Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

You don’t need me to remind you that everything in college sports, from athlete compensation to gasoline, construction equipment to medicine balls, has become more expensive. That means everybody is looking for new revenue sources.

But you can only sell so many jersey patches or new sideline activations. You can only host so many country music concerts. It’s hard to sell more tickets when you’re already bumping close to capacity limits, and very few programs are looking to increase the seating capacity of their major venues.

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One of the most popular places where more and more schools are looking for new money doesn’t even directly have to do with the games at all. It’s about real estate.

Per the Athletic:

The shining example of this strategy, mentioned here in the story, is The Battery, opened by the Atlanta Braves. I’ve also heard college sports executives point approvingly to the development districts around Wrigley Field in Chicago and Busch Stadium in St. Louis. All three stadiums are surrounded by dining options, retail, year-round-entertainment, and more.

Oklahoma, for example, just officially broke ground on their planned development district. Kentucky is looking to do something similar. And other schools contemplating significant capital projects, like Utah and North Carolina, are also batting around proposals.

Whether this can work or not, in my humble opinion, depends a lot on the specific location and campus. Wake Forest, for example, is a rare college campus that has a surplus of warehouses and parking nearby, and underdeveloped real estate assets near the major stadiums. I don’t think such a proposal would be possible at a place like Northwestern or American, because their campuses are smooshed in urban, very expensive residential neighborhoods. There’s not much room to build, and any project would be opposed by neighbors with the time to show up at meetings.

When the projects work, they provide something that’s very, very difficult for athletic departments to create…a revenue source that isn’t completely dependent on the on-field product being successful. Folks will pack the Wrigleyville bars whether the Cubs are good or if they suck, because tourists think Wrigleyville is fun. If residents enjoy eating, shopping, and living nearby, the school can collect rent no matter what.

But there are risks. Real estate development is complicated, and schools often need to partner with experts (private capital, real estate development firms, etc) in order to get the most use out of the project. Economic trends that have nothing to do with college sports could crush a well-designed project before it gets off the ground, leaving the school (and business partners) holding the bag. I also wonder if enough schools build something like this; each one won’t be as “magical” or as useful. Not every single stadium needs an event center, a music venue, and a few places to pay $28 for a burger and fries, right?

And we also can’t forget the risk that bulldozing tradition could turn fans away.

It’s the risk/reward with gentrifying neighborhoods all over the country, just through the prism of sports. Fancypants development districts mean no more 3 AM Taco Bells, no more dilapidated student housing, no more dive bars, and, often, higher prices on everything. Do you lose “charm” by getting rid of the $500/mo student hovels and replacing them with luxury condos? Or when Murder Kroger is replaced by a Whole Foods? Or do those changes make hanging out near the stadium more fun?

Like every other strategy in college sports, I don’t think this is an approach that will work everywhere, and how it works won’t be the same from place to place. But if roster costs are going to continue to soar north of $40 million, that new money has to come from somewhere.

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Also read about all the new changes we recently launched here, including sports specific spend vs performance, updated financial comparisons, an ai chatbot, game contracts and more.

Here’s what else we worked on this week:

• It’s very common for athletic leaders, agents, and others to promote (or disparage) the idea of a college athlete collective bargaining agreement. The idea has some real merits, in my humble opinion, but some important truths are often lost in the conversation. Here, I try to clear up some of those misconceptions.

• I pushed significant updates to Who’s That Football Team (hundreds of new clues, AI improvements, etc) and NIl Agent Tycoon 95 (improved AI, deeper gameplay from rival agencies, improved game balance in the mid-game, more graphics). These two games are both free to play!!

• I talked to a therapist at TCU about how their program is trying to help athletes struggling with gambling addiction in new ways. Perhaps other schools can borrow part of their approach?

• And my colleague KC interviewed WCC Commissioner Stu Jackson about how the league expanded to reach a new level of stability, and where the conference wants to go next.

• And oh yeah, we’ve added over 300 new PDFs to the Extra Points Library since last Friday, including hundreds of new game contracts across multiple sports.

For next week, we’ll have a deeper look at the potential expansion of the College Football playoff, an analysis of the operating budget of over 200 college football programs, and much more.

If you want to access every single newsletter we write, play all of our games, and support original, independent college sportswriting, consider an upgrade to a premium subscription today. It’s just nine bucks a month, and makes everything we do possible.

Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you all on the internet.

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Because I’m a Super Cool Guy Who Absolutely Knows How To Relax During The Offseason, I recently grabbed a copy of “Collective Bargaining in Professional Sports” by Scott Bukstein. I’ve spent almost my entire journalism career focusing on college sports, so I wanted a refresher on the history of professional athlete organizing, and a primer on the nuts and bolts of their actual CBAs.

Why? Because as college sports lurches through another series of “will they/wont they” with Congress, expensive litigation over athlete compensation regulation, and coaches bemoaning the state of college sports, more ADs, lawyers, pundits and activists will call for a college sports CBA.

Based on that book, my own personal experience being involved in labor organizing, and the years I’ve been reporting and covering this issue, I think I can provide a little clarity…or at least a new perspective, on some of the common tropes you may read about college athlete CBAs on social media or in other reporting.

Misconception #1: Because both labor and management benefit from the structure of a CBA, these negotiations do not have to be adversarial. The two sides want similar things and can reach solutions without meaningful conflict.

I think this idea comes from a good place. It’s true, I believe an actual college sports CBA would provide meaningful structural stability that would benefit athletic departments, coaches, athletes and the industry as a whole. Many of the issues that now can only be solved by litigation or arbitration could instead be addressed via a CBA. That’s good!

And I also understand the human impulse to try and mitigate conflict. Conflict is often uncomfortable and unpleasant!

But take it from Marvin Miller, the legendary executive director of the MLBPA and the godfather of anything resembling an actual athlete labor movement:

The owners hated Miller. Hated him! As far as I know, Miller didn’t go out of his way to be an asshole. But his job wasn’t to appear reasonable in national publications, cable television or to be loved by management. His job was to improve the working conditions of baseball players. And that meant fighting.

An adversarial process doesn’t mean that either side has to be unprofessional, impolite, unkind or unethical. But make no mistake about it, institutional labor conditions aren’t gentlemanly disputes that can be easily solved over a 12-pack in an afternoon.

In a hypothetical college athletics CBA negotiation, representatives advocating on behalf of the schools absolutely are going to want to push for policies that will limit compensation to athletes. If athletes (and their representatives) aww shucks their way through that conversation, they’ll get steamrolled.

Management, whether you’re talking about college football, digital media, auto manufacturing or anything else, is going to bring in experienced attorneys whose entire job is to find ways to give labor less money. The only way through that barrier is conflict. When it comes negotiation time, you don’t want Mr. Congeniality. You want a mean motherfucker. Because the bosses are gonna hire one of their own.

Misconception #2: Why on earth would elite college athletes ever want to participate in collective bargaining or labor organization, when they make more money under the current system? Why impose limits on yourself to help somebody who isn’t as valuable?

This is a meaningful problem…but it’s also an issue with every professional sports union, and for that matter, most unions in general. As professors Robert Berry and William B. Gould IV stated in Bukstein’s textbook, “to suggest…that all players’ interests are equal and the solutions to their problems are the same, or even compatible, ignores reality.”

No matter how you create a bargaining unit, that group is gonna have players who want different things.

But it also ignores reality to suggest that any CBA conversation is just about money, or that solidarity is impossible.

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Last month, I wrote about my growing concerns with the intersection of gambling and college sports, and of the need for the industry (and fans) to grapple with what a more responsible gaming world might look like.

This may be a minority opinion, but I’m personally far more concerned about gambling (and assorted gambling addictions, point shaving and manipulation, corruption, etc) presenting an existential threat to the college sports enterprise than I am with anything relating to NIL, employment status, labor classifications or athlete compensation. If fans have reason to believe the games themselves aren’t completely on the up-and-up, nothing else matters.

But the solutions to sports gambling regulation problems are mostly beyond the grasp of any campus official. College ADs, presidents and coaches can share their opinions and concerns, but it’s unlikely that those folks can (at least alone) push for legislative or regulatory changes. Charlie Baker and the full weight of the NCAA lobbying machine haven’t quite been able to do that either.

But do we just throw up our arms and pray that a major scandal avoids the schools that we personally care about? Or are there ways to limit risks, and harm, that are within the control of actual schools? At least one expert has some ideas.

Eric Wood is the director of Counseling & Mental Health at Texas Christian University. Unlike most schools, Dr. Wood told me that TCU’s campus therapy programs specifically ask about gambling behaviors as part of a new patient intake form.

Campus therapy groups treat various kinds of addictions, from athletes to regular students, all the time.

For those groups to be successful in treating gambling addiction issues, Dr. Wood told me he thinks professionals need to revisit their strategy.

First, Dr. Wood recommended practitioners think deeper about what a gambling addiction actually is, and how it differs from potentially other addictions.”

“Gambling addiction is what we could classify as a process addiction, rather than an addiction to a specific substance,” he told me. Somebody struggling with this type of process addiction will struggle to contain that compulsive behavior, even though they face negative consequences, potentially severe ones.

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

I hope you all had a wonderful Mother’s Day weekend! Today, I’m passing the mic to KC Smurthwaite, who has a story today on how the WCC moved from the brink of being picked apart, to a reinvention of a proud basketball conference.

The days start well before the sun rises for Stu Jackson.

If he has it his way, his yellow and black BMC bike hits the cold pavement somewhere in the mountains of Colorado. Most mornings, though, the ride is more likely to come in the hills somewhere near the West Coast Conference’s Bay Area orbit.

“I haven’t gotten out on the road as much as I would like recently, just because it seems like time doesn’t allow it,” Jackson said. “But that would be a passion of mine. I wouldn’t say a talent because we’re not talking Tour de France here, but it’s my happy place.”

Over the past 18 months, those rides have also served as a moving strategy session, as the league considered an aggressive conference realignment strategy

“We began with a list of roughly 43 schools,” Jackson said. “It was an extremely thorough process where we vetted every aspect.”

Jackson said the league evaluated a wide range of factors, including geography, enrollment profile, competitive history, budget, market, presidential priorities, academic history and basketball ambition.

There were mornings when the list followed him onto the bike.

The thoughts raced as the pedals turned.

For decades, the West Coast Conference had been one of the more stable leagues in Division I. From BYU’s arrival in 2011 through the end of the 2022-23 season, the league had the same 10 full members. Then BYU left for the Big 12. Oregon State and Washington State arrived as temporary affiliate members after the Pac-12 collapse. Gonzaga announced it would leave for the Pac-12 in 2026. Grand Canyon accepted the WCC invitation but then backed out to join the Mountain West. Seattle returned. Denver was added. UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara followed.

And now, by 2027-28, the WCC is scheduled to reach 12 full members. That number will be the league's largest membership ever.

That is a full climb.

Jackson knew the league could not simply wait for the hill to flatten.

“Personally, I’m fortunate to have a group of presidents that are very forward thinking,” Jackson said. “So the conversation about potentially adding members that didn’t look like us, it was a fairly easy conversation due to the recognition that we all had an understanding dating back to when the Pac-12 imploded, seeing what happened with Cal and Stanford, that there was a seismic shift about to happen.”

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That phrase is telling … members who didn’t look like us.

The West Coast Conference has long been associated with private institutions, many of them faith-based, with a tight Western identity and a basketball-first public reputation. But the modern realignment environment does not necessarily reward nostalgia. The league had to decide whether to protect an old definition of itself or build a new one.

“To remain steeped in simply accepting members that only looked like ourselves, that could not be the strategy going forward,” Jackson said.

That does not mean the West Coast Conference threw out its identity. Jackson argues the opposite. The league leaned harder into what it believed it could still own -- The West.

In an era when some athletic conferences are traveling across three or four time zones for conference games, Jackson sees geography as more than a map. He sees it as a brand position, a recruiting pitch, a student-athlete experience and a competitive differentiator.

“We are leaning into the regionality of this conference in an age where athletic programs are traveling across multiple time zones to compete,” Jackson said. “We are trying to lean into the fact that the West Coast Conference is very special.”

That regionality became one of the filters in the league’s expansion process. In a world where Cal and Stanford play in the Atlantic Coast Conference and the Big Ten spans from California to New Jersey, Jackson wanted the West Coast Conference to remain…well…West.

“That was a big part of the conversation because winning in March is central to our league’s operations on both the men’s and women’s side,” Jackson said. “We wanted institutions that were going to invest in the sport of basketball. We wanted institutions that were academically aligned with ours. That was absolutely vital.”

He continued.

“We wanted institutions that were in our region, in the western part of the United States, for a variety of different reasons as it relates to recruiting and having access to enrollment, being in major markets, which all of our institutions are at this point.”

That process led the league to Seattle, Denver, UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara, with the latter two receiving payments to join the conference.

Seattle brought the West Coast Conference back into a market and a school with conference history. Denver brought the league back into the Rocky Mountain region and added a school with strong academics and championship-level credibility in Olympic sports. UC San Diego added a public research institution in one of the West’s most important markets. UC Santa Barbara brought another public California brand, a successful athletic department and a return to a league it once called home.

Together, those moves also signaled a philosophical shift.

UC San Diego is set to become the WCC’s first public institution since Nevada departed in 1979. UC Santa Barbara will also join the WCC in 2027 as another public addition, returning to the league after previously competing from 1965 to 1969.

For a league defined by private membership for decades, that is significant.

But to Jackson, the shift was also practical.

After Gonzaga’s exit and Grand Canyon’s change of direction, the West Coast Conference was staring at a future in which it could have had nine full members. Jackson did not view that as sustainable.

“Having a nine-member conference is not a sustainable number for a number of reasons,” Jackson said. “Both financially, from a scheduling standpoint, and it leaves you in a position of vulnerability.”

The presidents decided they wanted to reach a membership of 12 schools.

“So we proceeded to pursue that membership number aggressively,” Jackson said.

Aggressive is not a word often associated with the old caricature of the WCC. It was a word used a few times in the conversation to describe the league's expansion. The league has sometimes been viewed from the outside as steady, traditional and institutionally cautious. But realignment has forced even cautious leagues to move faster.

Jackson said the WCC’s first major adjustment came with Oregon State and Washington State, which joined as affiliate members across 12 sports for a two-year term beginning in 2024-25. The move was unusual because it placed two former Power Five institutions inside a mid-major conference structure, even temporarily.

“We felt that we had to be opportunistic at that point,” Jackson said. “And we were fortunate enough to call Oregon State and Washington State partners across 12 different sports for two years.”

That partnership did not solve the long-term membership question, but it gave the WCC strength, inventory and visibility during an unstable period.

“What that did for us was really add to the strength and the breadth of our conference across many sports,” Jackson said. “It was an unprecedented partnership at the time in terms of having Power Four members be a part of a mid-major conference.”

Then came the larger question.

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What does the WCC become after Gonzaga?

Jackson said the league recognized Gonzaga’s departure was a matter of “when, not if.” That forced the conference to rethink survival and strength. The answer was not just to add schools. It was also to build internally.

“We have two opportunities to maintain the strength in this conference throughout this crazy landscape of realignment and revenue sharing,” Jackson said. “We can add members that bring competitive strength to the conference, particularly in the sport of basketball. That’s one way to maintain our viability.”

The second, he said, is more important.

“Strengthen from within.”

That means resources. It means basketball investment. It means operational decisions. It means presidents and athletic directors making choices that help the league’s strongest sports remain relevant nationally.

“It also speaks to the necessity to continue to try and develop student athletes, both mentally and physically, because that will strengthen your conference,” Jackson said. “And all of those things, if you do them, even without adding a member or losing a member, we’re still going to have strength.”

That is the part of realignment that can get lost in the transaction sheet.

Fans track the logos. Presidents track institutional fit. Commissioners track both and aim to ensure the schools already in the room are better positioned tomorrow than they are today.

Jackson knows the WCC cannot control every rumor. He knows other leagues may call. He knows members may listen.

“There’s always potential for departures,” Jackson said. “The nature of the beast and the beings involved is that when a conference loses a member, it triggers other members to also inquire about whether or not they can benefit by leaving a conference.”

The league cannot stop every question from being asked. It can only make the answer harder.

“We can’t worry about what we can’t control,” Jackson said. “But we can control having a conference that is strong, competitive, viable and can still remain on the national stage.”

That is where Jackson’s WCC vision becomes clearer.

This is not just about replacing Gonzaga’s basketball brand. It is not just about getting back to an even number. It is not just about finding schools in large markets.

It is about building a league that can tell a broader story.

The WCC still wants to be a basketball-centric conference. But Jackson is also quick to point to soccer, golf, tennis, beach volleyball, women’s volleyball and water polo. He sees the depth of Olympic sport as one of the conference’s defining traits, not a side note.

“What makes this conference unique is the strength of our Olympic sports and their historic performance at the national level,” Jackson said.

That includes NCAA Tournament access, Sweet 16s, Elite Eights and finals appearances in sports beyond basketball.

“There aren’t many conferences in the country that can stake that claim of being so strong in many of those sports in addition to being a basketball-centric conference,” Jackson said.

For now, Jackson said the WCC does not expect to expand beyond 12. But he will not close the door.

“At the current time, we don’t expect to add any more members,” Jackson said. “But again, we’re not going to shut the door on an opportunity for us.”

That is the realignment version of a long ride.

There is the route you planned, the climb you did not expect and the weather you cannot control. There is the hill in front of you, the one behind you and the next turn you cannot quite see yet.

For the WCC, the last 18 months have encompassed it all.

A league that once looked boxed in has widened its lane. A conference that historically leaned toward the private sector has added public institutions. A basketball brand that once revolved around Gonzaga is now expanding its reach across a broader map.

And somewhere before sunrise, Jackson keeps riding.

Not away from the uncertainty.

Through it.

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Last week, the Big 12 announced a broad, potentially historic parntership with RedBird Capital Partners. As part of the agreement, the Big 12 office secured a $12.5 million capital infusion to help the league invest in new commerical revenue-generating iniatives. But it also provided an opportunity for individual schools to secure a cash advance.

Accepting the additional school money is completely optional for Big 12 schools. But if they opt-in, schools would be able to obtain as much as $30 million, which would be repaid over a number of years via Big 12 conference distributions.

I reported earlier that my industry sources were telling me only a few Big 12 schools were expected to actually accept that money, even though plenty of conference institutions could probably use it. After all, the Big 12’s TV contract doesn’t pay out nearly what the Big Ten or SEC do, and many Big 12 schools are in smaller cities and with less affulent alumni bases than the R1 research behemoths of the P2.

But so far…the schools that you’d think would be interested…aren’t interested.

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Cincinnati will reportedly turn down the money. So will West Virginia. Baylor and TCU are also reportedly not interested. Houston and UCF are on the record as not interested. I’ve been repeatedly told that BYU won’t take the money either, and Utah’s own PE situation makes accepting another partner impractical. According to FOS, Texas Tech, Iowa State and Colorado will also not opt-in.

Most of the remaining institutions, like Arizona State, Oklahoma State and Kansas, are near the top in the Big 12 when it comes to athletic department budgets and generated revenue. Those would be the schools that would need expensive cash the least.

So why are so many schools turning down the money? The biggest reason, I’m told (and this lines up with local reports), is that taking the private capital offer is expensive. ESPN reports that the RedBird offer carries a “double-digit interest rate”. Public institutions like Houston and Cincinnati, should they need to raise $20 million, can typically borrow money at substantially cheaper rates (via bond sales, local lending, state programs, etc). Even most private schools can usally find a cheaper option.

The biggest reason Utah has turned to private equity (which is different from private capital) isn’t just the money, but the expertise that comes from working with large institutional investors. Utah is hoping that by tapping into other businesses in a PE’s portfolio (like in data, tech, professional sports, marketing, etc), they can generate more revenue than they could if they were simply spending and operating themselves.

That’s not the option on the table here for the rest of the league.

If institutional investors want to buy into college sports (and boy howdy an awful lot of them do), then they’re going to need to present terms that are actually attractive to public universities. Otherwise, don’t be shocked to see more and more schools turning these investment offers down, no matter how badly they need the money.

Speaking of money, what happens when a university needs to cut costs?

A new paper, published in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Friend of the Newsletter Robert Kelchen of the University of Tennessee, analyizes how colleges actually deal with budget challenges, especially as the traditional revenue strategies (hike tuition, start more graduate programs, partner with online programs) haven’t solved the problem. What did he find?

That’s interesting to me! As almost everybody looks to tighten their proverbial belts, athletic spending appears to be more protected from cuts than lots of academic spending.

To see this story right after Arkansas (and North Dakota, and Wichita State, and many others) recently announced the shut down of some athletic programs, and with more sport cuts possibly on the way before the end of June, is a bit of a shock…but also makes sense.

How sustainable is it protect athletics after cuts have already been made in instruction, central administration and facility upkeep? Is that politically possible everywhere? To borrow an overused analolgy often used to justify athletics spending…if the house has foundation problems, who cares what the front porch looks like?

Good thing athletic costs are slowing down across D-I—-ahh just kidding, it’s the opposite.

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Here’s what else we’ve been cooking on this week:

• I think theres been a lot of industry overreaction about the Amazon/Duke MBB sublicneses. The NIL component for Duke is meaningful, and this is an important experiment in what kind of premium audience can be generated from regular season college basketball, but it doesn’t mean college football games are gonna start going to Netflix or that everybody is going independent again. Here’s the truth.

• When athletic departments report official revenue figures to the NCAA, they’re not just including stuff like TV money, ticket sales or video game licensing money. Those figures also include student fees, government appropriations and institutional support. What do revenue figures look like once you take all that stuff out? We did the math.

• And we also shared a research study out of UMass Boston that examined what happened to official Cost of Attendence figures once schools were allowed to pay athletes the entire COA. Coaches feared schools would juice the numbers to pay athletes more money. Did they?

• And finally, we added another 200+ documents to the Extra Points Library, from game contracts across multiple sports, to the contracts for newly hired men’s and women’s basketball coaches, to vendor deals.

You can get every single newsletter we publish, and get access to Athletic Director Simulator 4000, by upgrading to a premium subscription. It’s just nine bucks a month, and it makes our journalism, our games and our business possible.

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you on the internet next week.

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Before we get to the story, I’m excited to announce of the biggest additions yet to the Extra Points Library Family….Creighton!

Now, the Blue Jays can use EPL to save money on building schedules, benchmark their team spending, research potential hires and make more informed decisions. If you’d like to learn more about how EPL can save your program (or newsroom!) money, check out Extra Points Library here.

So far, all of the FY25 FOIA Fun stories we’ve published have centered on Total Expenses, or what certain schools tell the NCAA they’re spending on certain sports. We have a few more of those stories left to publish (including football, which I promise I didn’t forget about)..,but I want to try something a little different today.

The NCAA MFRS reports don’t just tell us what schools spent money on, they also tell us what revenues they claim. But the “Total Revenues” figure can be a little misleading, since the NCAA forms include some items that laypeople probably wouldn’t consider to exactly count as revenue.

For example, many institutions use student fees to help balance their athletic department budget. If an athletic department generated funds via student fees, they’re allowed to count that figure as “revenue” even though students don’t really have an option of not paying, even if they never attend an athletic event. Schools can also claim “Direct Institutional Support”, or even “Direct State or Governmental Support”, as revenue.

That’s valuable information, sure. I’m not saying it doesn’t belong on these reports. But I suspect when Joe Fan is talking about athletic department revenue, they’re really trying to talk about Generated Revenue, or all the money that an athletic department produces via ticket sales, TV money, corporate sponsorships, concession stands, etc.

So I dug into all of those MFRS reports, found each school’s “total revenues” in FY25, and subtracted everything from student fees, direct institutional support, indirect institutional support revenue, Direct State or Other Government Support, and Indirect Institutional Support – Athletic Facilities Debt Service, Lease and Rental Fees.

The remainder? Let’s call that Generated Revenue. That figure includes everything an athletic department earned from:

• Ticket Sales

• Contributions (donations)

• Guarantees Revenue (buy games)

• Media Rights

• NCAA Distributions

• Conference Distributions

• Bowl Revenue

• Program, Novelty and Concession Sales

• Royalties, Licensing, Advertisement and Sponsorships

• Sports Camp Revenues

• Other Operating Revenue

   

Is this a completely perfect figure? No, because the MFRS data isn’t perfect. But I do think it’s close enough to be useful.

Before I share the data, three quick caveats:

This data also comes from FY25, or July 1 2024-June 30 2025. It does not include data from the 2025 college football season or 2025 fall sports.

We can only obtain data from schools that respond to open records requests. Private schools, like Cal Baptist, Duke, Notre Dame, etc., do not have to respond to FOIAs and thus do not publish their MFRS reports. A few public schools, like Pitt, Temple, Delaware, and Delaware State, are exempt from state open records laws. A handful of other schools have not yet responded to our repeated requests, either because they limit FOIAs to in-state residents (so we have to pay a stand-in) or because they’re simply very slow at responding to requests.

We are currently missing data from Alabama State, Alabama A&M, ETSU, Morgan State, Texas Southern, Troy, UNC-Asheville, UL-Monroe, and Tennessee State. If you happen to have the FY25 MFRS report for any of these schools, I’ll happily give you free premium Extra Points in exchange (and/or give you any of ours).

If you want to dig even deeper into this data, (like say, run these numbers without any donations or contribution, because you don’t think those should count as generated revenue) you can run your own reports on a per school, conference, sport or line item basis, via the Extra Points Library. 

Okay! Enough jibber jabber. Let’s get to the data!

Here are the top 10 programs in FY25 EARNED REVENUE. We’ve also calculated what percentage of a school’s total revenue came from generated revenue, which can give you an idea for how directly subsidized an athletic department is:

We’ll get to the rest of the data after the jump:

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

I’m excited to share a guest post today that highlights some new, unique academic research. But before we get into the weeds, I’d like to quickly talk about how we are approaching freelance submissions for the next few months. 

I’m happy to accept freelance pitches on a rolling basis. If you’d like to pitch Extra Points, send an email to Matt@ExtraPointsMB.com that explains what you’d like to write about, why you are the person to write about it, and how your idea fits with our readership.

I am only accepting freelance pitches. Please do not email me, asking to write for Extra Points, without providing any pitches. I do not have the resources to serve as an assignment editor at the moment.

A good Extra Points pitch is for a story that

• Will run around 1,500ish words.

• Adds either original reporting, research or a unique voice to an off-the-field story in college athletics

• Would be better coming from you, specifically, than me or another freelance writer.

Our standard rate is $300 per story, but that’s not carved in stone. To talk about your specific idea, shoot me an email!

Today, I’m happy to pass the mic over to Greg Chick of NILnomics, a data-driven newsletter exploring college athletics data. Greg just earned his PhD from UMass Boston, and he wanted to share some of the research he conducted for that PhD with us. Chick explored the data surrounding the huge College Sports Arms Race before NIL and the portal: Cost of Attendence.

His work is below:

Do you remember that time when college athletes were first allowed to get paid? The Power Conference schools wanted it, forced it through the NCAA, and made it the law of the land. The other schools could choose to opt-in if they wanted. Nick Saban decried it all. Everyone thought college athletics would end.

I'm not talking about the House settlement. Or NIL. Or Alston payments. I'm talking about Cost-of-Attendance (COA) stipends — a policy change that happened in 2015 and has been almost completely forgotten in the decade since. My name is Greg Chick, and I just earned my PhD studying what actually happened when the NCAA allowed schools to pay athletes for the first time.

A COA Rabbit Hole

For those unfamiliar, COA is a number the financial aid office at every college and university in the country calculates annually. It has five main components: tuition, fees, room, board, and something called "miscellaneous expenses." 

Those first four parts are straightforward - they're the billed expenses the school sends you. But that last one? The Federal Student Aid Handbook defines it as " an allowance for books, supplies, transportation, and miscellaneous personal expenses. This can include a reasonable amount, as determined by your school." Basically, every school gets to estimate, in whatever way they see fit, what out-of-pocket expenses a typical student faces. The regulations grant significant leeway in how schools arrive at that number.

Think of it like a bucket. The bigger the COA, the bigger the bucket. Students fill the bucket with scholarships, grants, and student loans. Critically, you can't have more financial aid than the COA ceiling allows. Thus, there's a direct link between how high a school sets its COA and how much a student can borrow in loans. A school that calculates a higher COA isn't just making a philosophical statement about the cost of living near campus — it's determining the upper limit of how much debt its students can take on.

Before 2015, college athlete scholarships covered only tuition, fees, room, and board. Elite, full scholarship college athletes would arrive on campus debt-free from billed expenses but broke for everything else. Specifically, college athletes were left to fend for themselves to cover those out-of-pocket costs the school itself had already calculated and acknowledged. 

The COA stipend changed that. Schools could now give athletes a stipend equal to the gap between the old scholarship and the school's full COA figure. A few thousand dollars, typically. Nothing like the million-dollar NIL deals or revenue-sharing contracts that dominate headlines today, but real money for a college student who couldn't previously hold a job without risking eligibility.

You can imagine the hot takes.

First, COAs already varied wildly between schools. There was already a built-in disparity in what a player could receive at one FBS school versus another. For example, Tennessee offered $5,666 in COA stipends compared to Michigan at $2,204 per student. Boston College, the lone dissenting vote among the Power 5 schools, was required to award these COA stipends (perhaps they voted against it because they would go on to award the smallest COA stipend). Second, and more provocatively, everyone expected coaches to get on the phone with their financial aid offices and demand they inflate the COA number to give recruits a bigger stipend. 

Nick Saban put it plainly: "I think some people have manipulated their COA numbers because they've significantly changed from last year to this year, and that's not the spirit of the rule." Third, the familiar argument that fans would tune out if players got paid was raised, loudly, again. Same arguments, different decade.

The Research

Fortunately, at least some of these concerns can be studied empirically. Dr. Willis Jones (now at SMU and the third reader on my dissertation committee) published a paper in 2022 examining whether Power 5 schools increased their COAs in response to the policy. His finding: yes, statistically significant increases occurred. Nick Saban, validated.

Good morning to everybody except the Toronto Raptors, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

May is normally a little bit early for men’s basketball schedule announcements, but Duke dropped one a few days ago that managed to steal headlines in a way that “P4 team will play host Incarnate Word on Nov 18th” usually doesn’t.

Duke will play three high-profile neutral site games next season: against UConn in Las Vegas on Nov. 25, against defending national champ Michigan at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 21, and Gonzaga on Feb. 20 in Detroit, according to ESPN.

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That alone would be newsworthy, as Duke, Michigan and UConn are likely to be among the three highest ranked teams in the beginning of the year. But the really unique thing about these games is who is supposed to broadcast them. Amazon.

Per the ESPN story:

Amazon has nibbled at various live sports broadcast deals, broadcasting select NFL and NBA games, for example, but hasn’t outright taken over any major professional or college broadcast contracts. This series would be the first major college broadcast for Amazon.

Now, there are a few teensy potential problems here.

For one, these games aren’t technically Duke’s to sell. Duke, as a member of the ACC, signed over the broadcast rights for all of their home conference and out-of-conference events to the league’s broadcast partner, ESPN. For neutral sites, the broadcast rights are generally negotiated, depending on who the “home” team is for the event. In this case, it appears that ESPN, (who would normally have the rights for at least some of these games, if not all), agreed to allow Amazon to broadcast these three neutral sites games in exchange for Duke committing to participating in a certain number of ESPN-owned events over the next two seasons.

The Big Ten, however, believes that one of those games wasn’t actually Duke, or ESPN’s, game to sell. Via Yahoo!:

Intellectual property lawyer David McKenzie argues here that a) the Big Ten can’t claim ‘ownership’ of these broadcasts and b) ESPN’s decision to allow the Amazon sublicense is partly because Disney wants to stress test the idea of whether college sports programming can justify paywalled broadcasts. His full tweet is worth a read, but this perhaps the main takeaway:

The Duke-Amazon arrangement is being described as a turning point for college sports media. My honest guess is that it's more of a market test, structured by a rights holder who needed information from a 200M+ subscriber base more than it needed three basketball games. It's now being resisted by a competitor who cannot afford to be that patient. The law explains how the deal got done. The strategy explains why ESPN wanted it done this way. And the B1G's complaint, stripped of its proprietary language, is the complaint of a conference that wishes it had thought of it first.

Okay, so what do you think, Matt? Is this the wave of the future, a one-off, or something else?

I don’t have a strong opinion yet as to who would prevail in a legal dispute between the Big Ten, ESPN and Amazon. I don’t have access to the exact language in the ACC media rights deal or in any previous agreement between the ACC and Big Ten over neutral site broadcast “ownership”. The previous copy of the ACC media rights deal, obtained by former Florida AG Pam Bondi during the Florida State/ACC legal battle, is too redacted to provide any useful context on this particular point, in my opinion.

I am, however, skeptical of any claims that Duke negotiating a limited carve-up of their non-conference men’s basketball rights package means that other schools will leap to do the same thing…or even could.

As a reminder, schools do not have the authority to unilaterally pursue these sorts of licenses, because they (with few exceptions) don’t actually own the broadcast rights to their games. Their conference does, which they then sell to ESPN, Fox, etc.

Often, schools will have the rights to more inventory than the primary rightsholder actually wants, especially for events like college baseball, softball or wrestling. It isn’t uncommon for leagues to secure sub-licensing packages for some of those games with companies like FloSports, or sometimes, even school websites.

But there’s a huge difference between sublicensing a mid-week Penn State/Indiana State baseball game, (which, no offense to either school, isn’t going to be worth very much as a single entity), and say, a Big Ten football game. There’s a reason USC’s attempt to move their football game to Netflix was met with such dramatic pushback from the Big Ten. The Big Ten’s broadcast partners paid a lot of money to broadcast events like Notre Dame/USC, and they had no interest in letting somebody else get that privilege.

So in order for the Duke strategy to be scaled, you’d need to find other examples of schools that have sufficient fanbase and brand to justify streaming (or other broadcaster) interest, and events that aren’t so large that the actual rightsholder wouldn’t balk at a sublicense.

I don’t think that’s a large list. My gut is that it would be almost exclusively men’s or women’s basketball, centering around either international events, large-scale MTEs (like the Players Era) or events featuring Big 12 or ACC teams as the primary program. I could hypothetically see a world, for example, where Kansas or North Carolina could pull off a similar arrangement. It’s harder for me to see the math working out for Texas, Kentucky, Alabama, or any Big Ten team.

It’s certainly better for conferences if Amazon decided to move from “theoretical major broadcast partner” to “actual broadcast partner”, creating another possible bidder for major broadcast rights as we head into the next round of league TV deals in the 2030s. It’ll be harder for leagues to secure larger and larger paydays if only two, maybe three broadcasters represent the only serious potential bidders, after all. I figure this type of series is a chance for Amazon to get better market data before deciding how seriously they want to chase basketball rights in the future.

Is it better for players? I guess, if we consider that Amazon will reportedly have some sort of NIL component that could then be re-routed to the athletes without counting against the CSC “Salary Cap.” But I’m personally not ready to spend too much digital ink (or real world brain cells) worrying about the cap until a school is actually punished for circumventing the cap. Until that happens, I am operating on the assumption that CSC cap regulations are closer to the scoring rules for Who’s Line Is It Anyway than they are to say, the NBA CBA.

That is to say, they’re made up and don’t actually matter.

Is it better for consumers? Probably not, unless you already have a Prime subscription. But hey, what’s one more paid subscription to sign up for in order to watch all of your favorite games?

Amazon is betting that you’ll complain, but at the end of the day, you’ll still watch. In a few months, I guess we’ll see if they’re right.

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

And welcome to all of our new readers from NIL Wire! I’m excited to have you here, and hope you find value in this newsletter. For a recap on bringing NIL Wire into Extra Points, read here.

Now, let’s talk about money. But first a word from our sponsor.

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The Big 12’s fancy new private capital deal, explained:

Just about every major (and a few not-so-major) college sports conference has at least kicked the tires on bringing in outside institutional investment. This week, the Big 12 became the first league to actually pull the trigger, as their league presidents approved a multipronged deal with RedBird Capital.

It’s easy to get private capital and private equity confused, but they’re not exactly the same thing, and the differences are pretty important in this specific example. The Big 12, and Big 12 member institutions, aren’t actually giving up any equity, ownership or direct control to RedBird or any other institutional investor. Think of this as a relationship much closer to a loan than say, selling an ownership stake.

As part of the agreement, the Big 12 will get a $12.5 million capital infusion that the conference can use for revenue-generating projects or investments. That means the conference itself could potentially take ownership stakes in other companies or projects, or make internal investments so it can earn more money from events, licensing, media rights, etc. The Big 12 and RedBird will also work together to secure additional sponsorship and “commercial development” projects for the league.

Those could potentially involve other firms where RedBird has a commercial interest, like the Fenway Sports Group, streaming platforms, OneTeam Partners, Front Office Sports, or other entities outside the sports industry.

At the campus level, individual schools can also elect to accept up to $30 million in up-front capital from RedBird. Again, that would not mean that any Big 12 institution is selling a stake in their athletic department revenues, (like Utah is looking to do), but simply getting a cash advance to make additional investments.

Multiple outlets, like ESPN, Yahoo and FOS, are reporting that a majority of Big 12 institutions are not expected to accept this money. That lines up with what I’ve been hearing from league ADs and industry consultants (my best educated guess right now is between two and four schools will sign up). Plenty of Big 12 schools need additional capital, but public schools can often get more favorable lending terms or sell bonds.

According to financial data in the Extra Points Library, Houston had the smallest operating budget among Big 12 public institutions in FY25, with roughly $99 million in total spending. Here’s the full list:

Via the Extra Points Library

The question I’m most interested in, even beyond which Big 12 schools take the money, is what the Big 12 decides to do with their extra cash. Do they attempt to buy stakes (or own outright) startups that could save money for Big 12 schools or provide additional revenue via licensing? Does the league try to get involved in real estate investments? Or will the money be used more for increasing commercial capacity from the league office? Will other conferences follow suit?

In a world where EVERYBODY is trying to earn more revenue, to both pay players and pay for rising operational expenses in higher education, expect leagues and schools to leave no stone unturned.

The NCAA Tournament is expanding. Is Vegas the next best place for First Four II?

My old colleague at NIL Wire, Kyle Rowland, was DEAD SET against additional expansion to the NCAA basketball tournaments. Well, he lost. March Madness is going to expand to 76 teams.

The smartest story I’ve read about this so far comes from my pal Matt Norlander over at CBS. I don’t think it’s fair to say that the tournament expansion is exactly about money, since the revenue boost from television broadcasters will be modest. It was about making sure the power conferences could get more teams into the Big Dance so they won’t be tempted to start their own tournament. Norlander thinks that threat wasn’t credible.

My fellow sportswriters seem united in hating this move. I gotta be honest…I’m not especially bothered. I don’t think the world ended when March Madness expanded to include the First Four in Dayton, and the D1 ranks have grown considerably since the mid-1980s, when the 64-team bracket was established. Expanding the field doesn’t have to be a handout to crummy SEC and Big Ten teams, although it probably will be, unless the NET is tweaked.

But among the interesting angles here, to me, is where you play these new games. The First Four as we knew it is dead. Now we’ll have ‘the “Opening Round” before the field of 64. Some of those games are likely to continue to be held in Dayton, but there will need to be another site, likely west of the Eastern Time Zone.

Brett McMurphy is reporting that Vegas is already preparing to host those games. My understanding is that Vegas sports officials had previously made a run at prying the First Four away from Dayton, and even though other cities have interest, Vegas is the front runner to host the additional games.

There’s plenty of hotel space, basketball courts and affordable flights to Vegas, no doubt. There’s a reason so many conference tournaments are held there. But in the wake of yet another major gambling scandal, is this the best place for the NCAA to cozy up to? Is there a smaller market that could adopt the games and provide more of a Dayton-like atmosphere? I dunno…some place like Salt Lake, Sioux Falls or San Antonio? Perhaps other western cities that don’t start with S? We shall see….

Do athletes like your athletic department?

If you’re considering a new job, there’s a decent chance you’d check out a website like Glassdoor during that process, right? You’d want to know if other people who worked there had a positive experience.

Athletes.org, perhaps the largest college athlete advocacy group at the moment, just launched their own version of that tool.

According to their survey data, athletes gave high marks to programs like Ohio State, Clemson and Georgia for things like athletic training, career development, NIL strategy, and more. But schools like Purdue and Nebraska, teams that haven’t been as successful on the football field, also saw positive rankings. Some of the schools with lower ratings included Baylor, Stanford and Seton Hall.

Not every program has a robust enough sample size to maybe be completely useful, and everyone’s experiences are different. But this information could potentially be an important tool for athletes looking to decide not only where to play…but where to study and live.

What else have we been working on this week?

• After the Brendan Sorsby gambling story that could not only blow up a national title chance before it starts and maybe threaten the legal structure of the House settlement…I think it’s time for everybody, from fans to ADs, to rethink their relationship with the sports gambling industry. How should regulation of this world differ from other “sin” industries, and what framework should we use to inform how to protect ourselves?

• Thanks to some open records requests and conversations with the athletic department, I wrote a more detailed explanation of how West Florida reclassified to D-1, and how their plans had to change at the last moment. A few other nuggets in here for conference realignment degenerates….

• Speaking of open records, I poured through hundreds of school budgets in an attempt to clarify the math surrounding the “should Arkansas have dropped tennis” debate. There’s detailed explanation about how revenue and expenses are calculated, what money they miss, and much more.

• We’ve also added hundreds of new documents to the Extra Points Library, from game contracts across multiple sports, to updated basketball coach contracts, new vendor agreements, and much more.

That’s a big week! You can support our work and read all of our newsletters, and play all of our computer games, by upgrading to a premium subscription. That’s just nine bucks a month, or less than the cost of a Taco Bell Deluxe Combo.

Thanks for reading, everybody. I’ll see you on the internet next week.

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Big day today. Let me share a quick announcement before getting to the newsletter.

Earlier this week, you might have noticed that Kyle Rowland, the lead writer for our sister publication, NIL Wire, accepted a new position at the University of Toledo. I’m bummed to lose Kyle, because he’s a friend of mine and I’ve really enjoyed working with him, but I love the hire for the Rockets. I’m confident he’ll do a great job in their sports information department.

We’ve been re-thinking where NIL Wire sits in our company for the last few months, as I think the editorial distinction between what our publications cover has become more and more blurred. Kyle’s departure makes me think this is a good time to try something different.

We’re going to merge NIL Wire into Extra Points and create one big publication, rather than operate two different ones. We believe this will create a better experience for our readers, and make it easier for us to pursue more relevant ad and sponsorship packages.

For all of you, that shouldn’t mean much of a change. Extra Points will continue to publish four-days-a-week, with two newsletters free, and two behind our $9/mo subscription paywall. If you have a paid subscription to both publications, we’ll merge your accounts and honor the lowest pricing (so you won’t be charged twice).

The only editorial tweak you’ll likely notice is that our free Friday post will be more focused on athlete-compensation and money related stories, and be a more aggregation-centric, rather than a full column. Kyle’s reported columns on NIL Wire will also be migrating over to Extra Points, and EP premium subscribers will be able to access them.

The migration process will start today, and NIL Wire subscribers should get their first edition of Extra Points on Friday. If any of you have any additional questions, feel free to drop me a line at Matt@ExtraPointsMB.com. Again, shouldn’t be a big change for EP readers, but also didn’t want it to be a surprise!

To me, the biggest news of the week, far bigger than even the expansion of the NCAA basketball tournaments, is the Brendan Sorsby gambling scandal.

For those that need a quick tl;dr, Sorsby was one of the most highly sought-after transfer quarterbacks of the last cycle, leaving Cincinnati to join a Texas Tech squad with national title aspirations. ESPN previously reported Sorsby was slated to make in the neighborhood of $5 million this year, one of, if not the, highest player salaries in college football.

But prior to joining the Bearcats, Sorsby reportedly bet on Indiana football games while he was a member of the team (only on the Hoosiers to win, and never in a game where he actually played), Beyond college football, Sorsby also reportedly regularly bet on Cincinnati Reds games and other professional sports, activities that would be against NCAA regulations. Earlier this week, Texas Tech announced that Sorsby is entering a “residential treatment program for a gambling addiction.”

There are a ton of angles to this story. There’s the potential recruiting skullduggery storyline between Cincinnati and Texas Tech. Who knew what and when? Is Cincinnati at risk of NCAA punishment for playing an athlete who was breaking NCAA bylaws? Who let the NCAA know about the activity?

Then there’s the on-field angle. According to the proverbial letter of the law here, Sorsby isn’t just at risk for a major suspension, but potentially a lifetime ban from college football. Will he play this season, or head to the NFL? Would Texas Tech risk additional punishments by pursuing an additional transfer? Can they still make the CFP without Sorsby?

And there’s an important legal angle. Cincinnati is suing over a buyout provision that was apparently not paid when Sorsby transferred to Texas Tech. Beyond an important legal test of the enforceability of said player contracts, Sorsby’s lawyers attack the very idea that these player compensation contracts are marketing deals, rather than what virtually everybody else recognizes but can’t write in a formal document: these are pay-for-play contracts for athletic performance, not publicity rights.

There’s plenty of time to write about all of those. But here, I want to do something a little different. I’d like to talk through how this story could, or perhaps should, change our thinking about sports gambling in the United States.

This isn’t the first major sports gambling story in a post-mass legalization world. Shoot, Damon Jones just plead guilty for his role in an NBA scandal, and dozens of college athletes were implicated in manipulating performance for the benefit of gamblers last season.

My pal Alex Kirshner, over at Slate, argues that a takeaway from this story should be that American society needs more friction around sports betting. Via his story:

Kirshner believes that part of the issue, with Sorsby or anybody else, is that it’s just too dang easy to bet from your phone. That lack of friction, plus the constant advertising from sportsbooks and the dopamine rush of winning a few bucks, leads to problems.

Is he right? Well, walk with me here for a second. I don’t have a completely formed thesis yet, but I’d be very interested in your thoughts as I try to nail down why there may be some problems here, and what we (as fans and industry professionals) could do about it.

Assumption #1: gambling has potential negative societal consequences to require some sort of regulation and/or social stigma…but outright banning is unlikely to be effective

Gambling is not a new industry…casting lots or games of chance predate the life of Christ, after all. Plenty of other societies, current and historic, have viewed the practice as some sort of social ill, even though gambling continued to happen.

I am operating on the assumption that gambling has enough potential societal negatives, be that addiction risk, a drain on family finances, connection to crime, mental health challenges, etc, that it should not be permitted without any sort of regulation or constraint. But I am also operating on the assumption that outright and total prohibition is unlikely to be successful, just as our country has learned from experiments in banning alcohol, some drugs, and other vices.

Perhaps you disagree! That’s okay! I’m open to other arguments.

But if we start at “okay, we can’t get rid of this thing, but we want some sort of constraining principles to limit the potential social harms”, then the question becomes…what regulations?

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

I have a quick announcement I’d like to share before we get too into the weeds. Beyond writing newsletters and running the Extra Points Library, we also provide classroom curriculum support for sports management and sports business classses. We call that package Extra Points Classroom.

Today, we’re excited to announce another institution participating in that program: Keuka College:

This gives Keuka College students (and teachers!) engaging classroom materials and resources, all for less money than a typical textbook.

To learn more about how Extra Points Classroom can fit in with your instruction or institution, drop me a line at matt@extrapointsmb.com.

On April 2, the University of West Florida made it official. The school would reclassify to D-I, joining the UAC in football and the ASUN in everything else. The Argonauts will begin D-1 competition quickly, starting this Fall.

The official announcement was certainly a celebratory moment for both UWF and the UAC/ASUN. For the conferences, they get a member with a successful D-II athletic tradition (including a D-II football national championship in 2019), a large enrollment, and an important market. UWF secures conference stability and a league affiliation with institutions that are more similar to what UWF has become. There are plenty of reasons to think that UWF can become a competitive low-major D-I program pretty quickly across multiple sports.

But reclassifying to play D-I athletics in just a few months wasn’t the original plan. Thanks to correspondence obtained by Extra Points via Open Records Requests, and then follow up conversations, we can better understand exactly how this decision came together, why it happened, and how everybody was able to quickly pivot away from the original plan.

UWF’s original plan? Move to D-I next year, in 2027.

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Today’s newsletter is brought to you in part by one of my essential reads, the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Last week, a major SEC program did something that isn’t super common among P4 schools. It dropped a sport. Well, technically two sports.

Arkansas announced last Friday that the school will discontinue their men’s and women’s tennis programs. Via their release:

Before this news story is used to launch a sea of #takes about the State Of College Athletics or whatever, let’s try to look at as much data as we can.

Arkansas reported spending $2,350,667 in total expenses for their men’s and women’s tennis programs in FY25

That’s slightly less than they reported in FY24 ($2,616,170). This data comes from the school’s FY25 NCAA MFRS Report, an annual budget report that every D-1 program files with the NCAA. I have a copy of that report, along with similar reports for over 200 other D-1 institutions. That data (along with tons of other reports) is uploaded and tracked in the Extra Points Library.

Based on the data we have in the Extra Points Library, that $2.3M mark would put Arkansas at 31st among public schools in total tennis program spending. But in the hypercompetitive SEC, it would be second-to-last among public schools, just ahead of Missouri…and Missouri doesn’t even have a men’s tennis team.

Via the Extra Points Library

Of course, “total expenses” refers to lots of different categories. This number includes spending on team travel, recruiting expenses, coach salaries, administrative salaries, food, equipment, severance payments, and more. So where was Arkansas behind the most?

Our data shows Arkansas was middle of the pack in spending on athletic student aid ($701,030, or 9th), travel, and many other operating expenses. Interestingly enough, it actually led the SEC in spending on athlete food for tennis.

They were near the bottom in coaching salaries ($545,544, while the league average was slightly above $900,000), support staff/administrative spending ($19,794, while the league average was around $103,000), and recruiting ($54,516, compared to the league average of $103,157).

If these numbers are correct (and more on that later), it looks to me that while on the lower end, the operating budget at Arkansas wasn’t so much lower than their peers that competition would be impossible.

But what about the revenues?

This is where things look a little unusual.

Arkansas reportedly had a paltry $3,284 in total revenues tied to their men’s and women’s tennis programs in FY25, and only $9,556 in FY24. Specifically, the school reported earning $2,000 from game guarantees, $1,200 in “other operating revenue”, and a whopping $164 from royalties, licensing, and sponsorships. Combined, that’s easily the lowest number in the SEC. For context, the second lowest program, Mississippi State, reported $118,944 in revenue.

For context, we have FY25 MFRS data for 184 college tennis programs right now. Arkansas would rank 180th in reported revenue, ahead of only Cal State Fullerton, Kennesaw State, Georgia Southern, and Ball State. Central Arkansas reported $336,422 in revenue. Arkansas State reported $219,906.

So if we just look at this like a profit and loss statement, well, this would be an easy decision, right? Arkansas tennis barely produces any sort of revenue whatsoever and costs around $2.5ish million bucks a year to operate. Of course the school should get rid of it, right?

Well,,,,not exactly.

First, we gotta talk about what revenue is

On the MFRS report, the ‘Total Operating Revenues” figure is a combination of many other line items. Those lines include not just the sort of income that you’d typically associate with revenue (like ticket sales, NCAA distributions, game guarantees, parking revenue, etc), but also a few line items that non-industry folks probably wouldn’t consider to be revenue at all.

For example, if a school uses student fees to subsidize the athletic department budget (common among most non-P4 public schools), those fees count as revenue for a sport. So do specific donations, as well as “Direct Institutional Support”, and “Indirect Institutional Support Revenue.” Those categories may not automatically mean cash, as spending on, say, security, utilities, accounting services, tuition waivers, etc. would typically fall into these buckets. But I think it’s important to flag them, since they aren’t revenue in the sense that say, a corporate sponsorship or a ticket sale is revenue.

So for Arkansas State, for example, that $219,906 in revenue comes overwhelmingly from student fees:

Data via the Extra Points Library

If we want to look at college tennis revenue figures without stuff like student fees, direct institutional support or inter-department resource transfers, we need to create a table to look at earned revenues.

Luckily, we have the tools to do that. Here’s the new Top 25, combining men and women:

Now, what we can learn from this exercise is that the overwhelming majority of college tennis programs don’t sell any tickets at all. Selling tickets requires a facility that actually has enough seating capacity that worth it, plus the ability to staff the venue to actually accept tickets. By our numbers, only 14 public schools generated any ticket revenue in FY25, and only one, Texas A&M, generated more than $20,000.

To the extent that tennis programs directly generate revenue, it’s most likely to show up via sports camps. 39 different programs reported sports-camp-related revenue via tennis in FY25, with 19 of them generating more than $20,000.

So yes, on paper, college tennis basically can’t become "profitable”, because it lacks most of the traditional pathways (tickets, concessions, alcohol, television) to generate revenue. Other than camps, fundraising, and corporate sponsorships, there aren’t many levers to pull.

But there’s one revenue stream that isn’t on this sheet that we do have to talk about. Tuition!

For an institution that opts into the House settlement, the new roster limit for men’s and women’s tennis is 10-full scholarship athletes per team. So a school could theoretically dramatically expand their scholarship spending from the pre-House settlement era (the limits used to be 4.5 scholarships for men, 8 for women)…or simply expand the roster and not expand scholarships.

The gap between roster size and scholarship spending is critical in understanding the math behind many Olympic sports, but especially college tennis. College tennis rosters tend to skew heavily international, even at places like Arkansas. On the current men’s roster, only one athlete is from Arkansas, and only one other athlete is from the United States. The others are all international athletes.

The kind of athlete who is capable of playing D1 college tennis is also typically the kind of athlete who is financially capable of paying full tuition. If a school might otherwise struggle to recruit those types of students, an athletic team could be “profitable” without ever selling a single ticket.

Full estimated room and board at Arkansas for a non-Arkansas resident is about $52,879.90 per year. So just four athletes a year, across both teams, paying the complete full price would bring in more than $211,000 a year to the university in tuition. That’s real revenue, but it won’t show up on the MFRS report.

This is a major reason why schools like Youngstown State, Western Carolina, Grambling and Longwood can afford tennis programs, even as Arkansas has decided it can’t. They’re all calculating revenues and expenses differently.

So did Arkansas HAVE to do this in order to stay competitive in other sports? I don’t think so.

In FY25, as an athletic department, Arkansas generated about $195 million in total revenues and spent about $184 million. Getting rid of their tennis programs, on paper, doesn’t even shave 2% off the total operating budget. It matters, but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter that much. It also makes me think that even if Arkansas officials decided that they’d need operating spending ~$3.5 million in order to compete in the SEC, they could have done that.

Just based on these spending reports, I would think Arkansas could have maybe done more to lessen the financial burden of their tennis programs on the general budget. There’s no reported sports camp income, and virtually nothing from donor contributions, sport-specific endowment revenues, or corporate engagement. If tennis was really important to the UA community, either they weren’t showing it, or the school wasn’t letting them.

But even if Arkansas were awesome at all that other stuff, tennis isn’t going to self-generate enough money to be athletic-revenue neutral. This is not a sport you operate if your goal is to profit from direct athletic revenue.

So if the school decided that funding a sport that is overwhelmingly played by foreign students doesn’t fit the department’s long-term, institutional goals, well, that could be defended. If the school decided that it would be better for fans and community members to instead reinvest that cash savings into the school’s golf and volleyball programs, I think that could be defended too. Marginal increases in the operating budgets of those sports may be more likely to lead to better competitive outcomes.

Sport sponsorship is, after all, partly about values. Those are going to be different from school to school

I don’t think there’s much evidence to suggest that the school is slashing a program in the hopes that the (tiny) savings will materially improve football or basketball program outcomes, especially since the tennis savings can’t really be directly converted into football payroll. Arkansas is already fully funding their House payments, after all. If that actually is the plan…then I’d say that’s a dumb plan.

I don’t automatically think that Arkansas reaching this decision means another 20 P4 programs are going to drop Olympic programs in the short-term. Different schools have different Title IX compliance obligations, different risk and bad-press tolerances, different donor pressures and different enrollment pressures. Schools can also almost as easily just slash scholarship and operational spending without actually dropping the sport, achieving similar results without bad press or as strong of a threat of lawsuits.

Did Arkansas absolutely have to do this? No, I don’t think so. Most schools don’t have to drop any sports in order to balance the books. Arkansas wanted to do this. Whether they were justified in wanting to do that depends a lot on what they’re hoping to accomplish.

If anything, this all shows that the math is complicated…and not everything that’s important is easily captured on one chart.

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I've completely given up trying to keep track of all the lawsuits related to college athlete eligibility cases. The task is probably too expansive for even my pals at the College Litigation Tracker. And even though the NCAA wins the majority of these cases (at least for now), the confusion, expense, and instability caused by regular litigation makes it difficult for coaches and athletes to plan for the future.

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The current best hope? A dramatic refresh of current eligibility rules. If NCAA President Charlie Baker gets his way, "five to play four unless you get a waiver" would become a flat "five in five" eligibility system. That means athletes would get five years to play five seasons. No redshirts, (almost) no waivers.

Via SI:

On Thursday, the National Association of Basketball Coaches released the following statement about the potential shift to a "five in five" model:

I haven't read any particularly convincing arguments against moving to a U-23 or "five in five" system. Consistently enforcing waivers for medical hardship or other extenuating circumstances proved almost impossible, and since the financial stakes for playing just one more year in the NIL era are potentially life-changing, I don't blame anybody for suing to play as long as they can. Potentially moving to something more hard and fast could solve that problem.

But the NABC has a point. "Common sense" solutions could very well have unintended consequences, especially since Baker wants this policy voted on next month — much faster than other significant college sports reforms. How such a policy is implemented is even more important than whether the policy should be implemented.

Let's say the policy is voted on and approved next month. Does it apply to current college students? If it doesn't kick in until, say, 2027–2028, will current students sue to force the issue?

And are there other edge cases that still justify exceptions? The three I've read (and heard from ADs) seem to be centered around athletes interrupting their college or athletic careers for military service, to give birth, or to serve religious missions (such as the typical 24-month, full-time religious mission common among Latter-day Saints). Will those be sufficient?

I don't know! Throwing a huge eligibility wrench right as the athletic season is ending — effective ASAP — doesn't feel especially fair to current coaches, high schoolers, or anybody trying to make roster decisions for 2026–2027. But it's entirely possible that there isn't a way to make this change without alienating some group of people.

I'd be surprised, right now, if a version of this rule doesn't get passed in the next several weeks — but as the idea rolls through the NCAA policy sausage-making apparatus, I wouldn't be surprised if the rule ends up looking very different.

A development to watch, especially for hockey fans, for sure.

What else did we write this week?

• We’ve FOIA’d over 1,000 game contracts in football, men’s and women’s basketball, baseball and softball for the Extra Points Library, with more being added almost every single day. I wrote about some of the trends I’ve observed from reading those deals, from which schools/events pay the highest guarentees, to the going rate to buy a women’s college basketball game, and more. I think I’ll be writing about this again, once we get even larger data sets for some of the non-basketball sports.
  
  Also, FOIAing all those contracts means that sometimes, I’ll get news of some 2026-2027 men’s college basketball games before they’re formally announced. For example…Texas A&M, TCU and Tulane? Guess what? You’re all playing UL-Monroe next season. Surprise!

• We also published some guest legal analysis that argued the Trump administration’s aggressive executive order could establish the NCAA (and various conferences) as ‘State Actors'“…which would nuke much of the NCAA’s remaining legal shields. The EO meant to prevent more lawsuits could accidentally create even more lawsuits that weren’t previously considered?!? Very cool!!!

• We also continued our series looking at sport-specific budgets across D-1, with a breakdown of what schools spent on Men’s and Women’s Gymnastics programs in FY25.

• And oh yeah, we added more quality of life features to the Extra Points Library, uploaded 300+ more documents, and added new data for our free trivia game, Who’s That Football Team?

That’s a pretty decent week, in my humble opinion. Now that EPL 2.0 is finally out the door, I’ve also had time to make more reporting phone calls, and you’ll start to see more fruit from those efforts, starting next week.

We can make games, file FOIAs, write newsletters, teach college classes and do everything else that comes with Extra Points, thanks to your support. A premium subscription gets you every single newsletter we’ve ever written (that’s like, three books worth of newsletters), all of our games, and my love and respect. That’s a good deal for just nine dollars a month.

Have a great weekend, everybody. Enjoy some sunshine, catch the end of the NFL Draft, and I’ll see you on the internet next week.

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Back in early March, we published a list of schools that Miami (OH) attempted to schedule in men’s basketball, providng some useful context behind why their SOS wasn’t very good last season.

I noticed from social media that many fans didn’t appear to understand how those schedules are actually constructed…from when teams typically secure opponents, to how guarentees work. So we tried to explain that system too.

Since those stories, I’ve actually been FOIAing for hundreds of game contracts, not just for men’s basketball, but for football, women’s basketball, baseball, softball and women’s volleyball. Part of this is to add those contracts to the Extra Points Library, sure, but I also realized that I didn’t totally understand how the guarantee system worked for other sports. I have a general idea of how much it costs to “buy” a P4 college football game or a major men’s basketball game, but what about softball? Women’s basketball? What influences how much those teams earn?

As of this morning, we actually have slightly over 1,000 total game contracts in the Extra Points Library, with more being added just about every day. Based on that data, here’s what I’ve learned so far:

Remind me…what’s a game guarantee? Or a Buy game?

When two teams agree to play an out-of-conference game in almost every sport, they sign a contract. That contract explains who is charge of paying for the officials, who will broadcast the game on TV/Radio, what the penalties would be if the game is canceled, how many tickets can go to the visiting team band, etc. They’re usually not super long contrats.

Here’s part of an example:

They also often (but not always) include something called a Game Guarantee, or a payment that the home team pays to the visiting team. When low-major schools travel to play larger and wealthier opponents, the home team will often pay for travel expenses, plus something extra…the guarantee. These are also often called “buy games”, because one team is paying the other to come play.

These fees can represent significant revenue streams for low and mid-major athletic departments. Across all sports, a G5 program could potentially earn north of $3 million a year in just game guarantees. In FY25, for example, Kent State University earned more than $4.2 million across all sports in guarantees. Western Michigan, Akron, Fresno State, UTEP, UTSA and Bowling Green all reported earning more than $3 million.

So whats the going rate for one of these games?

It depends on the sport, but also geography, who is doing the buying, when the game is happening, and many other factors.

Based on the contracts we currently have in EPL, here are what those ranges look like:

Men’s Basketball: $1,000-$250,000, (most common range: $50,000-$110,000)

Women’s Basketball: $1,000-$45,000

Football: $100,000 - $2,700,000

Baseball: $0-$25,000

Softball: $0-$7,500

The caveat here is that because we’re relatively early in this process, we don’t have a complete dataset with dozens of contracts per school. You, dear reader, can help us, if you happen to have any game contracts lying around your hard drive. I’m happy to trade those for access to the EPL,

These are pretty ranges! The who, what, when, where and why…after the jump.

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I’ve already written a bit about the Trump administration’s latest executive order on college sports. I don’t think it’s practical or particularly good politics, and I don’t expect it to solve any meaningful problems for the NCAA. But I am, of course, just a journalist. I’m not a lawyer or constitutional scholar.

Luckily, we know some of those constitutional scholars. Regular EP contributors Dr. Neal Ternes (Northern Illinois), Joe Sabin (Southeastern Louisiana) and Sam Ehrlich (Boise State) have a guest post today which suggests that this order could actually create an even bigger constitutional issue for college sports.

I’ll turn the time over to them:

You’re probably already familiar with the latest foray by President Donald Trump into college sports.  As a refresher, Trump held a college sports summit at the White House on March 6 featuring several Republican lawmakers, former coaches, NCAA leaders, conference commissioners, and Cody Campbell where attendees bemoaned the flood of litigation challenging rules regulating player movement, eligibility, and compensation and urged the government to intervene so those same NCAA and conference leaders could reestablish order.  Then, on April 3, the President signed an executive order that purported to use the threat of removing federal funding as an enforcement mechanism for the NCAA’s rules.  Industry insiders quickly noted that the order is unconstitutional and will very likely be struck down in court if it is enforced.

However, in their quest to enlist the federal government in solving the antitrust issues in college sports, NCAA leaders and conference commissioners may be creating new Constitutional issues that will similarly undermine the restrictions they are trying to enforce.

To explain why, we need to talk about state action. 

The protections/prohibitions of the U.S. Constitution only apply to entities that are part of the government, also known as state actors.  This includes public universities and government agencies.  For example, private entities do not owe the people freedom of speech protections and thus can (and frequently do) fire employees for sharing political speech. 

However, a privately operated entity may be said to be a state actor in certain circumstances, meaning the constitution applies to the actions they take while working with the state.  The test for when a private entity becomes a state actor is notoriously inconsistent and there is not single determining factor that guarantees a private actor will be involved in state action; it’s generally a totality of circumstances that lead to such a determination. 

Generally, a private actor may be involved in state action when it enters into a joint economic enterprise with government for which both parties benefit, when its leadership includes government officials, and when its actions are directed by the government.

The NCAA, despite being comprised of multiple public institutions and having officials from public schools in its governing positions, is not a state actor.  That was solidified in a 1988 Supreme Court ruling, NCAA v. Tarkanian.  You may recall former UNLV men’s basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian who was suspended with a show-cause penalty after the NCAA found 38 rules violations in the program.  Tarkanian sued UNLV for violation of his Fourteenth Amendment right to due process and the NCAA intervened.  The Court ruled 5-4 for the NCAA, saying that the association was not operating under the color of any single state law when it sanctioned Tarkanian and that UNLV was not using its power as a state actor to enforce NCAA rules.  

That decision has been foundational to the legal status of the NCAA for over 30 years, giving the association blanket immunity to sanction coaches, schools, and athletes without due process, to regulate speech in ways that might otherwise violate the First Amendment, and to operate without adhering to Title IX.  It is hard to exaggerate exactly how essential being considered a private entity for legal purposes is to the NCAA’s current business model. 

But that also makes Trump’s order a problem. 

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Before we get into it, let me quickly shout out today’s sponsor, the Chronicle of Higher Education:

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Over the weekend, Oklahoma captured the national title for Women’s gymnastics, while Stanford claimed the Men’s championship. Congrats to both of those programs!

That’s a great sign for us to continue in our series of sport-specific national budget analysis. We’ve previously written about volleyball budgets, softball budgets, basketball, and much more. Today? Let’s share some gym numbers.

But first, another important reminder about where I got this data, and what it actually measures

I obtain this data by filing tons of Open Records Requests to obtain each school’s FY25 MFRS Report. This is an itemized budget report sent to the NCAA each year, and while imperfect, it is the closest thing we have to a standardized budget dataset in college sports.

This data does not cover athlete payroll, House settlement payments, NIL, etc. This data comes from the Total Operating Expenses line item on the report. That includes coach and staff salaries, coach buyout and severance packages, recruiting spending, team travel, food, software costs, buy games, and everything that goes into running a program BESIDES athlete payments.

I’d love to share data about what schools are paying athletes! But schools won’t share it with me, and the courts aren’t making them right now. If I’m able to obtain that kind of information in a standardized way, I promise I’ll share it ASAP.

This data also comes from FY25, or July 1 2024-June 30 2025.

And finally, we can only obtain data from schools that respond to open records requests. Private schools, like BYU, Dayton, Stanford, etc., do not have to respond to FOIAs and thus do not publish their MFRS reports. A few public schools, like Pitt, Temple, Delaware, and Delaware State, are exempt from state open records laws. A handful of other schools have not yet responded to our repeated requests, either because they limit FOIAs to in-state residents (so we have to pay a stand-in) or because they’re simply very slow at responding to requests.

We're close to having data from everybody, but we’re still missing budget info from a handful of schools.

We are currently missing data from Air Force, Alabama State, Alabama A&M, Alcorn State, Coppin State, ETSU, Georgia Tech, Jackson State, Morgan State, Texas Southern, Troy, UNC-Asheville, UL-Monroe and Tennessee State. If you happen to have the FY25 MFRS report for any of these schools, I’ll happily give you free premium Extra Points in exchange (and/or give you any of ours).

I know I’ve got some athletic department staffers at many of these schools who read Extra Points. You can leak me your report at matt@extrapointsmb.com.

Now, let’s get to the budgets. First, the total expenses for men’s gymnastics programs from FY25:

That’s…a pretty short list! That’s because there are only 15 programs with D-1 Men’s gymnastics programs at all, and Stanford, Simpson, Springfield and Greenville don’t have to respond to FOIA requests.

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What about the women? Well, that’s a much larger chart… in multiple ways:

The biggest thing that jumps out to me about this data is that gymnastics is one of the rare college sports where the women’s version of the event not only has more participating institutions, but those schools spend much more. Volleyball is the only other obvious example that comes to mind, although I’m sure there are one-off additional exceptions.

Oklahoma, the highest-budgeting program in both sports, reported spending twice as much on the women as they did for the men’s program.

Trying to calculate the relationship between spending and success is a little harder for us in gymnastics because there isn’t an official RPI ranking. But using data from Road to Nationals, we came up with the following graph for women’s gym programs. If there are other data sets we should be using instead, I’m all ears!

This might be the strongest correlation between spending and results from any sport we’ve studied so far. The data from the 2024 season tells a similar story.

You can run similar reports on school-specific or sport-specific spending via the Extra Points Library. 

We’ll have similar breakdowns of spending (and later, revenues) on wrestling and football in the near future. But if you have other suggestions, leave them in the comments!

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Earlier this week, a massive business deal in college sports launched a thousand #takes. College sports mega-everything Learfield has reached an agreement to be purchased by TPG, a massive private equity company. The deal is reportedly valued at roughly $2 billion, which, in my humble opinion, is a lot of money.

To help make sense of this transaction, I have prepared a brief Q&A. But first, a word…

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Wait, what is a Learfield and why do I care about it if I’m a college sports fan?

Learfield, (or LEARFIELD, if I’m trying to correctly follow a corporate style guide) is a massive sports marketing company. In college sports, they’re best known for serving as a multimedia rights (MMR) sales partner for dozens and dozens of athletic departments, as well as offering wildly used products supporting ticket sales, team websites, intellectual property licensing, and more.

All of the ads you see around a football stadium? The radio station that carries your team’s games? The logos and uniforms you see in the college football video game? There’s a good chance Learfield had a hand in all of that stuff.

These firms have been some of the most important business partners to athletic departments for years (outside of the P4, most schools earn more money from MMR sales than they do from television media rights), but in the post-House era, this relationship can be even more important.

So if a private equity company just bought Learfield, and Learfield is an important business partner to most of the large programs in college athletics, are the barbarians at the gates now? Has private equity come for college football?!?

I don’t personally think so, no. Because here’s the dirty little secret. Private equity was already here.

It’s not like Learfield was some mom-and-pop shop that just got bought out by some evil bank from a Hallmark movie or something. Learfield was already owned by private equity companies. In fact, these institutional investors have been involved in owning Learfield since at least 2016. The TPG purchase is a PE-to-PE sale. Those happen in other industries all the time.

I would not look at this deal, or any analysis of this deal, the same way as, say, what Utah athletics is trying to do.

Why is this happening?

Doug Fillis, a former IMG business development executive and founder of Accelerate Sports Ventures, told me that private equity, as a group, “believes college sports is significantly undervalued.” Sports, in general, has become highly attractive for all kinds of institutional investors.

When there aren’t as many other types of businesses to absorb capital investments (not everything can be an AI company, apparently), and with sports typically offering predictable returns, long-term revenue contracts and durable cash flow…it would make sense for huge management companies to want to be involved. And since you (mostly) can’t buy a public school athletic department (yet), perhaps buying a chunk of their commercial rights management company could be the next best thing.

So is that the end of the story, then? Do you, Mr.Extra Points Publisher, have any worries or concerns about this deal?

I don’t know if worries ” is the right word, exactly. But I do have one question for anybody looking to make a massive investment in one of the pillar companies in college sports management. Where does the new revenue come from?

Learfield already works with more than 100 college sports programs, including massive athletic departments like Ohio State, USC, Oklahoma, Texas, and more. There’s always potential room to grab market share from competitors like Playfly, or schools that don’t use any major MMR partner (like BYU or Clemson), but there’s not that many schools that could potentially become new clients.

So the bigger question is about how the company can find ways to drive even more revenue from their current partnerships and clients, in everything from incremental sponsorship sales, to ticketing, digital media, and more.

Fillis told me he thinks there’s still plenty of blue water in new sponsorship categories. “I think there’s a huge opportunity in jersey patch naming rights, field sponsorships, and other big-ticket items.” Another potential area, according to Fillis, could be more aggressive monetization and partnership opportunities around “data rights” for regular season contests.

There’s also major demand from schools to have MMR partners assist in sourcing and executing “above the cap” NIL deals. This can be harder to execute, since State Farm or AT&T isn’t going to overpay an athlete for a marketing deal because they’re secretly big Texas A&M fans. They want to do athlete and school deals to make money, but large firms like Learfield have more data and scale to facilitate those kinds of conversations than individual schools or agents.

Is this the start of a trend?

On the non-school side? I dunno. There aren’t that many college sports companies that are large enough, and have enough potential to really scale, that would likely interest many PE firms, although I’m sure plenty exist. If those companies need capital to grow, PE investments could very well be attractive options.

But I don’t think anything about TPG or Learfield meaningfully changes the calculus for how schools or conferences might approach these sorts of deals. If it made sense for Utah last year, I don’t think anything has changed. And if didn’t make sense last year, well, those same barriers to doing huge deals are also still there.

So as a consumer, or heck, as a school, I wouldn’t panic. If you want an excuse to do that, Lord knows there are plenty of other ones out there. You don’t need to worry about this one.

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What else have we been up to?

Great question!

• A freelancer wrote a story for us about the quick rise of Augustana hockey, from not even really having a big club program to competing for NCAA Tournament spots in D1.

• I also wrote about why UC Santa Barbara is leaving the Big West to join the WCC…and why their explanation shows that one of the key assumptions about conference realignment over the last few years just isn’t true anymore. Hint: it’s about TV.

• I recorded a Sports Business Hour podcast with my pals at Split Zone Duo. And also: why Wisconsin should hire me to be their next AD.

• We introduced a (free!) tracker of college athletics jersey patch deals. 

• Aaaaand we announced Extra Points Library 2.0: a massive update to our college sports database. Since Monday, we’ve added over 200 more documents to this database, plus financial comparison tools, charts to help explain the connection between spending and winning, and much, much more.

Getting the upgraded version of EPL 2.0 out the door was a major time commitment over the last two months! I’m very proud of it and obviously will continue to add documents, features, and support to the platform…but I’m excited to have a little more time on my schedule to make phone calls, do reporting, and catch up with so many folks I haven’t had a chance to talk to.

We can do all of this work because of your support. If you enjoy Extra Points, consider upgrading to a premium subscription today. You get four newsletters a week, access to our entire archive, and get to play Athletic Director Simulator 4000.

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you online next week!

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

The Frozen Four is over, with Denver winning yet another national title. But today, I wany to pass the mic and talk about an interesting program that didn’t quite make the field this year….but came very close. And when you’re a tiny college in South Dakoa that wasn’t even playing D-I hockey a few years ago, getting “very close” is still quite an accomplishment.

Today we’ll hear from Tim Casey, a freelance writer who previously wrote about college basketball rivalries in Philly for us. I’ll turn the time over to him.

By Tim Casey

In April 2022, Garrett Raboin left a comfortable job as an assistant men’s hockey coach at the University of Minnesota to become the head coach at Augustana University, a small college in Sioux Falls, South Dakota that was launching a program. Four years later, Minnesota last month reportedly seriously considered hiring Raboin to lead its team. Instead, Raboin remains at Augustana, where he seems committed to a program he built from scratch into a national contender.

In just its third season, Augustana won 22 games, tied for second in the Central Collegiate Hockey Association (CCHA) and was the last team left out of the NCAA tournament. No program at Augustana’s resource level has become so good in such a short period of time.

The Vikings’ success can be attributed to Raboin and his staff’s recruiting and development prowess. They also benefited from being able to add players via the transfer portal rather than solely relying on freshmen and starting the program during a time when many players had an extra year of eligibility due to the NCAA’s COVID-19 provisions.

Perhaps the major reason Augusta has adapted to Division I, though, is the school’s financial backing and commitment to hockey, an expensive sport and one that was new to the area at the college level. South Dakota does not sponsor high school hockey, although Sioux Falls has a junior team that usually leads the United States Hockey League in attendance. The Augustana campus is also about 20 minutes from the southwest border of Minnesota, which has a rich hockey tradition, and within driving distance of a few USHL teams, making it convenient for recruiting.  

Still, Augustana didn’t even have a club, intramural or junior varsity hockey team before joining Division I in 2023. That was different from other programs such as St. Thomas (2021), Lindenwood (2022) and Stonehill (2022) that fielded teams at lower levels for more than two decades before moving up to DI. 

In December 2019, Augustana’s board of trustees approved a plan called “Viking Bold: The Journey to 2030” that included several goals to help make the University more attractive to students as small, private colleges faced enrollment and fiscal challenges. As part of that plan, Augustana sought to have all of its sports transition to Division I and join the Summit League, but its bid was rejected in May 2020. 

Augustana then considered its options and decided to start a DI hockey program. The school competes in the Division II Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference in its other sports, but can play DI hockey because the NCAA does not sponsor a DII postseason hockey tournament. 

The school broke ground in October 2021 on Midco Arena, a 3,000-seat on-campus hockey facility projected to cost $40 million.  T. Denny Sanford, a local businessman and billionaire, was heavily involved with funding the arena and program, as were other individuals and businesses such as Midco and Sanford Health.

“A lot of our founding partners may not have had huge ties to Augustana,” said Josh Morton, who has been Augustana’s athletics director since 2018. “They appreciate what we do, who we are, how we represent the city of Sioux Falls, but they recognize that this was a differentiator for our community. Whether you're a business owner or community leader, this is just another important step in providing Division I athletics for our city.”

After securing the funding for the arena, Morton’s next step was to search for a coach.

Via Augustana Athletics

There’s a saying that I’ve heard quite a bit while covering business and policy issues in college athletics. College sports generally isn’t the reason why anybody gets hired for university administration jobs….but it absolutely can be why you get fired.

And it makes sense! If you work in higher education, it’s because you have important skills in development, research, resource management or any number of other departments that have little direct connection to college sports. And that’s the way it should be! “Front Porch” of the university or not, it’s rare that athletics represents more than a few percent of a school’s budget. 

But when things go wrong, boy it can really go wrong, and not just for university presidents. College sports can be what drives congressional hearings, alumni engagement (or lack thereof), faculty battles, pesky FOIA requests, and sometimes, even the existential future of a university.

Even if you never go to a football game or teach a student, if you work in higher education, it pays to know what’s going on in college sports. Thankfully, that’s what Extra Points is for! 

A few specific things that everybody in higher education really needs to understand about college sports right now….

Governance belongs more to congress than the NCAA. Make sure your governmental affairs team knows that

After the NCAA’s defeat in Alston, the settlement in House and the near-daily eligibility related lawsuits across the country, one thing is certain. The NCAA does not enjoy the legal ability to make and enforce rules for its own membership that it enjoyed over the last several decades. If membership decides to vote in favor of a restrictive eligibility policy, new athlete compensation regulations, cost control measures or transfer windows, there’s a real risk that the policy could be struck down in court on antitrust grounds. 

That means that while the NCAA governance process still matters, the ultimate lasting regulatory authority increasingly sits with the court system and with state and federal lawmakers. And you probably don’t need me to tell you that state and federal lawmakers are usually not experts in higher education or college athletics. 

Your institution almost assuredly already has a governmental affairs team to help educate lawmakers about your institution’s mission and your various appropriation needs. If that person isn’t actively also trying to educate lawmakers and staffers about your athletic realities, that should change quickly. If the only schools lawmakers hear from are massive state flagships and P4 private schools, then they will craft and support policy with those institutions in mind. Your representatives need to know what athlete compensation, eligibility reform, athlete employment and other major issues means for regional public schools, HBCUs, tuition-dependent private schools, D-II and D-III institutions, and everywhere in between. 

Your faculty probably don’t know what goes on with athletics…and that can create problems over time. 

You don’t need me to tell you that this is a challenging time in higher education. Between the enrollment cliff making domestic enrollment more challenging, international student recruitment becoming more expensive and politically fraught, state appropriations declining and operating costs going up, there’s a good chance that your institution is dealing with the tough questions on how to manage limited resources.

That situation is hard on everybody, and it’s only natural for groups (faculty, alumni, lawmakers, the community, etc)  to look for somebody to blame. In our professional experience, athletics is often an easy scapegoat. This is especially true because athletic departments generally do not do a good job of building bridges with other departments on campus.

This dynamic can become toxic, but it’s entirely fixable. All faculty and staff should be able to understand exactly where athletics fits into the mission of the university, what kind of resources are allocated to athletics, and how athletics is measured. Massive departments like Ohio State and Texas may get the biggest headlines across the country, but chances are, your athletic department isn’t Ohio State or Texas. Is the athletic department mostly there for enrollment management? To improve community and political engagement? To facilitate the recruitment and retention of minority students? A mixture of all of the above? 

Whatever the answer is, make sure it’s being communicated across campus. Or other messages will be instead. 

Your athletic department budget doesn’t tell the full story. So you better tell it

We do extensive analysis of athletic department budgets via the NCAA MFRS Reports. While these reports show revenues and expenses, we know they’re not to be read as profit and loss statements. But most people don’t know that…including on campus. 

Your university probably doesn’t publish profit/loss statements for say, the English department, or the Human Resources department, or any number of other campus auxiliaries. If you don’t want the athletic department to be subject to a different source of analysis, you need to understand what message the MFRS report sends, what it tracks, and what is missing.

One important revenue item that doesn’t show up on these reports, for example, is tuition revenue from college athletes. If you have 15 men on your golf team roster, and only three are on full scholarship, then chances are, you’re generating new tuition revenue from 12 male students who wouldn’t otherwise be on your campus. That may very well be more revenue than the entire golf team operating budget. But that won’t show up on the MFRS report. Instead, it will only list revenue from ticket sales, donations, endowment income, NCAA distributions, etc. 

Make sure you know what your MFRS report says (we have almost all of the public school reports in our Extra Points Library), and if you don’t think it represents a completely accurate depiction of the budget and the rest of the university, you need to make sure you’re communicating the bigger picture. 

There are lots of ways to earn more revenue

Many of the larger athletic departments are openly courting investments from private equity and private capital groups. While this can work, our reporting shows that this is often a very risky investment category for universities. Private capital generally wants returns quickly, and since leadership changes so often in higher education, and the law limits what kind of control can be given to PE, selling equity shares can end up becoming a governance nightmare. 

Thankfully, there are other solutions. Beyond the traditional funding models of student fees, broadcast media rights and institutional subsidies, there is promising growth in licensing university IP, turning athletic facilities into multi-purpose venues, dynamic ticket pricing, and other, less dramatic and invasive strategies. 

Athletic departments regularly hire expensive consultants or third-party sales organizations to handle revenue growth and corporate sponsorships. Many of those companies (called MMR sales, or Multimedia Rights sales) have years of experience and valuable perspectives. But so does the rest of a college campus!

By tapping into the expert knowledge on marketing, sales, engineering, software development, business and more, we believe there are often better strategies for balancing the athletic department books than outsourcing or selling off important assets.

Now, this isn’t an exhaustive list. But it’s a start. 

Obviously, your school’s relationship with athletics will look a little different in the Big Ten than it might in the NCAC. Enrollment-challenged private schools don’t have the same objectives and cost pressures as massive land-grant research schools. But understanding how decisions are made, who they impact on campus, how the money is earned, and where that money is spent are all important things for campus leaders to know, from faculty to central administration. 

If you find this work valuable, the best way to support us, and get the full picture of the changing nature of collage sports, is by upgrading to a premium subscription. Premium members get access to everything we publish including two addition premium articles per week, where we publish our most detailed reporting, proprietary data analysis, and the kind of context that turns information into an advantage for industry professionals.

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Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Real quick before we start…you might have seen that yesterday, we announced a massive update to Extra Points Library. To help everybody (including folks who aren’t currently EPL customers) better understand the new tools and features, I’m running a free demo on Thursday to walkthrough the product.

If you’d like to attend, you can RSVP here. Or check out Library here.

Back in September, the WCC held a triumphant press conference to announce their latest addition, UC San Diego. While most of the press conference centered on celebrating their new addition (which, seeing as UCSD had just made the NCAA Tournament in Men’s and Women’s basketball, was deserved), WCC Commissioner Stu Jackson also shared some thinking about potential other additions to the league.

Via my story from September:

Well, I was hearing correctly. Last Friday, multiple other reporters shared that UC Santa Barbara would also leave the Big West to join the WCC. On Monday, the league held a press conference, confirming the news.

UCSB athletic director Kelly Barsky and university chancellor Dennis Assanis both pointed to the move as part of a holistic, university-wide effort to enhance the profile of the school, a highly regarded research institution, outside of just California. “We have a story we want to share with the world,” Dr. Assanis said, and joining a league that has historically competed for multiple NCAA Tournament bids, and has membership in markets like Denver and Portland would help the school share that story.

With the addition of the Gauchos, who are slated to join the league in 2027, the WCC will now have 12 schools: UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, Denver, Seattle, Santa Clara, San Francisco, San Diego, Saint Mary’s, Portland, Pepperdine, Pacific and Loyola Marymount. But could the league get even bigger?

Said Jackson, “

Jackson also noted something else about the league’s approach to conference realignment that I think fans (and ADs) should pay close attention to…