Making Second Draft Labs the Savannah Bananas of Education
Framing our mission around a relentless commitment to our community
Second Draft Labs: #0003
We publish the best ideas in AI and education, from the people doing the work.
I was in Oregon last week.
My internal clock was three time zones off. I was bored in my hotel room.
I never watch regular TV, but I also don’t know my Netflix password. So I grabbed the remote (risky I know, with the germs) and saw that the Savannah Bananas were playing on ESPN.
I’d heard about Jesse Cole and his yellow tuxedo for years. I’ve watched a ton of shorts of interviews he gives. I might have even posted about it before. But I had never actually watched a game.
It was wild. An entire football stadium, packed. The field completely mishappen by the football field dimensions. Players doing backflips in shorts and cut off sleeves. So fun!
The game moved so quickly. The fans were involved. There were trick plays, points, runs. The umpires were dancing. Everyone was genuinely enjoying the experience!
Grocery Money
If you don’t know the Savannah Bananas, here’s the short recap. Jesse Cole and his wife Emily founded the team in Savannah, Georgia in 2016, replacing the departing Sand Gnats at Grayson Stadium.
They sold their house, lived off $30 a week for groceries, and slept on an air bed. Sold two tickets the first three months.
They renamed the team through a public contest, started experimenting with everything (dancing players, all-inclusive tickets, trick plays), and by 2018 set the Coastal Plain League’s all-time attendance record with over 118,000 fans on the season.
A few years in, Cole invented Banana Ball, a faster fan-first version of the sport with a two-hour cap, no walks, and rules that put the crowd inside the game. By 2025 they were selling out 17 MLB parks and three NFL stadiums on a world tour.
They’re now valued at over a billion dollars with 3.5 million people on the waitlist.
Fans First
Cole has said it a hundred ways. .
“We stopped focusing on chasing customers and started focusing on creating fans.”
“If you put the fans first then everything else will take care of itself.”
That’s the move. Community first.
Cole rebuilt the category. He decided baseball wasn’t even the right product. The product was the fan’s two hours and optimized for that.
Here are nine things the Bananas do because they’re committed to fan value first, with everything else flowing from that. Each one is a decision the rest of the industry treats as impossible.
1. They cap the game at two hours.
No new inning can start after an hour and fifty minutes. Cole’s logic: long, slow, drawn-out games cost spectators their evening. Respect the audience’s time, or someone else will.
2. Every ticket is $35. All-inclusive.
Burgers, hot dogs, soda, water, popcorn, service fees, taxes. Everything. No “convenience fees.” No upsells at the gate. No surprises.
3. They built their own ticket platform.
They wouldn’t accept the friction that Ticketmaster baked in. They built the rails themselves so they could control the experience end to end.
4. They turned down a million dollars from a reseller.
A buyer offered roughly $1M for a large block of tickets at twice face value. Half a million in immediate profit. Cole said no without hesitation, because the buyer would scalp the tickets to fans.
5. No advertising in the stadium.
No corporate logos on the walls. No sponsored signage between innings. The Bananas decided a cluttered environment of ads treats attendees as conduits, not guests.
6. Free streaming on YouTube, even with an ESPN deal.
ESPN wanted exclusivity. Cole said the games still go on YouTube for free. The Bananas average 500,000 viewers on ESPN, The CW, and Roku. The July 4 Fenway game pulled 837,000 viewers. And they added 12.7 million new social media followers in 2025 alone.
7. They released their full P&L.
Revenue, expenses, player salaries, everything. As a private company, with no obligation to share any of it. Cole’s reason: “Fans first. They deserve to know everything.”
8. Fans are inside the game.
If a spectator in the stands catches a foul ball, the batter is out. The crowd can challenge an umpire’s call once a game. Fans aren’t watching the show. They’re playing in it.
9. Ten new ideas a day.
Cole made it a discipline. Generate ten ideas a day. Most fail. A few become the game. The dancing players, the Banana Nanas, the Parking Penguins, the rain-delay choreography. All experiments that survived contact with fans.
Our Own Bananas
Second Draft Labs is building a version of this for education.
We’re a press. We’re a syndicate. We’re a publication. And underneath all that, we’re trying to ask what all of that would look like if the community and the contributor came first, and the institution, and the tradition, and bureaucracy, and the [insert value drain]. . . came nowhere on the list.
Education hasn’t asked any relevant question about it’s value in a long time. Academic publishing obviously doesn’t ask it at all. The contributor’s job is to navigate gates. The reader’s job is to pay for access to whatever made it through.
Second Draft Labs is built around different questions. The premise is simple.
The work goes to the reader. The pay goes to the contributor. The press exists to make those two things possible.
If it doesn’t bring value to the community, it isn’t part of the platform.
Thanks for being the best part of this!
-Patrick
PS If you have ideas, we want to know them! Comment or DM