Product brief

A desk for a college tree.

Bleacher Report organizes the sports internet around leagues and teams. The Alums organizes it around where they went to school. Oregon is the beachhead because the pipeline is deep, the brand is loud, and 36 former Ducks are on NFL 53-man rosters right now.

What v1 has to do

Roster truth. Every Duck on a 53, plus IR / practice squad flags.
Sunday board. One page with every Duck’s box score by 11pm PT.
News filter. Ingest national and local stories, keep only those that mention a rostered Duck.
Fantasy layer. PPR actuals + weekly projection + a start/sit chip.
Player files. College years, draft slot, current team, season line.

Day-one data (free only)

Do not buy a live feed until the site has traffic and a card processor. Launch on public data:

Rosters, weekly box, draft history: nflverse / nfl_data_py / nfldata.org — free, college field included. Filter college == "Oregon".
Combine / workouts: nflverse load_combine() plus public combine+pro-day sheets. Official numbers land once a year.
News: RSS (Ducks Wire, GoDucks ProDucks, team sites) and a free GNews/NewsAPI tier. Deduplicate by URL.
Fantasy: compute PPR from the same weekly file. Sleeper API is free for ADP.
CFL: hand-maintained roster of Canada Ducks until income covers api.cfl.ca volume.

Paid live box scores (SportsDataIO / Sportradar) wait until banners + affiliates cover the invoice. Until then, Sunday board updates after games, not every snap.

Money before subscriptions

Banners: one leaderboard under the hero, one inline in news, one on the fantasy board. Label them Advertisement. House ads for the shop until AdSense / direct-sold inventory fills them.
Affiliate shop: Fanatics / NFL Shop / Amazon Associates / official Oregon store. Jersey and hat links tagged to the player’s current team. FTC disclosure on every product page.
Do not: wallpaper the ticker or live box with ads. That is where trust lives.

Stack we’d ship

Next.js (or Astro) frontend, deployed on Vercel.
Postgres (players, weekly stats, stories) + a Sunday cron that pulls nflverse.
A tiny CMS (Sanity or even Notion) for the desk to write the Week N recap.
This static prototype is the design system. Keep the black / Oregon green / gold.

Roadmap

Oregon-only. Static design + curated Week 1 data. This folder.

V1.1

Live weekly stats job, headshots, practice-squad/IR, email “Sunday Flock” digest.

Add Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State as sibling pipelines. Shared player engine, school skins.

User accounts: follow a school, follow 8 players, fantasy overlay against your Sleeper league.

Name and brand

Network name is The Alums. Oregon lives at /producks as a channel, not the company. Do not print ProDucks on merch. Footer: not affiliated with UO, the NFL, the CFL, or Alum hotels. Next schools are sibling paths.

Colors: Oregon Green #154733 and Yellow #FEE123 on near-black. Editorial type is Oswald. Body is Source Sans 3.

Legal

Player names and stats are facts. Do not use official NFL or University of Oregon marks without a license. Do not republish full articles. Headshots: use a licensed data provider or a simple monogram system like this prototype.