Former Penn State Tight End Adam Breneman has found a new career in college football content creation. He interviews the biggest names in the sport, like former Nittany Lion Head Coach James Franklin.
Courtesy of Adam Breneman
At 30 years old, Adam Breneman could be a star Tight End in the NFL. The next Travis Kelce or George Kittle, if you will. The Pennsylvania native was a three-time 2nd-team All-American in college, starring for Penn State and later UMass. Instead, he is now a Forbes 30 under 30 media member, a co-founder of the College Sports Company, and a highly successful content creator.
Breneman has shared his knowledge of college football as an analyst on ESPN and CBS Sports. He also interviews the most influential people in the sport on his weekly podcast Next Up with Adam Breneman. He is online every day, discussing team performances, rankings, and the convoluted landscape of college football with his over 600,000 followers, and is actively creating new athlete-driven media networks across the United States.
As a 25-year-old, Breneman had already traded in his pads for a clipboard and whistle. Deteriorating knee issues had robbed him of his NFL dream. Still, his football acumen won him an assistant coaching job at Arizona State University, first as an offensive assistant and then as the Tight Ends coach.
“I thought I would be a head coach at 30 and do that my entire life,” Breneman told me over the phone. Instead, he was let go, along with the entire coaching staff, after an NCAA investigation into the university’s football program. But just as Breneman found a way to thrive after playing, he found new outlets after coaching.
Leaving Arizona State, he was a 26-year-old Power 5 coach, had been a former 5-star high school recruit, a projected NFL draft pick, and an All-American for two universities. He says, “I felt I had a unique perspective on football,” and so he focused his energy on building a brand discussing the realities of college football: what it’s like to be a 5-star recruit, what practice and game days are like, and how coaches work with players.
With ratings-darling Pat McAfee as his reference point, Breneman built his podcast following. “From the day that I started doing content, there has not been a single day in the past three to four years where I haven’t posted,” the former Tight End told me.
In his eyes, “volume negates luck,” not a surprising mantra for an athlete used to finding perfection through repetition. Breneman admits that sometimes his content is not the best, but he has improved over time, and continuing to produce something every day allows him to keep driving the conversation around the sport he loves.
A national voice in college football, Adam Breneman does live podcasting, participates in panels, and broadcasts for CBS Sports.
Courtesy of Adam Breneman
Not content with voicing his own thoughts on college football, Breneman has taken steps to platform current athletes. In 2022, he co-founded the College Sports Company alongside Porter Grieve and Andrew Spano. The company collaborates with universities nationwide to create and distribute athlete-driven media content. That content is, in turn, used to drive interest in the particular university’s athletics programs and attract strategic partnerships with local and national brands.
With Division I universities now obliged to pay players $20.5 million per season, they will need to find new sources of income. Stadium signage and other physical branding are outdated models. Breneman thinks the best way to generate that revenue is through content. “The best way for schools or collectives to drive new revenue is to act like media companies,” he says.
So far, the College Sports Company has launched athlete-driven media networks at nine top-tier sports universities: Penn State, Michigan, Tennessee, South Carolina, BYU, Louisville, the University of Virginia, Oklahoma, and Kentucky.
College Sports Company’s partnership with the University of Louisville’s NIL collective, 502 Circle, birthed Floyd Street Media. According to in-house metrics, Floyd Street’s athlete-first content generated over 137,000 views on YouTube from just two preseason games, and $750,000 in NIL revenue in its first month, a testament to the athlete-driven model College Sports Company is pushing across the country.
The company gets a cut on the upside of whatever each school generates, although exact figures were not disclosed. Breneman did insist, however, that “the majority of the revenue goes to the student-athletes themselves.”
Clearly, Breneman thinks his company’s model helps both schools and athletes, thereby enhancing the entire college sports industry. Furthermore, his career trajectory is one that he believes resonates with others and can act as a guide for young athletes.
While he feels he would have made money if he had played in the NIL era, he is living proof that there can be life after playing football, even if it is just talking about it. He is fully aware that he wouldn’t be where he is today without football, but states adamantly, “I used football and didn’t let football use me.”
What he thinks is important is that the young men and women who benefit from NIL agreements do not squander their leg up. “That’s a massive advantage for the rest of your life that players didn’t have before,” he says. As more money pours into college sports, he hopes to see more players rewarded financially. He also hopes it will keep players in school longer, meaning athletes will leave with money and degrees, ready for a future on or off the field.