SBJ Unpacks: Dajuan Eubanks is the Celtics’ Maine man

Tonight in Unpacks: Dajuan Eubanks honed his networking skills at stops with the Harlem Globetrotters and GMR Marketing, helping him lead the Celtics’ G League team in Portland, Maine, through a rebrand and making it one of the most successful minor-league clubs in the country, as SBJ’s David Broughton reports in this early look at next week’s magazine.

Also tonight:

• Literate AI helping sports orgs prepare for AI-driven internet
• CBS’ ‘The NFL Today’ going retro for its 50th birthday
• Laver Cup set for sell-out crowds at Chase Center
• NFL loses key member of its exec team

Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where Abe Madkour wraps up the week with insights gleaned from this week’s AXS DRIVE conference along with innovations in college football replay reviews, Inter Miami closing in on an extension with Lionel Messi and more.

Dajuan Eubanks has never interviewed for a job.

He was a junior at Justin F. Kimball High School in Dallas when he was recruited to play basketball by Rice University; moved into a student coaching assistant role with the Owls after an injury derailed him; and was working out with friends one day during his senior year when legendary Harlem Globetrotters player and coach Tex Harrison saw him and brought him into what was not simply a chance to travel the world while playing the sport he loved, but to become immersed in the world of entertainment marketing.

Eubanks’ nearly three years with the Globetrotters from 1994 to 1996 was more than just performance — it was an education in networking. The organization emphasized that success wasn’t just about talent, but about connecting with people.

“We were engaging with fans in public during the day and in the arenas every night, so it was about relationship building and responding to crowds in the moment,” he said. “So that, combined with my business degree, really put me on the trajectory that I’m still on today.”

While touring, Eubanks was introduced to GMR Marketing, the team’s agency that was producing a Globetrotters HBCU tour for Apple Computer to promote its first touchpad laptop. His skill engaging audiences led to a new opportunity: tour manager for the NBA Jam Van, GMR’s first major consumer engagement initiative.

One week into what was intended to be a three-week trial, GMR asked him to stay on permanently.

“I purposely started on the road with Jam Van so I could understand what live event marketing was and what it could become,” he said. “When I started, the whole ‘entertainment marketing’ genre — that’s what it was called back then — was still very nontraditional. Advertising and PR got the majority of the budget line items, and if we got anything, we felt lucky.”

After nearly two years on the road, he transitioned into GMR’s internal operations in Milwaukee to start a family and deepen his understanding of the business.

Beyond the NBA, he oversaw Major League Baseball’s first “Road Show” campaign, and the McDonald’s account during its “Plan to Win” campaign, which introduced healthier menu options and innovative brand engagement strategies.

His then-wife was from Ellsworth, Maine, 2½ hours up the coast from Portland, and when his family traveled from Milwaukee to visit her family each February, Eubanks was always surprised how enthusiastic his mother-in-law was when watching Class C and D girls basketball state playoffs on her small black-and-white kitchen TV.

In 2005, he relocated to Portland, following GMR’s acquisition of Pierce, an event marketing agency.

“It was those family visits that helped to lay the foundation for me to understand how important basketball is to this state. And then once I moved here, I really got it.”

During his three years at Pierce, Eubanks viewed Portland as his “bedroom community” because his clients and his work were national and global. Locally, he felt mostly known as “that 6-9, freak-of-nature former Harlem Globetrotter with kids in the school system.”

Determined to root himself in the community, Eubanks began networking. In February 2009, he attended a Portland Regional Chamber event called Eggs & Issues, where he introduced himself to the ownership group launching the Maine Red Claws, the state’s new NBA D-League team (now G League Maine Celtics since Boston bought the franchise in 2019).

Weeks later, he was named vice president of corporate partnerships of the team, became president in 2014 and was named the league’s Team Executive of the Year after the 2019-20 season.

The networking skills learned during his Globetrotters and GMR years is evident every day in Maine. He often carries his Celtics 2024 championship ring with him and doesn’t hesitate to let people try it on.

“It’s just another way we can help strengthen our connection to the community, and the state’s connection to the Boston Celtics. It’s all about community access and sharing it with our supporters.”

That connection is becoming as natural as lobster with butter.

Last season’s ticket revenue and corporate partner revenue were all franchise records, he said, noting that since 2021, the team’s corporate partnership roster has grown from 44 brands to 53, which included an 18% year-over-year increase in associated revenue last season. The team also saw a 35% year-over-year increase in season tickets and has again topped 1,000 full-season tickets for the upcoming season, meaning that nearly half of the 2,417-seat Portland Exposition Building, known as The Expo, is filled with long-term fans. The club sold out 17 of its 24 regular-season games last season and averaged 2,253 fans for its third straight year-over-year increase.

Additionally, the club was fourth in the league for 2024-25 merchandise sales, a 40% year-over-year increase that was certainly bolstered by playoff runs the past three seasons, including the club’s first appearance in the league finals in 2024; and was second in the league in per-cap revenue, despite playing in one of its smallest arenas.

The Alabama native’s accomplishments were recognized last week when he was inducted into the Maine Sports Hall of Fame.

“It’s been great for me to be able to develop myself personally here and step into my voice and showcase my skill set professionally, particularly as a minority individual in Maine,” he said. “It’s just been a great place for me to really come into my own and build a great community that is supportive of me and my family. Family doesn’t always have to be blood, you know, and I have a whole lot of friends and family here.”

After trotting the globe, Dajuan Eubanks is officially a Mainer … with no interview needed.

THREE QUESTIONS WITH DAJUAN EUBANKS

• What venue would you most like your team to be able to play a game in (and don’t say the Sphere): One of the anomalies about New England’s pro sports is that it’s not just our historical stadiums and arenas that have mystique, but so do the generations of fans that come into those buildings. The Expo is a lot like the old Boston Garden and TD Garden in that way. So I’d say TD Garden.
• You said the “two degrees of separation” in Maine can make it difficult to separate personal life from work life, especially for someone who is in the public eye. How do you make that happen?: I love to fly fish in northern Maine on the Allagash. Also, this summer I took a bourbon trip to Kentucky put together by my friend Mike Meir, managing director of Man & Oak [a members-only bottle club in Portland]. I’ll never do another bourbon trip again that wasn’t organized by him!
• Goal for the next year: We’re part of the organization that has the most NBA championship banners and we are under the same directive as they are. We’ve seen improved results on the business side and on the court since becoming part of the overall fabric of the team 100 miles south of us. Winning a championship will help further that integration.

As internet users increasingly trade trails of purple links for bulleted artificial intelligence-generated summaries as their primary mode of search, an emerging firm is seeking to help teams, leagues and adjacent brands maintain their online visibility.

Literate AI is a 4-year-old subsidiary of Red Krypton Inc., a digital marketing agency co-founded by former Group SJR co-founder Mitch Stoller and ex-Tough Mudder and NBC Sports executive Dan Weinberg in 2019. Its specialty is “AI optimization,” a new-age version of search engine optimization that evaluates how often and in what context certain terms show up in popular AI queries, then implements strategies for increasing and refining that presence. It launched an AIO offering specific to sports a little less than a year ago.

“We see [AIO] as SEO 15 years ago — a time to disrupt and a little bit of a golden age, especially within the next two to three years,” Weinberg, Red Krypton’s CEO, told Sports Business Journal. “It’s really been in the last six to 12 months we understood the significant opportunity in sports and entertainment.”

Web publishers are feeling the impact of AI’s rise as a search/recommendation tool. Platforms such as ChatGPT and features such as Google’s AI-synthesized search summaries are at once siphoning web traffic across the internet and reshaping the way hundreds of millions of people retrieve and process information. In February, Bain & Company published research that found 60% of internet searches terminate without the user clicking through to another website, and that organic web traffic had decreased 15%-25% due to reliance on AI-written results.

The primary opportunity for sports organizations and brands in this area, in the view of Literate AI’s leadership, is reputation management. That could mean reaching fans who ask an AI search platform for recommendations of activities in their city on a given weekend, or potential partners whose market research includes probing AI for the sports properties or consumer brands that deliver the best sponsorship ROI.

“[Large language models] are nothing if not hungry — they want content, they want information constantly,” Literate AI CEO Matthew Van Dusen explained. “It’s not link-driven. It synthesizes and aggregates. And so, there’s this need to speak directly to the machines.”

Literate AI’s consulting process includes an audit of a brand’s visibility and reputation within a range of programmatically generated AI search queries, then targeted content development that addresses priority areas. Its initial audit can be priced at $15,000 to $100,000, depending on complexity, with projects typically lasting six to 12 months once they move to proactively managing one’s brand signals in AI platforms.

Weinberg says Literate AI is in talks with more than 25 teams, leagues and sponsors, including All Elite Wrestling and Michigan-based sports investment/management firm Simon Sports as clients. The latter recently underwent a six-month AIO project intended to drive traffic to online merchandise for the Halifax Mooseheads, a Quebec Maritimes Junior Hockey League team it owns, and is now exploring ways AIO can influence other areas of its business.

Simon Sports President Peter Simon called fan discovery one of the biggest potential impact areas of AIO.

“If I’m a sports fan and I live in Michigan, and I look up a game to go to tonight on Google, what teams are going to show up first on AI search?” Simon said. “If that’s based on their brand and their media and their visibility on the internet, that could be the difference in missing out on a potential revenue source if someone is going to buy tickets to your game.”

As another example of its audit process, Literate AI compiled an independent report on which NFL teams and sponsors are most visible in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity when asked which deliver the most ROI to partners.

Based on a “visibility score” formula that weighs how many times a team was mentioned in AI search results, where teams ranked in lists generated by AI search platforms and the number of users each AI platform has, Literate AI’s research found the Cowboys (visibility score 41), Rams (38) and Giants (25) to be the leaders among NFL teams, while the Saints (2), Buccaneers (2) and Cardinals (1) were the least visible. On the brand side, meanwhile, Gatorade (33), Verizon (30) and Bud Light (27) were particularly visible. (The firm considers visibility scores between 31-45+ to be strong, 15-30 to be moderate and 14 or less to be weak.)

Literate AI Associate Director Henry Eisler also called out a key learning from the NFL team list in the sixth-ranked Jaguars (19) and eighth-ranked Raiders (17), which each beat out teams based in larger media markets.

“[The Jaguars and Raiders] had 3.5 times more content about their sponsor partnerships cited by the large language models than any other team on average did,” Eisler said. “That means that there are case studies, there’s news coverage, there’s content coming out of the teams about how the Jacksonville Jaguars are partnering with a sponsor, or the Las Vegas Raiders assigned naming rights for Allegiant Stadium.

“That kind of content is becoming important source material to the AI platforms, and it’s making these teams a lot more visible than maybe [you’d expect].”

Weinberg views the next two to three years as a major opportunity for those who invest in understanding how AI surfaces information, before advertising in AI platforms becomes “pay for play” the way it is now on social platforms and traditional search engines.

“It is a fast-moving space,” Weinberg said. “But at this exact time, I think smart, innovative companies and leaders are understanding there’s an opportunity to capture share here that won’t exist in a year or two.”

CBS Sports is throwing it back to 1975 during this Sunday’s NFL coverage as it celebrates the 50th anniversary of “The NFL Today.” The show’s debut on Sept. 21, 1975, lines up exactly 50 years with Sunday’s games, and CBS is going retro for both the studio show as well as its game broadcasts.

CBS will have a retro set for “The NFL Today,” as well as specialized graphics, music and even announcer wardrobes. Brent Musburger, the only living cast member from the original show, will also join the network during the pregame hour.

“A lot of us have been NFL fans for a long time and one of the things that always makes me perk up is when I see footage of old players, the Walter Paytons, the Dan Marinos, the Dick Butkus, etc,” said Tyler Hale, CBS’s SVP/Studio Production. “And so anytime you see that old footage, it makes you smile.”

Hale said the idea for the throwback Sunday started going back to Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas, when CBS aired a documentary, “You Are Looking Live,” which was a historical documentation of “NFL Today.” Then in 2024, CBS started planning around the 50th anniversary.

CBS’s crew of Musburger, James Brown, Matt Ryan, Bill Cowher and Nate Burleson will appear from a recreated studio meant to mimic 1975. Show segments will hearken back to that era, from graphics to music.

“The neat thing is that we also have to talk about the games on Sunday,” Hale said. “So, we are going to be previewing the matchups, the games that we have, but doing so in a way that hearkens back to how it would’ve been done in 1975.”

Likely to get the most attention on Sunday will be the wardrobes selected by the broadcast talent. Members of the studio show will be donning retro garb. Game play-by-play announcers and analysts will be wearing replica CBS blazers from the 1970s.

“They’re going to have some fun with their shirts and ties, loud colors, think Anchorman era,” said Steve Karasik, CBS’s SVP/Remote Production. “All of our guys are really leaning into it and want to have some fun.”

While Musburger is the only living cast member remaining, many members of CBS’s crew have ties to the old shows, Hale said, providing a direct line to that era.

“At CBS we’re really proud, obviously of the history that we have in covering the NFL,” Hale said. “We’re really proud of the stuff that we do today with the evolution and modernization and technology that we use today. But one of the really cool things about working here is that there are a lot of people here that may not have been here in 1975, but started their careers in the early 80s, etc. So, we have this great through line, and so when we have these meetings and we talk about something like a throwback that happened 50 years ago, there are actually people in the room that learn from and know what it was like then.”

The 2025 edition of the Laver Cup -- the self-proclaimed Ryder Cup of tennis and a joint initiative between Roger Federer’s Team8 agency, Tennis Australia, the USTA and Jorge Paulo Lemann -- begins today at S.F.’s Chase Center, the third time the event has come to the U.S. and first time since 2021 (TD Garden in Boston).

Organizers say the tournament sold out all sessions at the 16,500-capacity Chase Center on Friday, Saturday and Sunday (its sixth sellout in eight years), including a bevy of premium clubs that price between $5K and $30K. Outside the venue, the Thrive City mixed-use district will host a Laver Cup Fan Zone from Thursday-Sunday, which will be anchored by a 74-by-24-foot LED screen for watching matches and include activations like live tapings of Andy Roddick’s “Served” podcast; pop-ups from tournament partners ServiceNow, Mercedes Benz and DAOU Vineyards; and a mini-tennis gaming space run by USTA NorCal. Laver Cup has 22 total corporate partners in 2025, headlined by founding partner Rolex (which re-upped on a five-year extension earlier this year) and global sponsors UBS, Mercedes Benz and Alipay+.

The competition will see a series of singles/doubles matches between members of Team Europe, captained by Yannick Noah and led by world No. 1 Carlos Alcaraz, and Team World, captained by Andre Agassi and featuring American star Taylor Fritz.

RELATED: Laver Cup team tennis competition to return to London’s O2 Arena in 2026

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Dhruv Prasad, an NFL SVP and former direct report to league No. 2 Brian Rolapp, has quit his position three months after Rolapp departed to become CEO of the PGA Tour, sources said.

Prasad, who joined the NFL in 2022, oversaw both the league’s media business development division and 32 Equity, its venture investing arm. Prasad made his mark in a short period of time, playing a key role in putting together the ESPN equity deal, the formation of Skydance Sports with Skydance Media and the launch of EverPass Media. His decision to leave was his own, sources said. His next career step is unknown, and efforts to reach him today have not yet been successful. His last day was Friday.

It’s the first major change in the NFL’s C-suite since Rolapp left in June. After Rolapp departed, Commissioner Roger Goodell had Prasad begin reporting to him directly, sources said.

It’s unknown whether Goodell will attempt to replace Prasad one-for-one, but for now, sources said, 32 Equity reports to CFO Christine Dorfler, and the media business development division is back under Hans Schroeder, EVP/media distribution, with VPs Brent Lawton and Grace Senko as the ranking media B.D. staffers.

• NBC Sports’ return as an MLB rights partner will include a Sunday morning package, likely on Peacock, with the company replacing a window that had been on Roku, sources tell SBJ’s Austin Karp.
• Miami FC’s proposed 15,000-seat stadium, which will anchor the larger Sports Performance Hub project, can commence construction following the Homestead, Fla. city council’s Thursday approval of an 80-year ground lease with a group of developers and investors, reports SBJ’s Bret McCormick.
• SailGP awarded its latest expansion franchise to Artemis Racing, which will represent Sweden, writes SBJ’s Chris Smith. Artemis was founded in 2006 and is backed by Torbjörn Törnqvist.
• The $46.7 million Woodman’s Sports & Convention Center continues the youth sports building boom when it opens Saturday night in Janesville, Wisc., in a former Sears building, notes SBJ’s David Broughton.
• In F1’s new licensing deal with S.F.-based home retailer Williams-Sonoma, the Pottery Barn brand will now make F1 racing-themed bedding, rugs and other décor and accessories for kids and teens, reports SBJ’s Adam Stern.
• Stern also writes that CKE Restaurants brand Carl’s Jr. is introducing a Chiwiwi Burger as part of a deal with UFC fighter Raul Rosas Jr.
• The PGA of America exceeded its goals for its $10,000-per day premium hospitality option nearly a month before the Ryder Cup begins at Bethpage Black, notes SBJ’s Josh Carpenter.