Alabama football’s next dynasty is in the content game

Courtesy Alabama Athletics

Here is a useful way to think about the Alabama football brand: It doesn’t need you to like it. It doesn’t particularly need you to root for it. It just needs you to watch — and, on that front, it has never had a problem.

For decades, Alabama’s grip on the national consciousness was maintained almost entirely through winning, a self-reinforcing loop so efficient it barely required tending. Nick Saban recruited better than everyone else, won more than everyone else, and the attention followed automatically.

That era is over, not because Alabama stopped winning, but because winning alone is no longer enough. Every program in the country is scrambling to figure out what college football looks like when players are brands, when entertainment companies are recruiting partners, when the difference between keeping a five-star in your program and watching him walk through the transfer portal might come down to whether he feels seen. The business changed faster than anyone expected, and the old model — win games, hang banners, let the legacy speak — is a strategy that, over time, starts to look a lot like coasting.

Building a Media Empire

Walt Brock, Alabama’s Director of Football Creative and Production, is not coasting.

“We haven’t been really operating that way from a content and entertainment standpoint,” he tells Awful Announcing of the program’s historically passive approach to its own brand. “But that is now shifting.”

It’s shifting toward increasingly looking like a fully functioning media operation, with distribution strategies, franchise IP, athlete brand development, and an annual event designed specifically to get the entertainment industry to take notice.

Brock’s job is to build it in Tuscaloosa before anyone else figures it out first.

The first thing Brock will tell you about the Crimson Tide’s content operation is that it runs in buckets. Inform. Educate. Entertain. For years, that was the whole framework, the same one most programs use, the same one that produces behind-the-scenes videos and hype reels that blur together by October. The framework still exists. But there’s a fourth bucket now, and it’s the one that changes the shape of everything else.

“How can we be innovative and generate revenue?” Brock says. “That’s everything from creating new series, new formats — also really highlighting the Bama brand.”

NIL Changed the Content Game

The old content operation at a place like Alabama had a pretty narrow mandate. You were making highlight packages for recruits and their parents, hype videos for the fanbase, a doc here and there to remind everyone that the program existed off the field, too. The audience was already yours, and you were servicing it. Nobody in the athletic department was sitting around asking whether a behind-the-scenes video could open a door with a production company, or whether a player series could move the needle on his NIL deals, because the answers were obviously no, and the question itself would have seemed strange.

NIL changed what the content is actually for. Now, a well-made series attached to the right player can drive his market value, attract brand partners seeking proximity to the program, and attract production companies looking for IP pre-loaded with one of the biggest audiences in sports. The creative department used to submit its budget requests like everyone else. Now it’s part of the conversation about where the program’s money comes from.

Serving that conversation means knowing exactly who you’re talking to, and Brock programs for three or four distinct audiences simultaneously.

The younger fans — the ones Alabama needs to keep cultivating — want the players out of uniform. They want to know who these guys are when the pads come off, what they listen to, how they talk, what they’re actually like. Short, fast, built around personality, lives on TikTok and Instagram. The older Bama faithful, what Brock calls the “Blue Blood fans,” want something longer on Facebook, something that rewards the kind of devotion that survives a losing season. And then there’s the group that might matter most to what Alabama is trying to build commercially: the people who will never call themselves Bama fans and watch anyway.

“Whether you’re a Bama fan or not,” Brock says, “even if you love us or hate us, you’re still watching. So we still try to figure out how we can create high-level shoulder content so that when people are watching our games and checking our social media, how can we kind of drive them to learn a little bit more about the program.”

Holding that audience is exactly what the two series currently in production are designed to do, and they couldn’t be more different in how they go about it.

“The Bama Way”

The Bama Way is the newer of the two flagship projects, and it’s the one that signals most clearly where the program’s ambitions are pointing. The logline is essentially Hard Knocks for the executive layer, not the players, not the coaches, but the infrastructure underneath them. The sports medicine staff. The recruiting operation. The conditioning program. The people who don’t appear on any depth chart but whose decisions are, Brock argues, as responsible for the dynasty as anything that happens between the lines on a Saturday.

“Everyone always sees what takes place on Saturdays,” he says. “But there’s a whole team of high-level executives, high-level subject matter experts in different areas that are operating and moving things down the line. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. We have high-level people who are here as a resource for our young guys. And I would say that’s really what Bama’s secret sauce is. Yes, it’s a legacy, but there’s a lot of people who contributed to that legacy that are still here.”

Alabama’s competitive advantage has never been only recruiting; it’s been the system that recruiting feeds into, the staff that develops players, and the culture that holds them. That story has never really been told at scale because nobody has found the right container for it. The Bama Way is a bet that the machine is interesting to watch, separate from its output. That people who’ll pull up a Saban-era highlight reel at midnight will also sit with a well-made documentary about what a general manager and a strength coach actually do.

“Who I Am”

Who I Am is built on a different premise: that the version of Derrick Henry, Bryce Young, or Josh Jacobs that the public actually knows is a surface reading, and that somewhere underneath the highlights, the draft grades, and the endorsement deals is a person nobody has really met yet. Upcoming episodes will feature all three, along with C.J. Mosley. Getting players of that stature to actually say something real on camera — not perform, not deliver media-trained talking points, but say something — requires getting them to forget there’s a camera.

“I always say that content is just like music,” he says. “When you have a producer and an artist coming in, what I try to do is really make them feel comfortable to the point where we’re just having a conversation. That’s kind of how we were able to knock the barriers down and for them to kind of open up and share their stories.”

The Changing Program-Player Dynamic

Before NIL, a player’s relationship with his program’s brand operation was a faith-based arrangement. Show up when asked, wear the gear, say the right things, and whatever exposure the program generated was understood to flow downstream eventually, probably, in some form.

In the age of NIL, arrangements now have terms, and programs that can’t articulate them are losing players who can find one that will.

“Retention is the name of the game now, right, with the transfer portal and everything else,” Brock says. “It’s one thing to get these high-level guys in, but we also have to position them well to make sure that we keep them. We want to develop them from a brand standpoint and from a content standpoint the same way that we develop them in the weight room or on the field.”

Think about what Alabama player development actually looks like: the nutrition staff tracking body composition across an entire offseason, the strength coaches with individualized loading programs for every player on the roster, the sports science operation measuring outputs and adjusting in real time. That infrastructure exists because the program decided decades ago that leaving athletic development to chance was a competitive disadvantage it couldn’t afford. Brock is making the same argument about brand development. A player arrives in Tuscaloosa, and the program starts building around him, figuring out his voice, his audience, what kind of content fits him authentically, what platforms make sense, what a long-term media presence for this specific person could look like. This isn’t a photoshoot before the season opener, nor is it a social media manager telling him to post more. It’s an actual sustained effort to turn whoever he is off the field into something that compounds, so that by the time his number gets called on a Saturday and the whole country suddenly wants to know who he is, the answer is already built and waiting.

Take Ryan Coleman-Williams, for example.

After a breakout performance against Georgia in 2024, he went from a player people knew about to a player everyone was searching for — his following jumped from around 215,000 to nearly 600,000 in a matter of days. That kind of moment is not something a program can engineer. It comes from a game, from a play, from something that happens between the lines that nobody planned. What a program can engineer is what’s waiting on the other side of it.

“The great thing about that,” Brock says, “was we had created the New Wave podcast platform for him, so that was steadily building until that moment hit and we had the right infrastructure in place for him to really capitalize. What we tell these guys all the time is: let’s build your brand, not just for the moment. Let’s build your brand for the long term.”

None of that works, though, without people on the outside willing to build with you. A production company that co-develops a series. A brand that sees a player not as a jersey number but as a platform. A media executive who flies to Tuscaloosa and leaves thinking about Alabama the way they think about the properties they actually compete to work with.

Selling Tuscaloosa

Earlier this spring, Brock got them all in the same place for the Second Annual Showcase. Tuscaloosa isn’t a city people pass through on their way somewhere else, which means the people Alabama needs to reach most are never going to just show up. So the program went and got them.

“I understand that Tuscaloosa is not the biggest media market,” he says. “And so we have to be intentional about bringing people down here.”

What changes when you actually go is harder to explain than it sounds. The program that exists in the national imagination — the one built from highlight packages and championship graphics and decades of being the team everyone else measures themselves against — looks different when you’re standing inside it. The scale of the investment, the depth of the staff, the seriousness with which every corner of the operation is run. A brand executive who has been buying inventory around Alabama games for years comes down and realizes she’s been looking at the lobby. Brock wants the people he needs to see what’s behind it.

“Once you’re down on campus and you see the legacy for yourself,” Brock said, “you’re able to move around, but also we’re able to position our head coach, position our athletic director, and our leaders in the different spaces to interact with the brand and media executives, to really identify ways to kind of further plug in.”

Alabama’s Constant Evolution

It’s worth acknowledging, before going any further, that Alabama has been the subject of a lot of pieces exactly like this one. The program is always evolving. It is always doing something unprecedented. The dynasty is always entering a new phase. Some of that coverage is warranted, and some of it is just what happens when you are the most written-about program in the sport.

What separates what Alabama is attempting from what most programs call a content strategy is the scope of the ambition. Adding a videographer and posting more on Instagram are not media operations. Neither is hiring a former ESPN producer or launching a YouTube channel. The NFL has spent thirty years building the most valuable sports media ecosystem on the planet. The NBA turned its players into global brands and its games into cultural events. A small number of European soccer clubs have done the same thing internationally. In every case, the ones that got there first didn’t do it by accident — they made a deliberate decision, at some specific moment, that the entertainment business was part of their business. Alabama is at that moment now.

“As an athletic program, you’re seeing what’s taking place across the landscape — that brands are becoming media companies,” Brock says. “And we’re taking this seriously. We know that there are some rich stories here. But also from a revenue standpoint, we’re building the right ecosystem so that we can generate revenue from it, so we can help sustain the program and continue to be a leader in the space.”

Alabama has been running the same loop for twenty years. Win, recruit better, win more. The program that does that longer than anyone else and with more consistency than anyone else eventually becomes something beyond a football team; it becomes a weight-bearing institution in the culture of a state, a region, a sport. What Brock is building sits atop that foundation and asks: What is all of this worth if you actually treat it like a business? The answer, if the infrastructure holds, the stories get told, and the right partners come to Tuscaloosa and understand what they’re looking at, is a lot more than anyone has collected on it so far.

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