Fanatics X Picks
X Picks — A First-of-Its-Kind Sports Community Deal
Client: Dez Bryant / Fanatics Sector: Sports Betting / Community / Culture & Commerce Partners Courted: MGM, Circa, Betr, and others Partner Secured: Fanatics (1/1 exclusive) Platform: X Picks on Patreon, X (Twitter), The Money Route TV Deliverables: Platform concept and strategy, community development, brand and content architecture, partnership development, deal negotiation, activation calendar
The Opportunity
When sports betting legalized and expanded across the United States, it didn't just open a new market — it opened a new cultural moment. Overnight, sports fandom became participatory in a different way. The casual fan had a reason to know the spread. The die-hard had a reason to follow the capper they trusted. The culture around sports — the talk, the takes, the predictions — became commerce.
Dez Bryant was perfectly positioned for that moment. He knew the game at a level almost nobody else did. He had relationships across the league, with players, coaches, and the kinds of people whose knowledge shapes outcomes before any line is set. He had a community that trusted him and wanted to be in the action with him. What he didn't have was a platform built to monetize all of that in a way that was worth something to him and to a partner at scale.
That's what X Picks was built to be.
The Platform: X Picks
The insight behind X Picks was that sports betting had a product problem hiding inside a cultural moment. The apps were everywhere and the interest was real, but what existed was transactional: here's a line, here's a pick, here's an outcome. There was no community. There was no education. There was no experience of actually being in the action with people you trusted and respected.
X Picks was designed to solve that. Not a tipster service. A sports community platform — the first of its kind — built around the idea that sports are better together, and that the right platform could make every subscriber feel like they were watching the game with their best friends, no matter where they were or how much time they had.
The platform ran on three pillars. The first was powerful insights — not statistics, not models, but the kind of knowledge that comes from actually knowing the game and the people who play it. Dez and the team used that knowledge to explain not just what to bet but why, in language that made the sport make sense rather than reduce it to math. The second was curated moments — putting subscribers inside the action through Dez's actual experience of it, sweating outcomes together, sharing in the wins and the losses as a community rather than as individuals staring at their phones. The third was games, challenges, and giveaways that layered additional engagement on top of the betting itself, building value and connection that didn't live and die with any single outcome.
Inside X Picks lived the Capper's League: a competition among the twenty best cappers in the game, submitting their one best NFL play each week, scored on wins, losses, and odds. Teams, spot prizes, two-way amplification — a competition the culture could follow week over week as it built toward crowning the best capper alive. There was nothing else like it in the space.
Building the Proof of Concept
The strategy for getting a deal with a major sports betting brand was never to walk in and ask for one. It was to build something worth wanting and make the right partners come looking.
That meant going to market with whoever was ready to move first. MGM moved first. The partnership put Dez at UFC 300 — one of the most watched combat sports events in history — as a visible, active face of the brand. March Madness with Circa followed. A home Cowboys game with Betr. Trips to games and events across the country, each one generating content, each one deepening the community, each one demonstrating that X Picks wasn't a concept — it was working.
The events were not incidental to the deal strategy. They were the deal strategy. Every activation with a competing brand was proof of demand. Every piece of content was evidence of what a full partnership could look like. The question being answered — for every brand watching — wasn't "can Dez draw an audience" but "can this platform activate that audience in ways that move our business." The answer was being demonstrated in real time.
Fanatics saw the waves being made with MGM and started asking questions. That was the signal.
Closing the Fanatics Deal
The nurture period wasn't a sales process. It was a presence strategy.
The Big LA Tailgate brought the Cowboys fanbase to Los Angeles for a Cowboys away game — a Texas-sized party in the shadow of the opponent's stadium, the kind of cultural activation that only works if the person at the center of it is actually that person. Dez was. Jay Z and LeBron James were in the building. That kind of room doesn't happen through production. It happens through reputation and relationships, and it was exactly the kind of moment that demonstrated to Fanatics what being associated with Dez Bryant actually meant in the culture.
The Reform Gala in Atlantic City — Michael Rubin's event, Meek Mill in the room, the whole thing turned up — was another moment that didn't need explanation. You were there or you weren't, and Dez was there and he made it.
The final move in the relationship was a personal favor. Traveling to Chattanooga to support a fan experience promoting Fanatics' new properties — not a high-profile event, not a culture moment, just showing up and delivering because the relationship mattered and Michael Rubin's business mattered. That's the kind of move that closes a deal when everything else has been equal. It signals that the partnership isn't transactional — that the team on the other side of the table takes the relationship seriously enough to do the unglamorous work.
After Chattanooga, the attorneys got involved. The deal was done.
The Deal Structure
What Fanatics agreed to was a 1/1 partnership — exclusive in the sports betting space, first of its kind in how it was structured around a personality and a community rather than around inventory or ad placements.
The co-production agreement made Fanatics a production partner on select Money Route TV episodes: Fanatics organizing event access, the X Picks team shooting the content, Fanatics receiving and editing with one round of creative feedback before publishing to Dez's owned channels with partner-posted clips on social. Both logos. Every collaborative episode framed as presented by Fanatics.
Travel support provided a standard per-event budget for the X Picks team — Dez, a camera operator, and a production lead — to attend and document activations independently, keeping the content feeling real rather than managed. A $5,000 monthly FanCash discretionary budget gave the team the ability to activate the community spontaneously, which is exactly where some of the best content and the most authentic moments come from.
Card breaking from the suite at Cowboys home games added a collectibles layer — Dez live on stream, breaking cards, activating the Fanatics collectibles business in the room where the game is being played and the culture is most alive.
The activation calendar that followed took the partnership to NFL games, college football, Formula 1 in Las Vegas, the World Series, the WNBA Finals, the NBA Emirates Cup Final, and the Super Bowl in San Francisco — X Picks as the lens through which Dez experienced and activated each one, Fanatics as the thread connecting the community to every moment.
What Was Built
X Picks is a community model that doesn't exist anywhere else in sports betting. It converts attention into engagement through content and experience rather than through odds and outcomes alone. It introduces fans to new sports and new cultures and then gives them the tools to participate — as fans, as bettors, as members of something larger than a single game or a single season.
The Fanatics partnership validated the model commercially. The deal wasn't won through a pitch. It was earned through a year of demonstrating — at UFC 300, at March Madness, at tailgates in Los Angeles and games in Philadelphia and a gala in Atlantic City and a fan experience in Chattanooga — that Dez Bryant brings something to a brand partnership that you cannot buy with a media budget.
You have to be in the culture to access it. Relay put him there first. Fanatics followed.