As with my breakdowns of the ACC (link here), Pac-10 (link here), and Big Ten (link here), I will go through the Big 12 at a conference level and then play it out with my pre-season (or pre-looking at it) predictions. Of course, I'll continue this coverage by going through this journey program-by-program.
Let's start with a quick overview:
What's Good about the Big 12 Experience? The Big 12 Network is a pretty packed video player. And the Big 12 Insider Blog gives you a day-by-day take at the conference.
What Could Be Better? There really isn't an easy way to follow your favorite sports -- your only options are to follow the conference.
Let's dive in...
Hitting the Big 12's home page, here, and you'll have pretty clear access to each school in the conference by clicking on the icons in the upper right-hand corner. It's also pretty clear that video plays a big role in the conference - we seet his in both the Big 12 Report video player and the Latest Videos callout.
Before we go there, let's zoom in a little on the Fans menu. As you can see, the Big 12 offers access to follow the conference on either Twitter or Facebook.
First, I double-clicked into the Big 12 on Twitter, shown here. As you can see below, there are just over 3000 followers. From what I can tell, the site is updated regularly, cutting across all schools and programs. The conference seems to do a pretty good job of delivering updates with both news and personality. On the other hand, the conference could get a lot better with their "following" strategy. I'd love to see a directory of icons of every coach and program in the Big 12. But instead we see a collection of miscellaneous bowl games (Texas Bowl?) and analysts (Pat Forde). This is a chance to be all Big 12, all the time!
The strategy of the Big 12 on Facebook is to leverage it for frequent news updates. You can check this out here. This site is packed full of news updates, but lacks anything personal, or any community feel at all.
Going back to the home page, I was pretty excited to click on the Big 12 Insider blog, shown below or by clicking here. It is a really solid blog - kept updated on a daily basis by correspondent Wendell Barnhouse. The blog does a nice job of combining both sharing links to Big 12 updates and insight into the conference. It's worth a read. I do wish it was set up to allow you to filter by sport though.
Hungry for basketball content, I moved on to the Men's Basketball section, shown below and here. As seen on the home page, video content is elevated.
If you click into any video, you are taken to the Big 12 Report section. This is a video area with the top plays of each week, game replays, and a weekly TV show. Game replays require you to register, but don't cost anything. Here's an image of the section, which is pretty incredible. I do wish you could share these videos on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or email -- great content, just let people take it with them!
The basketball section also promotes this week's Media Days. This year, the Big 12 Conference is giving fans access to video content around each program, men's and women's plus blog recaps of the event. I'm a huge fan of Conference Pre-Season Media Days, which I think are very underrated -- you have all coaches gathering, all optimistic, all with a chance if everything plays out right. I've always wanted behind-the-scenes access for this event, and this year the Big 12 Conference is giving it to us!
Naturally, part of this event is to release the Pre-Season rankings. Which is how I'll close my Big 12 overview. Before we start our breakdown of each program (next Monday), I'll list my Pre-Looking at Anything Prediction (or PLAP):
- Texas
- Oklahoma State
- Kansas
- Missouri
- Oklahoma
- Texas Tech
- Iowa State
- Texas A&M
- Kansas State
- Nebraska
- Baylor
- Colorado
Thanks for reading, stay tuned!
Andy
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment