In the early years of the National Football League, scouting and roster development resembled the wild west. Drafts were held in hotel ballrooms the day after the last game of regular season college football was played. There was no combine, limited scouting, and no salary cap. Over time, these aspects have changed dramatically, in part due to key figures from Pete Rozelle to Gil Brandt to Bill Belichick. The development and learning from this time period have laid the foundational infrastructure that modern roster construction is based upon. In this modern day, managing a team and putting together a roster involves numerous people, intense scouting, layers of technology, and, critically, the management of the salary cap. Since it was first put into place in 1994, managing the cap has become an essential element of building and sustaining a successful team. The New England Patriots’ mastery of the cap is a large part of what enabled their dynastic run over the past twenty years. While their model has undoubtedly proven to be successful, an opposing model has become increasingly popular and yielded results of its own. Both models center around different distributions of the salary cap, starting with the portion paid to the starting quarterback. The Patriots dynasty was, in part, made possible due to their use of both models over the course of their dominance. Drafting, organizational culture, and coaching are all among the numerous critical factors in determining a team’s success and it becomes difficult to pinpoint the true source of success for any given team. Ultimately, however, effective management of the cap proves to be a force multiplier; it does not guarantee that a team will be successful, but it helps teams that handle the other variables well sustain their success.

Especially during the current COVID-19 pandemic and age of social unrest in the United States, there has been an increasing need for comfort, yet the idea of comfort is quite vague and rarely elaborated upon. To simplify the idea of comfort and communicate the ideas around it effectively, I am defining comfort as a subset of escapism in which a person escapes to reduce or alleviate feelings of grief or distress. As companies rush to comfort their customers in this current state of uncertainty, marketers are pressed to identify people’s insecurities and comfort them without coming off as insensitive or trite. Current comfort marketing focuses on inspiring nostalgia in its customers, having them recall previous positive experiences or feelings to comfort them. Nostalgic marketing techniques may ease mild grief in some cases, but using them to alleviate severe distress probably will not be as effective, and has contributed to several seemingly out-of-touch “COVID-19 era” commercials.<br/>When addressing comfort, marketers should understand the type and hierarchy of comfort that they are catering to. Not all comforts are equal, in that some comforts make us feel better than others and some do not comfort us at all. A better understanding of how and why comforts change among different individuals, and possibly being able to predict the comfort preference based on a product or service, will help marketers market their goods and services more effectively. By diversifying and specializing comfort marketing using this hierarchical method, marketers will be able to more significantly reach their customers during “uncertain times.”

Every year, nearly 1.5 shelter animals are euthanized.(1) By the end of 2020, California was reported to be responsible for the second most dog euthanasia’s in the United States, behind Texas by nearly 15,000 dogs. Sadly, these numbers do not include the euthanizing of cats which is generally a fraction larger. Additionally, a majority of numbers tallied by euthanasia centers do not include animals that younger than 1 month old and under 2 pounds. These animals are referred to as “neonate,” which is essentially unsavable newborns. In fact, the New York Times writes, “Many of the shelters do not track outcomes uniformly or make historical data readily available online. Until recently, there has not been a concerted national effort to standardize and compile shelter records.”(2) If these numbers were to be included, we would see a large spike for shelter euthanasia’s in every state. <br/>Traveling Paws is a 501(c)3 Nonprofit Organization that was created to help reduce the number of shelter and stray animals euthanized in California. Our mission is to rehome animals from dangerous environments and kill shelters into their “forever homes,” or shelter facilities where they then can further be adopted and live out the rest of their lives happily. In addition to animal relocation, our team has begun programs such as sheltering, fostering, and put an emphasis on a trap, neuter, and return program to help increase the health and safety, while reducing reproduction rates of stray cats in the Southern California region. While we have been able to substantially help animals located in areas of Southern California, our work is nowhere near complete. <br/>Through this write up, I will tell you the story of my journey, creating and managing our nonprofit organization, along with our successes, problems faced, business plans to help guide us toward our future goals and success, and what I have learned throughout the process.