Millionaires U.

The highlight for Tucker this time around would be the penultimate day of the second session. Jim Thompson, director of Wharton's Societal Wealth Program, had asked Tucker to discuss his business in a session about entrepreneurship.

Before the session began, Tucker ventured out to the lobby, where the usual complimentary feast of snack food and drinks was laid out on several elegant

tables. Swallowing a banana in two bites, he made small talk with other players checking their BlackBerrys and getting cups of fresh coffee. He had made friends here, some of them people he'd previously only seen on the field. "Ryan Lilja, Jake Scott, Brad Butler -- we offensive linemen stick together," he joked.

During lunch one day, John Kuhn, the Green Bay fullback, had been so taken with Tucker's description of Go Big that he had pulled out his cellphone and text-messaged a high school player he knew, advising him to go to the site and sign up. (The player did.)

Thompson, a slight man with a good-natured smile and mischievous blue eyes, began his class by introducing his close friend, Spencer Hoffman, a Wharton MBA who is a principal at Philadelphia's Lovell Minnick Partners, a private equity management and venture capital firm. Because Hoffman's expertise is sifting through business plans and deciding which ventures are worthy of investment, Thompson had invited him to sit in and offer what he later dubbed "a healthy dose of practitioner's perspective." Hoffman was wearing a well-tailored dark suit, round glasses and grim expression.

Thompson, wielding a laser pointer, began with a PowerPoint presentation on business plans. An enormous fan hummed in the back of the room as he detailed the value of a five-page concept statement, explained businesses' "fatal error number one"-- underestimating the speed of competition -- and warned that half of all new ventures will fail.

There was a rustle of food wrappers. Hands were pressed into cheeks and chins, and there was much face rubbing and highlighting of handouts with fat, yellow markers.

After the presentation, Thompson called Tucker down to the lectern and explained to the class that he'd invited the player to discuss Go Big Recruiting. As the professor spoke, Tucker stood next to him, arms crossed over his chest, eyes intensely focused on the floor, like a coach psyching himself up to address his team. He waved away Thompson's offer of a microphone. "I'm loud," he said, and his voice clearly reached the back of the classroom. As he spoke, "Go Big Recruiting" appeared behind him on the white overhead screen.

"I thought it'd be a value to you guys, seeing the mistakes I've made and the ups and downs," he explained. "Maybe you can give me ideas, too . . . I'm not saying it's a success yet," he quickly added.

After admitting he's "technology averse" and didn't even own a computer while attending Princeton in the late 1990s, Tucker launched into how he came up with the idea for Go Big. "We're like an online post office," he explained. "I remember sitting in my basement as a high school senior with 30 blank tapes and two VCRs. I had to buy bubble wrap and envelopes, look up the mailing address of each school, and send each envelope Priority Mail . . . Some schools I never heard back from, and you assume they don't want you, but you don't really know. It's a great unknown and very, very frustrating."

Tucker's presentation was a fast one. He jumped from one point to the next, confirming much that Thompson had already outlined in the abstract: that it took his business twice as long as forecasted to reach its target revenue, why it was crucial to analyze the market and check for competitors. "When I talk to a coach or investor and they bring up a potential competitor," he explained, "I really have to have a good sense of how Go Big is different." He explained how hands-on he is, typically spending 12 hours a day making phone calls to schools and coaches and monitoring every order. His partner, a veteran of Internet startups who works out of an office in Cincinnati, handles "the big picture stuff," such as legal and financial matters.

Tucker also said he had hired his first full-time employee the week before. "I didn't trust anyone else to make the calls, but after [talking to professors] the first session here, I realized I needed to."