From my personal experience, the whales are watching. If the idea/project is solid enough to be supported and that it is ensured that the people/team behind this project can be trusted and has what it takes to deliver the project, then you'll get likely to be supported.

I'd like to see how you will be handling plagiarism, abuse, circle jerking, and most importantly how the reward pool gets distributed. I'd like to know how will you be reaching out the billions of Sports fans all over the world to jump into Hive and participate. The DAO, front end, curation and author rewards split payout, Hive delegations, and many more. They are important things if you want to create the project, you can present the idea first without any development at all, as long as they see it is robust.

On the other hand, I somehow understand Patrick's decision. It is difficult to turn over the keys and management will be a long battle as he has been an advocate of the Sports platform. If a whale or a delegation is what we receive, then I think this tribe will be revived - only if they are managed by trusted individuals, not only in a couple of months, but over time. Transparency is also very important.

So my suggestion is, because I don't think @patrickulrich can just turn over the management as the goal of yours is to rebrand, re-establish, and tweak some important features of the platform, then I don't see a complete turnover is much needed. I believe the key for this is to be more technical with the changes? Multi sig? And probably townhall too.