How Wisconsin created its EA-inspired 2022 NSD graphics

Six words have reverberated throughout generations of sports fans and gamers.

E ... A ... Sports -- IT'S IN THE GAME.

Electronic Arts Inc. and its sports division have captivated audiences with its Madden, FIFA, PGA Tour and other various sports franchises on a multitude of video game consoles. That includes one popular series, NCAA College Football, which was discontinued by the video game developer after its 2014 edition. Of course, many fans have yearned for its return.

When Wisconsin announced its first 2022 signee, wide receiver Tommy McIntosh, at 6:29 a.m. CT on Dec. 15, the program unveiled its signing day motif with its Madden-esque graphics.

“This year, we sat down as a group, and a theme that sort of floated to the top pretty quickly was obviously everybody's very excited about the prospect of EA’s college football game coming back," Brian Mason, assistant director of brand communications for Wisconsin football told BadgerBlitz.com on Dec. 15. "And this is a class that, assuming all the timelines we read about are correct, these kids could have the potential to be in that game. We like the idea of tying into that, and so really built around the look and feel of the most recent Madden game."

[For those wondering, EA Sports announced a return of the series on Feb. 2, 2021, though the specific timeline is still to be officially confirmed. Extra Points' Matt Brown reported in March 2021 that a Collegiate License Company (CLC) letter, obtained via open records request, stated that the developer's target for a game release was around July 2023. Cory Moss, CEO of the CLC, told 247Sports' Brandon Marcello on Dec. 9 there is "hope" for Summer 2023, a similar timeline of Brown's initial report.

EA Sports tweeted later on Dec. 9 that it has "not announced a specific release timeframe for the upcoming EA SPORTS College Football title. We’ll confirm launch timing at a later date."]

Wisconsin announced 14 scholarship signees, along with seven walk-on additions to the program for this 2022 class on Wednesday. That is 21 total videos to design, capture and compare various "assets," and organize into succinct 40 to 65-second clips per recruit. A substantial group of UW personnel came together from the recruiting, creative and communications staffs and logged hours of planning, brainstorming, feedback and execution to take their ideas from vision to reality.

When Mason said that national signing day "is always all hands on deck for everybody that is associated with football in terms of communications and creative," that certainly rings true.

"It started with [graphic designers] Lauren Arndt and Julia Hujet, who worked on graphics for it," Mason said. "But then a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of making it all look like Madden, a lot of that credit goes to Erik Role in the video department. Jerry Mao and Brandon Spiegel are heavily involved in all that. You've seen the work those guys do, they're all wizards with video and the stuff that they can pull off.

"Then I think the ton of credit should really go to the two that sort of kept everything on the rails and kept it all together, which is Kelli Steffes -- who is our football social media coordinator -- and Meagan Blair, who is new addition to football recruiting staff, who's heavily involved in the communications."

The timeline from thought to what was shared on social media started about five weeks prior. Mao, a producer for Wisconsin's athletic department who previously created the men's basketball program's "One Shining Moment" video for the 2019-20 season, noted that the first meeting from a content perspective came on November 8.

National Signing Day, and its early signing period in mid-December, allows programs' athletic departments to display their innovative imaginations at work. In terms of audience, there really is one group that's the major focus, however -- the signees.

"This is a big day for creatives in this world, because you think ideally their best work is going to show around signing day," Mason said. "We start our meetings and we start our planning process, it isn't about what's going to impress our video guys’ peers at some other place, or what's going to impress our graphic designers' peers at another school. It's really about how do we stay sort of true to our brand and all of that, but also at the same time knowing that our primary audience is those recruits that we're going to sign and making it about them.

"So certainly that's where we go. That's the primary audience, and then from there, we try to do something that we think will catch everybody's eye and make sure that as people are scrolling through their feeds on signing day, they're going to look at those guys that have decided to join us and that we're really excited to have.”

Mao estimated about five to eight ideas surfaced during a 20-to-30 minute spitballing session, and among them a collector card's theme as one of those concepts. From there, about two to three ideas went into discussions about their respective feasibilities, especially with the football season continuing and basketball starting up. He echoed Mason's sentiments regarding the audience, wanting it to relate to the kids and making them feel special.

One of the first to be mentioned, according to Mao, was the fact that "everybody wants to see themselves in a video game," like a Madden or 2K Sports' variety of games.

They revisited the idea a week later after some research (see: watching YouTube videos) of how the menus of the EA Sports' Madden game looks and how people maneuver through them, looking to find ways those could be adapted to work for Wisconsin's purposes.

"We had some mock ups of like, 'Alright, so these are a few of the screenshots that I took of videos I watched,'" Mao told BadgerBlitz.com on Dec. 17. "We kind of threw over the screenshots and were like, ‘Yeah, so this part can be the highlights, and this part can be the tabs of the different things we're showing.’

"One of the things that we always try to do every year with the signing day videos is like trying to make it more personable. It's one thing to just show their face, but it's another thing to actually hear from them. So every year for the past few years, we've been trying to get a personal message from these kids, because at the end of the day, that's the most authentic way to show them off is to have them speak directly to the fans. We talked about how we can incorporate that into the menu and all that stuff."

The staff realized they could execute this concept. Then came time to build everything out -- both on the creative side with a digital framework for each video, and also from the communications staff in setting up the mechanisms for player interviews, photos and all relevant information needed.

The amount of granular details provided by Mao showcases the nuances creative departments take from inception to the final, polished product we all see. From a high-level standpoint, the staff needed to build "out the assets and the structure that we need to basically make this a project that we can more or less plug in and crank," according to the producer.

For this template, Role -- another UW video producer -- recreated the entire Madden menu. Mao hypothesized Role's time commitment at about 20-40 hours of work over the course of a few weeks between his other various projects. Mao created the welcome, loading and transition screens, which took between four to eight hours.

By early December, they saw a first look at Role's progress which was about halfway complete. Then a week before the early signing period commence, the staff had a working demonstration video of one signee that was between 90-95% finished.

"The next day, we had a basic mock up of what the graphic insert portion would be from Lauren," Mao said. "So basically taking inspiration from Madden menus and Madden menu styles with the triangles and textures and buttons and the look and feel of the stat bars and stat boxes. Building out something that would stand on its own, but also would feel like it was part of the menus if we had been navigating the game."

Each signees' video seen on social media and YouTube contained three different pages.

"We have the signee page, and then tabs over to the highlights page, and then tabs over to the personal message page," Mao said.

Colin Ludema, assistant football video coordinator, and his intern, Matt Whipple, took players' designated Hudl highlights -- which UW requested a top five from each recruit via questionnaire -- and provided those with freeze frames and players' positions on the field with the program's "Motion W."

By Dec. 13, two days before the early signing period began, the team had in its possession essentially all of the assets regarding graphics and Hudl highlights. Then Mao went through the commits' personal messages to Wisconsin fans from previous Zoom calls set up by Steffes and Blair.

Blair, UW's director of football recruiting communications and events, and Steffes helped organize the signees with those aforementioned calls, and they ensured all information was updated and correct. The latter also helped with YouTube thumbnails and descriptions.

“Between Kelli and Meagan, they put the plan together for how we were going to take all these different assets that had to be collected, all the different things that had to be designed, and then work closely with with graphics and video and made it happen," Mason said.

Spiegel and Role assisted Mao with what can be described as a two-step finalization in the creation of the videos using a couple of different softwares. That process, Mao estimated, took 10 to 15 minutes per signee thanks to the template being developed.

"I think the end result is something that we're all really proud of because for the people in the creative world, it's a kind of a showcase day," Mason said, "I think we can be really proud of how things turned out because we had a lot of people working really hard on it."

Once the final designs and plans are set, who approves it on the football side? Does Wisconsin head coach Paul Chryst give the go-ahead?

“I think where we always fall on that is if you think it's something that the head coach needs to see or have a say, in, then we go to him," Mason said. "But largely, I think we're very fortunate here that coach Chryst trusts the people that are in position to do the jobs to do their job.

"He's not someone that was really worried on a minute-by-minute basis about how the creative and the social media part was gonna come together. He trusts all of us to do our job there.”

BadgerBlitz.com reached out to a few of Wisconsin's main audience -- its signees -- for their reactions on Sunday. Those that responded certainly expressed very positive sentiments.

"We loved 'em," cornerback Avyonne Jones said. "All the recruits thought they were awesome, especially with the Hudl clips."

"They were arguably the coolest signing day graphics I’ve seen," athlete Cade Yacamelli said. "The fact that they put us in Madden was just unique."

"I think Wisconsin did a phenomenal job with the signing day graphics," four-star tackle Joe Brunner said. "They really hit the spot with knowing what the kids would love, and I totally did.

"They made it easy for us to be apart of as well. We just had to join a Zoom for about 10 minutes and answer some questions. But the best part was connecting it to Madden, which every football player has dreamed of being in since a little kid, so to see that is awesome. The whole staff did a great job."

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