a section about the international travel of this squad (playing games in the summer in Europe). This is really great stuff, completely on another level.






But, wait, I'm not done. Seriously. It is time to click into the Sports, Men's Basketball section. (We haven't even been here yet?) Wow. The big call out is how they integrate YouTube highlights into their site. Look in the main window and ponder why others haven't done this yet. I'm just pumped about this!


Thanks for bearing with me. I know it's been awhile. But it's tough to leave much out. This is a world class site, and I feel smarter for having plowed through it!

Tune in tomorrow for a final recap of our trip through the Pac-10.

Then we'll turn our attention to the middle of the country for our third conference!

Andy