Emily Melton Takes SEC Football on a Wild 100 Day Ride

Another Auburn grad makes good! Who says you can’t get a fun job in social media!

I am really excited about this news. Emily Melton - a former student and recent AU graduate - is working with CSTV on Mission: SEC. She is blogging and vlogging SEC football! The world of social media and college football will be changed forever.

…this will be a fun fall odyssey as Emily Melton turns college football and the SEC on its ear…

Mission SEC is a 100 day road trip through the Southeastern Conference leading up to the December 2nd SEC Championship game in Atlanta.

They are blogging and sharing videos about the culture of SEC football. There are three videos up now and tomorrow I believe we’ll start seeing the long list of interviews with many of the colorful characters of SEC football.

Funny thing is, they’ve got one of the most colorful and enjoyable characters on their team. Emily Melton is terrific. She’ll be an absolute delight to watch. Seriously, CSTV could not have picked a better person for this project. Now we just need to pray for Jean Neuberger and Glenn Anderson, her cohorts in this 100 day marathon.

So, good luck Emily. We’ll all be following your odyssey. This is going to be fun. War Eagle!

P.S. I really hope you guys will be putting these videos up on YouTube.com. There are a lot CSTV videos at YouTube, but I don’t see these in there, yet.

For context, if you are not familiar with SEC Football, it is basically a religion here. Compare it to the popularity of cricket in the UK, Australia and India or football (soccer) in Latin and South America and Europe, I guess. The SEC is the Southeastern Conference of university sports programs - 12 universities. The SEC drew about 1.5 million fans to their baseball parks this year, alone. Football in the SEC has outdrawn every other college conference for 25 years. Last year, SEC college football programs drew over 5.5 million fans to stadiums and untold tens of millions watched on TV. It is big business. CSTV is a CBS company.

Here is just one example of the revenues generated:

The SEC (distributed) approximately $116.1 million to the 12 league schools in its revenue sharing plan for the 2005-06 athletic year…

Broken down by categories, the money derived from $47.4 million from football television, $20.7 million from bowl games, $13.2 million from the SEC Football Championship, $12.1 million from basketball television, $4.4 million from the SEC Men’s Basketball Tournament and $18.3 million from the NCAA Tournament. (Source)