Courtesy of UCF.
ORLANDO, Fla. – Last year, Gus Malzahn presided over a spring football game where across the back of his UCF players’ jerseys were not their names but their handles on Twitter.
This year, the Knights have upped their game.
When they kick off the spring game Saturday, the back of their jerseys will feature something else unique to college sports but ever-present in our daily lives: QR codes. Instead of a player’s roster number, the back of jerseys will feature a giant QR code that, when scanned, will link to that player’s bio page on the UCF athletics website. From there, fans can find links to a player’s social media channels and websites to purchase their own player-branded merchandise.
It’s all part of UCF’s attempt to stay progress in the new world of name, image and likeness (NIL).
Courtesy of UCF
“Last year, we put Twitter handles on our jerseys. I was like, ‘What the heck am I doing?’” laughs Malzahn, the 56-year-old former Auburn coach. “We wanted to be the school that embraced it. At the old traditional schools, there’s a lot of dynamics. Yeah, they’re for it but really, they’re not for it. We are a school that can fully embrace it—the young school, social media. It fits with us.”
UCF has an enrollment of about 70,000, and its average age of alumni is about 36, Malzahn says. That’s only going to drop. The school graduates around 20,000 students a year.
Just two years ago, Malzahn never thought he’d be embracing such things on jerseys.
“It was a little weird early on. Now it’s not,” he says. “Now it’s part of the job description.”
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For more UCF coverage, go to Inside The Knights.
