Road to Game Day

A couple days ago I received an email from Phil Arnold, who had corresponded with me several months ago with interest about Badgercentric. He's a former football walk-on who has graduated and along with his brother launched a new college football-focused site. I'll let him tell the story below:

Well, I guess you could say you are kind of an inspiration. I graduated in May with an economics degree and had been doing the whole job search for a few months or more. After missing out on a job that I thought I wanted, and getting a few offers that i knew I didn't want, my brother approached me with an idea completely out of the blue. He sent me a business plan for a college football website that's premise centered around us driving week to week to the best college football games that Saturday could offer, chronicling the journey, gameday atmosphere, and whatever else we wanted to talk about. I had just gotten a sales job offer in Chicago (with sales not being something that I necessarily wanted to do) when he sent me the email.

I guess I figured I'd never get another chance like this and hopped on board. After some very hard work (more by my brother than me) and some how convincing a few investors to provide start up money, we launched www.roadtogameday.com. We managed to sign a partnership with The Sporting News to be hosted on The Sporting Blog, and when i read your recent post about the new Sporting News, I figured I would let you know about my exodus.

We unfortunately missed the first week of the season because of a family wedding in Chicago we really couldn't miss, so I'm now in Gainesville for the first official stop on the Road to Game Day (we filed our company with Game Day as two words, as not wanting to get crushed by ESPN if we ever get bigger). We're planning on doing 3 goofy videos a week and blogging as often as we possibly can. My brother was a writer in Los Angeles before he decided to do this, and I don't really consider myself a writer, so I'm sticking mainly to the football aspect.

I was wondering if you could possibly throw me a link on Badgercentric? I'd be happy to answer any questions you had about the site or the idea. We are just starting to try to gain readership as this was a pretty big rush job, but we are doing a pretty good job already. If you look now, we're on the front page of the Sporting News' college football section. Weird...

Talk to you soon, and good luck to the badgers versus Marshall. Can't wait til we play Fresno next weekend. Hopefully we don't blow that one.

The brothers Arnold are off to a good start, best of luck to them. Maybe someday soon Andy and I will do something like this ... okay, probably not, but what a cool idea!