Dave Campbell’s Texas Football: A Case Study

Dave Campbell’s Texas Football has long been a retail print publication. More recently, they have invested in providing more content to their online subscribers. No longer bound by the number of pages in a magazine, they have a never ending canvas to work with on the web.

Working together, we created a streamlined subscription flow that provides the subscriber with a mailed copy of the print edition, in-depth analysis of high school talent in Texas, access to insider videos and archives, recruiting services, and insider picks of every high school game in Texas.

The biggest goal coming in was to maximize subscriptions, so identifying more ways to surface unique content has been critical to the continued success of the new site.

As Texans ourselves, we know how important it is to have live scoring updates for Friday night high school games. We designed this feature to withstand high traffic within a short time period.

“The first weekend we launched live scoring we saw 29,000 visits to the site overall, with 18,500 visits to the Live Scoring page alone, peaking at 150–300 active users every minute.”

During the 2018 playoff games, 42,500 people visited the Live Scoring page in a single day.

How we kept it online under load

To ensure the site could withstand that kind of concentrated traffic, we leaned on Microsoft Azure’s cloud hosting infrastructure.

• Configured auto-scale capabilities to bring additional servers online, and take them back down, based on current traffic volume
• Used a load balancer to direct new traffic to the server with the least volume of usage in real time
• Leaned on SQL database performance reports to constantly improve data organization and query paths as more data became available

College football is serious business and knowing where your team stands within the rankings during the season is a must. Together with the team at Dave Campbell’s we developed the Texas College Football Heat Index, a ranking that tallies up the results, winning streaks, and point differentials of the last 10 games for every program in the state, from Texas to Navarro.

Using DCTF’s formula, we dynamically generate the Heat Index at the completion of each team’s game, always keeping the index up to date in real time. Our ability to cross-link data throughout the site means those Heat Index rankings update site-wide on team pages as well as the Heat Index itself.

Recruiting talent for college teams used to consist of calling coaches, visiting practices, and watching highlight reels. Today college recruiting has taken on a life of its own, between Twitter, Hudl, and ESPN, recruiting is everywhere.

With continued focus on Texas high school football, DCTF wanted to provide more coverage of the players in your communities and offer something no other service has: player honors and attributes.

Working with Dave Campbell’s we developed a backend recruiting system to help compile all relevant data about a player into one place. Beginning with the class of 2020, DCTF provides:

• Statewide rankings and positional rankings
• Star ratings and player descriptions
• Honors and attributes
• Colleges of interest and commitment status
• Highlight videos

With pre-existing advertisers in place, the Dave Campbell’s team needed a way to manage the display of those partners without relying on third-party plugins from Google or other advertising engines that wouldn’t play nicely with their existing ad deals.

To achieve this, we built a complete advertising management system. Their marketing team can input graphics and variable metadata such as ad placement within the site, limits on impressions and clicks, and ad prioritization, all without a developer in the loop.