Coming Full Cirkul

From USA Today (LINK):

It started out as a locker-room spitballing session, a couple of Ivy League football players trying to solve for hydration.

Sunday, more than a decade and many late nights and early mornings later, Garrett Waggoner and Andy Gay’s brainchild will be unveiled on the biggest commercial gridiron of them all.

The co-founders of Cirkul will enjoy a significant full circle moment, when a 30-second spot for their flavored water will air during the Super Bowl.

For those who are new around here, Garrett Waggoner '13 was a standout Dartmouth safety who went on to play in the CFL (LINK) while Andy Gay '14 was a backup quarterback who as a high schooler won a contest for a commercial he created and acted in for Trident gum. That's Gay as the driver of the car. (LINK)

More from the Super Bowl commercial story . . . 

Cirkul distributed its first product in 2018, just a few years after Waggoner was parking cars in between his two seasons playing football for Winnipeg of the CFL and Gay was selling shoes, both hoping to gain a foothold with investors to provide a proof of concept.

By 2022, after multiple investment rounds, Cirkul exceeded a $1 billion valuation.

Here's the Super Bowl commercial (don't click it if you prefer to be surprised during the game ;-):

Green Alert Take: Here's something to think about. Mrs. BGA and I joined the Go Fund Me campaign (at least I think it was Go Fund Me back then) to support Cirkul development when it was in its infancy. It never reached its goal, so we got our money back. We still don't have a Cirkul bottle, though. ;-) 

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You're going to have to wait at least another day for that (maybe not-so) final listing of Dartmouth football commitments. It just feels like the right thing to do to let everything settle down after Florida defensive lineman Aiden Holewski, who announced for Dartmouth in September (LINK), reversed course and "signed" with Mercer. The Macon, Ga., university labeled him a "big-time addition" in a Xweet introducing him. (LINK)

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Pebble Beach was all over the TV last week and the wackiness of the 16th hole at the Phoenix Open will be all over ESPN this week. It will be a while before anyone tees it up around here, but there's still golf on the mind per an email from Dartmouth football with a "save-the-date" reminder:

For more information, click HERE.

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EXTRA POINT

Per the platform on which the BGA blog is published, this is post number 8,500. Assuming just one hour per posting (which is absurd because most days its more than two hours searching far and wide for items of interest, and writing them up), that's an absolute minimum of 8,500 hours on this site.

I shudder to think about what I might have accomplished if I'd put the time into something more constructive, like learning a foreign language. Consider that, per the U.S. Foreign Service Institute, we should be able to achieve proficiency in Spanish in 600 hours, German in 900, Russian in 1,100 hours and Japanese and Chinese in 2,200 hours each. (LINK) 

Assuming one hour per BGA posting, by now I could have been proficient in those five languages if I'd worked on perfecting those languages instead of occasionally butchering this one. Heck, I could have thrown in Danish while I was at it so I could talk with my cousins in their own tongue.

Oh well, that's water over the puente, as they say in Spanish. Or the brücke, or pont or moct or, as Mr. Google tells me the the Danes would say, over the bro. ;-)