It’s football season, which means Saturdays are suddenly about strategy, rivalries, statistics, questionable officiating and people saying things like, “We just need to control the clock.”
But football and public relations have more in common than you might think.
Both are about preparation. Both require a strong game plan. Both can change in an instant. And both are played in front of an audience that is more than willing to tell you when it thinks you’re doing something wrong.
So, in honor of college football season, we’re taking a look at some of the sport’s biggest programs and the PR tactics they represent.
No rankings. No playoff predictions. No arguments about who belongs in the Top 25.
Just a few lessons communications professionals can steal from the gridiron.
Tennessee: Build the Community Around You
Let’s start where we live. There may not be a better example of the power of community than Tennessee football.
Vol football doesn’t simply have fans. It has Vol Nation where everyone knows the correct orange Pantone and every year “feels like ‘98.”
The Tennessee brand extends well beyond the 100,000-plus people who pack Neyland Stadium on Saturdays. It lives in the traditions, the social media conversations, the checkerboards, the tailgates, and the shared rituals that make people feel like they are part of something bigger than a football team.
That is a powerful communications strategy: your audience should feel like it belongs to something.
The strongest brands don’t spend all their time talking at their audiences. They create opportunities for people to participate, identify with the brand, and share it with others.
For businesses and organizations, that might mean a customer community, employee ambassadors, community events, behind-the-scenes content, or simply giving your audience something worth talking about.
Because the goal isn’t to make people know you, it’s to bring people along with you. And if you’ve ever sung “Rocky Top” surrounded by a sea of orange, you already know the difference.
Alabama: Invest in Reputation
Ah, Alabama. We had to include them, but we don’t have to give them too much credit.
But the Crimson Tide does offer one particularly useful PR lesson: reputation is an asset.
Decades of winning have created a brand that carries enormous recognition and expectations. You don’t have to explain what Alabama football represents to most college football fans. That’s the benefit of investing in reputation over time.
For organizations, the lesson is particularly important: Don’t wait until you need credibility to start building it, earn trust before next season, before the crisis. Build relationships before kickoff, or before the pitch. And just like bragging rights, tell your story consistently before someone else tells it for you.
A strong reputation won’t make problems disappear. But it gives you something valuable to work with when problems inevitably arise.
And if you’re wondering whether Alabama’s reputation can carry a little too much weight sometimes… Well. This is a PR blog, not a rivalry blog. But it is written by an Auburn graduate living in Vol Nation, so take that for what you will.
Moving on.
Ohio State: Make Consistency a Strategy
Ohio State is a useful reminder that consistency doesn’t have to mean boring.
You may not like them, but the Buckeyes have built a football brand around sustained excellence, recognizable traditions, and a clear identity that doesn’t need to be reinvented every season.
The PR takeaway is less about any one season and more about the discipline of maintaining a recognizable identity. The best organizational brands don’t reinvent themselves every time a new trend comes along.
- They know what they stand for.
- They know what they sound like.
- They know what their audiences expect from them.
- And they repeat those messages often enough that the audience remembers them.
That’s strategic consistency.
In PR, we’re often tempted to chase the shiny new idea: a new campaign, a new tagline, a new platform, a new visual identity.
Sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed, but sometimes the answer is much less exciting: Find the thing that’s working. Then do it really, really well.
Notre Dame: Own Your Distribution
Notre Dame has something most college football programs don’t: an unusually long-standing direct relationship with a major national media platform and no conference.
Its football partnership with NBC dates back to 1991 and has helped make Notre Dame football a national television property in a way few other programs can replicate. That’s a heck of a distribution strategy.
And that’s a useful PR lesson in an era when organizations have more ways than ever to reach an audience directly. You still want the media, but you shouldn’t depend entirely on someone else to tell your story.
Your website. Your newsletter. Your podcast. Your social channels. Your video. Your events. Your employee communications. Those are all channels that allow you to communicate directly with the people who matter most.
The goal isn’t to replace earned media, it’s to make sure earned media is one part of your communications ecosystem, not the entire ecosystem.
Notre Dame has been doing some version of this for decades. The rest of us are just catching up.
Indiana: Change the Reality Before You Change the Story
And then there’s Indiana. This might be the most interesting PR lesson of the bunch.
Before Curt Cignetti arrived, Indiana football had spent years at the very bottom of the college football conversation.
Then everything changed.
Cignetti led Indiana to an 11-2 record in his first season in 2024. In 2025, the Hoosiers went 16-0 and won the College Football Playoff national championship, the first national title in program history and the first undefeated national championship team in the playoff era.
The transformation was so dramatic that it became one of the most remarkable turnarounds in modern college football. And here’s where the PR lesson gets interesting:
Sometimes repositioning isn’t about changing the message. It’s about changing what the audience experiences.
You can’t PR your way out of a bad product. You can’t create a compelling reputation for something that consistently fails to deliver. And you can’t simply slap a new tagline on an old problem and call it a rebrand. Indiana changed the underlying reality. Then the story became impossible to ignore.
That’s the dream scenario in PR: when the communications strategy and the actual experience finally line up. The lesson for organizations is simple: Before asking, How do we tell a better story? Ask: What would have to change for the better story to actually be true?
Sometimes the best PR strategy starts long before the press release.
Auburn: Build Loyalty Through the Experience
As an Auburn alum (War Eagle), I may be slightly biased here, but hear me out.
Auburn is an interesting case study in brand loyalty because, well, let’s just say the loyalty isn’t always being reinforced by the scoreboard.
Auburn fans have endured coaching changes, disappointing seasons, heartbreaking losses, and the occasional Saturday that has you throwing things at the screen. And yet, they keep showing up.
Why?
Because Auburn has built something bigger than the product on the field.
It’s the traditions. It’s the eagle flying over Jordan-Hare Stadium. It’s “War Eagle.” It’s Toomer’s Corner. It’s the rivalry. It’s the generations of families who pass Auburn down. It’s the idea of the Auburn Family. The experience has become part of the product.
And that’s a powerful PR lesson:
Don’t just give people something to buy. Give them something to belong to.
Organizations often focus so heavily on what they’re selling that they overlook the experience surrounding it. But products change. Leaders change. Campaigns end. Even football coaches eventually get fired. A strong brand gives people reasons to stay connected through all of it.
For businesses, that might mean creating traditions customers look forward to, developing a recognizable brand voice, building community around a shared mission or creating experiences people associate specifically with you.
Because when people are loyal to the experience, they’re much more likely to stick around when the product has an off year (or decade). Auburn fans know a little something about that.
Iowa: Give People a Moment They’ll Remember
Every football stadium has a scoreboard. Iowa has something else.
At the end of the first quarter, fans at Kinnick Stadium turn toward the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital and wave to the children and families watching from the windows.
The tradition, which began in 2017, has become one of the most recognizable traditions in college football. And it’s a brilliant example of something PR professionals sometimes forget: Not every powerful brand moment needs to be about the brand.
The Hawkeye Wave isn’t about selling tickets or promoting a sponsor. It isn’t even really about football. It’s about people. And that’s precisely why it has become so closely associated with Iowa football.
The lesson for organizations is simple: if you want people to remember your brand, give them something to feel.
A lot of communications are built around information. Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s what we’ve accomplished. Here’s our latest announcement. Here’s another statistic that proves we’re great.
Information matters. But emotion is what makes information stick.
Maybe it’s a community tradition. Maybe it’s an unexpected act of kindness. Maybe it’s a behind-the-scenes moment that lets people see the humans behind an organization.
The best brand experiences aren’t always the ones that say, “Look at us.” Sometimes they’re the ones that make people stop, look around and think: This is why I love being part of this.
PR Don’t: Don’t Become the Story
Lane Kiffin has entered the chat.
There are few people in college football who understand the attention economy quite like Lane Kiffin.
The (at this moment) LSU head coach has built a very recognizable public persona, particularly on social media, where his posts, jokes, jabs and commentary have frequently generated attention well beyond the football field.
From a pure attention standpoint? Mission accomplished.
But PR professionals know there’s an important distinction between getting attention and building reputation. And that’s where Lane offers a useful cautionary tale: Don’t let your personality become bigger than the organization you’re representing.
A CEO who responds personally to every criticism. A spokesperson who turns every interview into a personal platform. An executive whose social media becomes more recognizable than the company’s actual mission. A leader can absolutely be part of an organization’s brand. But if every story becomes about the leader, eventually the organization itself gets pushed into the background.
That’s especially risky during a crisis.
The story starts as, “Company responds to customer issue.”
Suddenly it’s, “CEO gets into an argument on social media.”
And now the communications team isn’t managing the story.
They’re managing the CEO.
Lane Kiffin is a particularly entertaining example because he is very good at making himself part of the conversation. That’s not necessarily a bad thing because attention can be incredibly valuable. But there’s a difference between being memorable and becoming the message.
The best spokespeople know when to step forward, when to step back, and when the story should be about something bigger than themselves.
So, from your friends in PR:
Be interesting. Be human. Have a personality.
Just remember that the brand you’re representing should still get the headline.
And maybe don’t abandon your team in the dark of night in chaos so intense it ignites couches on Cumberland Avenue.
The Final Score
The best PR strategies have something in common with the best football programs:
- They know who they are.
- They understand their audience.
- They prepare before the spotlight arrives.
- They build relationships over time.
- And they know that reputation isn’t something you can manufacture overnight.
Whether you’re building a national brand, growing a local business or trying to get your organization’s story in front of the right reporter, there’s a lesson somewhere on the college football field.
You just have to know what to look for.
And if nothing else, football season gives us one more reminder:
A good game plan matters. But execution is what people remember.
