MAILBAG: NIL and 'Good Jobs", ADS3000 updates and more:

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

Quick programming note: I’m going to take a little Fall Break as we head into Thanksgiving. I will try to have a premium post up for Tuesday and then will go dark the rest of the week. We’ll return to our regular four-days-a-week schedule next week. Am I taking a few days off because my metrics show nobody is reading their email two days before Thanksgiving? Am I doing it because Chicago Public Schools is closed all of this week? The answer is yes.

Anyway, before you all head off to enjoy Thanksgiving with friends and family, let me answer a few reader questions. As always, you can send me mailbag questions via Twitter, DMs, or emails….but I’m more likely to remember your question if you DM it or email it.

Great question Doug! For those that aren’t aware, earlier this year, we built an Honest-To-Goodness computer game called Athletic Director Simulator 3000. This game, which we originally built for our D1.classroom students, asks players to respond to many realistic scenarios that an actual AD might face.

For a guy who isn’t a software developer, I think it turned out pretty good! But it was a first effort. After reading your tweets, and emails, and getting feedback from several of our classroom partners, we decided to make some big changes to the game. Our goal is to have a massive update ready before Christmas of this year.

Our goal is to include updates like

• Actual graphics! Say goodbye, Apple IIe, 1981-lookin’ graphics. Hello, early 1990s pixel art!

• The ability to customize your AD’s name, school name, and more.

• Completely rebalancing the game’s variables by removing the “support” variable and replacing it with an “internal support” and “fan support” variable. After all, sometimes something is popular with fans, but not so popular with university presidents.

• Adding new types of schools. No longer will you play as a generic Low-Major or Mid-Major. Now you’ll be able to pick a type of school (academically selective private without football? Regional public school in Georgia? Religious private school in Texas?), which will influence not just the questions you get, but how to respond.

• Multiple new quality-of-life updates

• And more!

Here are a few CONCEPT IMAGES, just to give you an idea of what we’re working with. This is not what the final product will look like.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy these games! I sure love making them.

So this is a good question…and I think I have a different definition of what constitutes a good job.

If you define “good job” as a job where one could win a national title, there’s only one “good job” open, and that’s Texas A&M. There is no reason to believe that anybody could recruit enough elite talent to places like Michigan State, Mississippi State or San Diego State to win more than one playoff game. And even at A&M, a place that is willing to spend enough to bring in national championship-caliber recruiting classes….well, there’s a reason nobody has come close to winning a title at Texas A&M since the invention of color television.

If you define “good job” as an attractive gig relative to like, the median job in general…then they’re all good jobs. Great jobs, even. The worst FBS gig in the most thankless market is still gonna pay what, a minimum of $450,000 a year over four years, and once you get fired, they still gotta pay out the rest of that contract? And at a P5 market, once you get fired in five years, you get generational wealth. Those are all GREAT jobs. We should all be so lucky as to get ten million dollars when we get canned.

I think a “good” FBS head coaching job is one where a) expectations are in line with resources and competitive reality and b) it’s in a place that would be fun to live in.

This is my job personal preference, but that would put San Diego State near the very top of the list. I’d probably put Mississippi State and Syracuse near the bottom.

Now, as for NIL…I don’t think it changes things that much.

This could change in the future, but right now, talent distribution hasn’t actually changed very much in the NIL era. The most elite prospects are actually concentrating more at the same handful of schools than they did before, and post-P5 programs are recruiting at similar levels than they did before NIL started. Outside of Missouri and Texas A&M…how many programs can you think of that are suddenly doing much better signing high school kids?

Like, I don’t doubt that Syracuse isn’t dropping NIL bags like a Florida State or Clemson is, and that’s part of the reason the team isn’t recruiting at the top end of the ACC. But Syracuse didn’t recruit those dudes before NIL. Syracuse is a private school in a region that doesn’t produce a lot of elite CFB talent. They haven’t been consistently good since before any current recruit was even born. They’re not gonna get blue-chippers by the truckload even if they somehow start outspending NC State or Virginia Tech.

I think it’s fair to say that the ability of your market to drop NIL bags plays a very big role in securing transfer portal talent, or in keeping some of your best players. But that isn’t the only factor, and programs that build strong cultures and have a track record of developing talent will be able to retain dudes, even if they get outbid. I think we now have some compelling evidence to suggest that you can’t build your entire roster out of the portal, which means HS recruiting still matters a ton…and the teams that can do that well are mostly the same teams that were doing that well in 1999.

Basketball? Totally different everything. But that’s what I think the data tells us for big-time college football.

Sure!

I won’t sugarcoat this. I legitimately believe that college football is facing massive, structural changes on multiple fronts. Conference realignment has blown up multiple regional rivalries, and probably isn’t finished. The courts are very likely to rule at least some college football players are employees, which will almost certainly price some programs out of major college football, and will overturn the administrative status quo. There are real concerns about TV networks, mega boosters, institutional investors, and others who will push for additional consolidation among power leagues. I believe all of that is true.

But my advice to any fan would be to remember why, specifically, they love college football.

When Ohio State plays Michigan this weekend, will I be contemplating how the results will impact anyone’s NIL valuations, or if FOX will make enough money selling advertisements, or how the game will perform against ESPN’s noon programming? Hell no. I’m not that kind of college football sicko.

Could some of these structural changes in college athletics make things worse for athletes, fans, and institutions? Yeah, I think so. I’ve written about that and expect to continue to do so as long as I am writing Extra Points. Could some of them help usher in an era of governance that is more honest, fair, and moral? Yeah, I think that’s possible too, and I’ll write about that here as well.

I don’t know how the story ends. But I do know that on Saturday, there will be football games played. Marching bands will be there, tens of thousands of screaming fans, and those games will mean something. In five years, a lot of stuff will be different….but I think there will still be football on Saturdays, with marching bands and mascots and screaming fans. I think there will be for many years to come.

When that happens this weekend, I’m going to enjoy it. And I’m going to try and enjoy it as long as I can.

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