This week’s SBJ Tech newsletter covers the conversation on AI usage in the sports industry from the first of our three-part SBJ Live series on the topic and also highlights the arrival of a new security screening tech company on the scene. — Ethan Joyce
In today’s edition of Power Up:
- Cosm to show The Players
- MOGL creates AI to match athletes and brands
- ShotTracker boasts 50 college clients
Cosm to show The Players in shared reality
Cosm and the PGA Tour have a deal for Cosm to produce and present three days of The Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass in its immersive venues in L.A. and Dallas this March.
On March 13, 14 and 16 -- the first, second and fourth rounds of competition -- Cosm will show immersive angles of holes 16 through 18 in its wraparound LED domes, and live feeds of the rest of play in its venues' Hall spaces, which contain 155-foot programmable displays. (Third-round action on Saturday was excluded due to conflicts with the already-scheduled SEC and Big 12 NCAAM conference tournaments.)
“If you can’t make it there, Cosm is the next-best option,” Cosm’s SVP/Content & Media Peter Murphy told SBJ. “[The partnership made sense] between the location and iconic venue, the PGA Tour’s willingness to lean in and drive innovation, and our desire in 2025 at Cosm to try new things.”
This activation marks a mini milestone for Cosm: its first foray into outdoor golf (it showed a TGL match through its partnership with ESPN in January). That comes with production challenges but also event presentation opportunities.
Working alongside PGA Tour Studios, which handles the on-site production infrastructure for Tour events, Cosm will install two of its immersive cameras on each of holes 16,17 and 18 of The Stadium Course, showing viewpoints of those holes' tee boxes and greens. On 16 and 17, the green angles will be shot via camera mounts in the water -- or, as Murphy put it, “locations where you can’t buy a seat.”
“It’ll be a first-ever vantage point that we haven’t had before,” said Tom Jeffs, the PGA Tour’s VP/Media Business Development.
In addition to the live feeds in the Hall, Cosm will set up mobile gaming stations where visitors can demo PGA Tour 2K25 and, at its L.A. location, a mobile Dryvebox golf simulator. The company is also planning F&B offerings that mirror refreshments available at TPC Sawgrass, including the event’s flagship cocktail, the “Sawgrass Splash.”
“That really is part of what we promise,” Murphy said. “We want people to feel like they’re going to Florida to watch golf. And you can do that in Dallas, you can do that in LA.”
Both Murphy and Jeffs said their agreement is for one event to start, but the sides are optimistic it could spark more collaboration in the future if it is well-received by attendees.
“What will be interesting about golf is we’re trying to activate the whole space,” Murphy said. “We’ll see fan behavior. We’ll see if people sit in the Dome for an extended period of time and watch as they would sitting next to a hole at a course if you’re at a tournament -- or if people use it more as a GA experience, walking through, checking out the alt-feeds in the Hall, coming into the Dome for a three-some as they circle 17 or finish out their round on 18. That’ll be a fun experience, to learn how fans behave.”
NIL tech platform MOGL launches AI solution to match athletes, brands
MOGL, a tech platform designed to deliver mass scale in NIL influencer marketing, has created an AI solution to match athletes and brands and then help brands get better data to optimize their spending.
Conceived in 2019 by Notre Dame classmates Ayden Syal and starting quarterback Brandon Wimbush, MOGL is currently working with more than 25,000 athletes and 2,500 national brands, including prior campaigns with Toyota and DoorDash.
In building that business — which led to an NIL Power Players honor and New Voices Under 30 recognition for Syal — MOGL averaged about 14 days from the time a brand posted a campaign, signed athletes to help promote it and then started benefitting from deliverables such as an Instagram post.
It would also take about 29 hours for brands to receive their first qualified applicant. In the soft launch phase of MOGL AI, that time has been reduced to just three minutes, a 99% reduction.
“The core thing that we learned — and why we built MOGL AI — is that the overall timeline within the broader influencer marketing space needs to be reduced and needs to be reduced really tremendously,” Syal said, explaining that the product will “address athlete influencer outreach and discovery and then ultimately to match brands to athletes that better fit their criteria.”
MOGL AI was built on top of third-party large language models under the leadership of the firm’s Chief Product and Technology Officer Matthew Himelstein, who previously oversaw similar AI matching tech stacks at Wonolo, a blue-collar marketplace backed by Bain Capital and Sequoia. (Wimbush remains a MOGL advisor but joined Duael Track as a VP.)
The more efficient influencer discovery process is only part of the offering. It also initiates contact with automated outreach, manages campaigns from a single dashboard and offers enhanced data tools to help brands track campaign progress in real-time with detailed audience insights — age and geography of those reached and the relative success of each athlete’s posts.
“This AI tool enables them to hire 1,000 athletes within 10 minutes, and that’s really a huge differentiator for us and for these brands, but what becomes extremely exciting from an AI perspective is now we launched first-party data and reporting in the platform,” Syal said. “Another major gap that’s associated with influencer marketing is measurement and reporting — it’s hard for brands to understand if influencer marketing works for them because of the tools or the platforms they’re using.”
One early case study is 5Star, a new electrolyte drink mix that hit the market in November. MOGL initially connected them with six UNC athletes, including men’s basketball star RJ Davis and women’s soccer national player of the year Kate Faasse. They did photo and video shoots to produce social content as part of a pilot launch. From there, MOGL AI then connected 5Star with 100 more athletes in short order, and Syal said the campaign has now reached 300 million users.
5Star President Owen Agee said his company expanded its collaboration with MOGL AI because the NIL tech firm “makes it so easy to reach the next generation of consumers.”
“It’s helping us to unlock larger budgets with brands and help them to reach their target audience with precision in a way that you know historically we haven’t been able to do,” Syal said.
ShotTracker client list up to 50 college programs
ShotTracker, a performance analytics company working predominantly in basketball, announced the addition or renewal of contracts with 17 Division I college programs. That list includes four Big 12 schools adding the tech for both their men’s and women’s programs -- Arizona, Arizona State, Utah and Colorado -- as well as the men’s programs at Creighton, Indiana and Purdue. In total, more than 50 NCAA teams are ShotTracker partners, including Kansas men’s hoops, and it also has a league-wide deal with the Big 12 Conference.
What started as a sensor-based technology has evolved to also include more AI-based video and data-driven insights. Some of ShotTracker’s earliest investors include Magic Johnson and late NBA Commissioner David Stern. It implemented the NCAA’s first live analytics platform available on the bench during the 2018 Hall of Fame Classic.
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