Fast and scrappy. Repeatable at scale. Infrastructure underneath.

The Hoop Collective is ESPN's NBA podcast, a pre-game and post-game show with same-night turnaround during the Finals. Paper Dart was brought in on short notice to run production: set up, record, and cut social clips around each show.

The brief was loose. The show knew it needed hands. It didn't have a shot list.

An hour before Game 1, the plan for Tim MacMahon's trip into the Jackals section, the Spurs fan group he was writing about, was a couple of b-roll clips shot from a distance.

That's the version you get when the crew only has capacity for the assignment.

We had the gear and the bandwidth to do more, so we did. MacMahon went in with his own vlog camera and a mic. We shot b-roll from outside and recorded him interviewing fans inside.

None of that was the job. It was possible because the kit was overbuilt for the brief and the setup for the podcast was already handled.

The edit turned around in under 24 hours so it could run the next day.

A two-minute segment that didn't exist in the plan.

It ran as standalone content and aired on ESPN as the visual accompaniment to MacMahon's written story on the Jackals. The podcast shows and social clips shipped on schedule alongside it.

College athletic departments live or die by social, but most operate as siloed brands. Learfield Studios sits across 40+ Power 5 programs as a centralized creative resource.

The question: when something works at one school, what does it take to run it at twenty? At forty?

Three cross-property campaigns: March Means, Countdown to Kickoff, and From Every Angle. Each was designed to repeat across schools without losing local identity.

What worked at one school didn't translate cleanly to twenty. Each new partner required custom setup. Execution broke as participation grew. Without shared infrastructure, success at one property became friction at scale.

Each campaign followed the same model: pilot, build the infrastructure, then scale.

March Means grew from 7 to 14 schools and 40+ athletes in a year. Countdown to Kickoff expanded from 20 to ~36 schools. From Every Angle delivered 18+ episodes across 8+ programs in its first window.

The shift was in how the work was structured. Reusable one-sheeters, opt-in trackers, and fulfillment dashboards meant each new property entered a system that already worked.

The infrastructure became the deliverable. That's what allowed the work to scale without rebuilding each time.

Three campaigns. 40+ schools. 2M+ impressions.

Behind every multi-property campaign is the operational work that makes it possible.

Content operations across 40+ collegiate athletic properties. The infrastructure behind how campaigns were planned, executed, and delivered.

The output wasn't a single piece of content. It was the system that made all of it possible.

At scale, fragmentation was the default. Teams worked on different timelines. Sales, content, and athletics weren't aligned. What worked at one school broke at another, and it was hard to trace the root.

Every issue became a one-off fix. Nothing carried forward.

Three areas.

When the system held, the work held. So the focus wasn't fixing individual problems. It was making the system reliable.

40+ properties, one shared system.

Before, every property operated differently. Campaigns broke in different ways and fixes didn't transfer.

After, teams were working from the same templates, the same timelines, and the same source of truth. Work that used to require constant alignment moved without it.

Pre-production templates, routing grids, and audit frameworks became the standard across the network. Properties without dedicated resources had a clear path into the same system.