A central tenet of The Checkdown’s philosophy is to spotlight and amplify player personalities, and nowhere do those personalities shine brighter than through their choice of pregame outfits. We know how players and their teammates celebrate fashion and style, and we knew we had an opportunity to share that experience with football fans.
We wanted to highlight player fashion in ways that would make it shareable by players, teams and fans alike. Our solution? Leverage our Live Content Correspondents and our presence at every NFL game to capture player outfits as they arrived at the stadium.
With those images in hand, we then had some of our most talented illustrators draw the best player outfits each week in a unique style, then post each illustration to our Instagram Story. Finally, we let our followers vote on the best fit each week. What started as a way to better highlight player fashion turned into something so much more.
Before we knew it, not only were players and teams sharing our illustrations every week, but they were actively sending us messages to put an upcoming outfit of theirs on our radar or request an illustration of a past outfit. From Mark Ingram to Cam Jordan to Jamal Adams, our DMs were full of player interactions about Fit of the Week. Players actually came to us asking for a custom illustration of themselves.
We were able to take player fashion and turn it into a cultural conversation every single week, creating a brand new content series that fans not only expect from us, but crave.
Of the four illustrations we made on a weekly basis, all four players shared the Instagram Stories to their own feed almost every week of the season.
