Athletic Director Simulator 4000, or how I found out ESPN reads Extra Points

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

And welcome to the, uh, thousands of new Extra Points readers we’ve added over the past few days. I’m thrilled you’re here, and I hope you enjoy reading Extra Points and playing our games.

Why the sudden spike of new readers? Well, let me quickly talk about the past 48 or so hours.

I woke up Tuesday morning to discover that ESPN had launched a new web interactive. The game — called “Dream Job or Impossible Gig?” — asked players to step into the shoes of a Division I athletic director. They would decide what type of school to lead and then face a variety of realistic scenarios. They would select a decision from multiple choices and then try to balance their athletic department budget, on-field success and “risk management.”

Does that sound familiar to you? It sure did to me, because wooobuddy, that seems an awful lot like Athletic Director Simulator 4000, the game we wrote here in 2023. If you haven’t played ADS yet, now is a great time, since we’re making it free for the rest of 2025.

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After I saw ESPN’s game, I fired off a few tweets that were both tongue-in-cheek and also conveyed a real sense of frustration. I know ESPN’s college football desk is aware of this publication and of ADS4000; lots of ESPN employees read Extra Points, and I can see who plays the game.

I understand that ESPN wasn’t trying to launch a direct competitor to what we’re trying to do with ADS4000, but when you’re a tiny company, and you see some massive megacorporation launch something very similar to what you’ve already done … well, I think reasonable folks can understand why I wasn’t thrilled.

Especially because what am I going to do, try to sue Disney? That would be like our neighborhood parks department karate teacher deciding to go after John Wick. It isn’t a fair fight.

A few outlets have written about this dust-up, and it’s possible a few more will. For what it’s worth, ESPN PR gave the following statement to Awful Announcing:

I’ve since had the chance to talk to some folks at ESPN, and you know what? I agree!

I don’t believe anybody at ESPN deliberately sought to rip off ADS4000. Do I think their work was inspired by mine in some capacity, and that it shares an awful lot of similarities? Well, I’ll let you be the judge of that. But I don’t think any harm here was intentional.

I applaud anybody trying to find new ways to help broad audiences understand complex topics. The House settlement, the SCORE Act, how departments earn and allocate resources … these are all complicated, important topics, and they’re not always easy to follow. Games are a great way to help explain them, and I’m glad that’s what ESPN tried to do. I hope other publishers follow.

But if anybody else wants to try to make an interactive web game based on being an athletic director, maybe give me a call first? It might prevent some confusion later, and honestly, I’d be more than happy to help. We’re on the same side here, after all … trying to help educate and inform the public.

Of course, if ESPN really wants to make it up to me … how about letting Extra Points broadcast some Big Sky basketball games next season?

We’ve been trying to grab all the new college football coach contracts and extensions from this year’s carousel. We don’t have everything — UCLA and Cal, for example, have told me contracts or term sheets don’t exist for their new hires yet — but we’ve picked up quite a few PDFs, which you can check out in the Extra Points Library.

One deal that caught my attention is Marshall Faulk’s contract as the new head coach at Southern. According to the contract shared with us after we filed an open records request, Faulk’s deal is only for three years (Jan. 1, 2026 through Dec. 31, 2028), although the school’s board can extend that by one year. Even by FCS standards, that isn’t very long.

Faulk will be paid a base salary of $400,000, with incentives for winning a SWAC division championship, going undefeated, beating an FBS team, winning the Bayou Classic and driving season-ticket sales.

And then there’s this fundraising incentive, which you occasionally see at FCS or smaller schools but very rarely at larger FBS institutions:

It seems pretty clear to me that Southern wants to win football games and graduate players, but the school is hoping that bringing in a famous ex-NFLer will light a fire with its fanbase and drive new attention and ticket sales. This strategy has worked before, I’m told.

I also doubt this next clause ever becomes a thing, but I couldn’t help but notice this paragraph in Joey McGuire’s contract extension at Texas Tech:

It’s hard for me to imagine a world in which Tech would make the College Football Playoff at the end of this current deal (2033) and McGuire wouldn’t be extended, so this provision becomes moot, but you never know! College football could look very, very different by 2033.

FWIW, I haven’t seen any coach contract yet that promises any particular level of House settlement payments or “above cap” NIL money, even though I’m sure that sort of thing comes up during negotiations. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, just that I haven’t seen it in writing yet.

We’ll keep filing requests as new hires and extensions are announced.

As a quick reminder, we’re moving to a holiday schedule for the next two weeks. I will have short posts on Dec. 22 and 29, but otherwise, I’ll be taking some time to build Cherished Family Holiday Memories with my children. We will return to our regular publishing schedule on Jan. 5.

I will also be at Chicago State on Thursday morning for a press event and will write about that for Friday’s newsletter.

We’ve also …

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Thanks for reading everybody. Good luck with today’s Who’s That Football Team puzzle, and I’ll see you all in your inboxes tomorrow.