Tony Florez

SMAC Entertainment

Constance Schwartz-Morini (co-founder and CEO)
Michael Strahan (co-founder)
FredAnthony Smith (vice chairman of non-scripted)

Constance Schwartz-Morini was in Los Angeles for the Super Bowl in 2022 when she linked the dots.

Schwartz-Morini, who co-founded SMAC Entertainment in 2010 with Pro Football Hall of Famer and media star Michael Strahan, is the longtime adviser and enterprise affiliate of Deion Sanders, whom she helped persuade to enter teaching. With Sanders getting into his third season on the helm of Jackson State’s soccer program in 2022, Schwartz-Morini sought a brand new platform for considered one of sports activities’ most electrical personalities. So she bought to speaking with Marie Donoghue, Amazon Prime’s vice chairman of worldwide sports activities video.

“I just said to her, ‘Listen, there’s got to be something to do now that you guys have ‘Thursday Night Football’ and are getting into football,” Schwartz-Morini recalled. “Prime on Prime — it just doesn’t get to be a better story for a marketer.”

And so some of the common docuseries in sports activities leisure was born.

“Coach Prime,” a SMAC manufacturing, is making ready for its second season as a key tentpole within the manufacturing firm’s rising portfolio of football-related items. There’s additionally “BS High,” HBO’s documentary on Bishop Sycamore that premiered in August; “The Underdoggs,” an MGM sports activities comedy film starring Snoop Dogg with a deliberate theatrical launch in January; and a deliberate docuseries on the evolution of Black quarterbacks within the NFL that’s in manufacturing.

“We always talk about how we specialize in the multi-hyphenate,” Schwartz-Morini mentioned, “and that also goes for the productions that we choose to get behind.”

Schwartz-Morini first labored with Strahan within the late Nineteen Nineties, again when she was with the NFL as a director of tv programming and leisure advertising and he was nonetheless wreaking havoc as a New York Giants defensive finish. Overlapping on a program about linemen set the muse for a long-term relationship.

“When we did come together at the end of his career and launch SMAC, it was literally like everything we both learned on the grounds and in our previous employers in our previous lives and that’s just carried over,” mentioned Schwartz-Morini, who has sculpted a glowing repute for herself and her manufacturing firm with tasks like “Coach Prime,” which is able to take a brand new flip in its upcoming second season with Sanders getting into his first season as Colorado’s coach.

In early 2022, Schwartz-Morini introduced in one other veteran from NFL media, FredAnthony Smith, who had been an unique content material lead for the league and now leads unscripted present improvement.

The finest present in sports activities proper now may be what Deion Sanders is doing at Colorado, which is ideal timing for SMAC.

“I don’t want to say the stakes are higher because the stakes were as high for him when he was at Jackson State,” Schwartz-Morini mentioned. “But there’s different stakes now because so many people are cheering for him but there are even more people that are rooting against him now. And all that does is just give us more drive and energy to show everybody that he belongs there and he’s making amazing strides and he’s also leading the way to bring African American coaches along with him.” — Erik Bacharach