AKRON, Ohio -- Usually the texts come at night, long after business hours. It'll be 9, 10 p.m. and Matt Pottorff's phone will ping with a message from his boss: "What if we tried this?"

Pottorff, the chief operating officer for Akron athletics, has gotten used to the litany of ideas that follow that framing -- some good, some unfeasible and some just wild enough to be worth a try. The really big one though came in late March, on a flight from Tampa where the Zips' men's basketball team had just been bounced from the NCAA tournament by Texas Tech, and athletics director Andrew Goodrich offered another of those "what if" scenarios.

What if ... Akron let a fan call a play? A few years earlier, the question might've drawn laughs or groans, and the idea would've died there. But in 2026, for all but the most affluent of schools, revenue generation is paramount, and when it comes to creative ways to engage fans, there's no such thing as a bad idea.

The hook for this one, Goodrich explained, was that Akron didn't even have a true offensive coordinator, as head coach Joe Moorhead calls the offense. But if Moorhead could be convinced to turn over the job to a fan, it could be a great way for Akron -- with less than 10,000 undergraduates and a decade removed from its last bowl game -- to sell some tickets and generate a little attention. It couldn't just be one play though, Pottorff suggested. It had to be bigger. What about calling a full offensive drive? The first drive of the year at home, in fact -- that might really move the needle. It worked.