Let's play Athletic Director Simulator 3000 with an actual Athletic Director

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

A few quick housekeeping notes I’d like to share:

• I will be in New Orleans from Sunday to Tuesday for the Women Leaders in College Athletics conference. I’ll be interviewing ADs, athletes and administrators for Collegiate Sports Connect and Athletic Director U while I’m there, but also hoping to just introduce myself to folks and put names with faces. If you’ll be in town, I’d love to say hello! Drop me an email/DM/telegram etc.

• I am also working to finalize other travel for the rest of 2023. I’m planning on being in New Haven, Connecticut in mid-November (more on this later), and am looking to lock down two or three other trips before the calendar flips (Boston? Boise? Pullman?).

• If you haven’t taken advantage of some of the other stuff that comes with your Extra Points subscription recently, I’d encourage you to do so. I am blocking time every single day to update our FOIA Directory, and as we get closer to BUYOUT SZN, I think more fans will appreciate being able to pull up the full PDF of a contract. We also have itemized athletic department budget information, shoe deals, vendor contracts, AD contracts, and more…from the P5, to D-III.

A premium Extra Points subscription also gives you access to the computer game we made, Athletic Director Simulator 3000.

In order to make this game as realistic as I possibly could, I talked to lots of ADs (as well as other industry professionals) about our scenarios and success probabilities. We had a few ADs play beta versions of the game, and I know that at least a handful have played the game post-release, even though most of them have registered using their personal email addresses.

But you know what I thought might be fun? Actually playing the game with an actual athletic director.

So earlier this week, I sat down with Craig Pintens, the AD over at Loyola Marymount University, in the WCC. Craig was kind enough to play a few rounds of the game with us, and talk through how he would approach those particular scenarios. You can watch that playthrough below:

I’m going to go ahead and spoil something here. In his first run of the game, Pintens, a successful, actual AD in real life…got fired.

Is this because he’s secretly bad at video games? Is it because I made a lousy game? Did he just get tremendously unlucky? Am I trying to drum up business for an Athletic Director Simulator Strategy Guide?

No, he just got unlucky, since the game does have semi-randomized results. Sorry, I’m not very good at teasing videos.

I’m going to try and play the game with a few other folks at Women Leaders, and will be happy to share those videos. I am also happy to announce that we just kicked off a process to make some pretty significant improvements to the game, from updated graphics (the game won’t look like it was released in 1981 anymore! Maybe…1989 instead!), school profiles, customization options, tools for educators, and much, much more. We hope to release the next version of that game by Christmas.

Let’s pause for a moment for a quick word from one of our sponsors:

This edition of Extra Points is brought to you by AMPLOS:

Here’s what else we published this week:

• I asked Alex Payne, a former Washington State hammer thrower, to talk about what conference realignment and long-distance travel mean for her as an athlete and fan.

• I also published a story from Cody Jackson, a compliance officer at Samford, to help explain what the heck compliance officers actually do, especially on football game days.

• I also listened to an Oregon statehouse hearing on conference realignment, which included some important information about travel for Oregon Duck athletes, and some jaw-dropping numbers for the Oregon State athletic department. It begs the question…should the state do anything to help offset the potential financial pain for Oregon State and the Corvallis community?

Thanks for reading, everybody. I’ll see you in your inbox from New Orleans.

If you’d like to buy ads on Extra Points OR in ADS3000, good news! They’re affordable, and we still have openings for this year. Drop me a line at [email protected]. If you have news tips or FOIAs you want to share, I’m at [email protected]. Otherwise, I’m at [email protected], @MattBrownEP on Twitter, @ExtraPointsMB on Instagram, and @MattBrown on Bluesky