Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
I hope all of you have a wonderful winter holiday season. I’m going to try to be on holiday hours over the next two weeks, as I’ll be home with my kids and extended family. Extra Points will publish again on the 29th, and then we’ll be right back to our usual four-day-a-week schedule starting on the Jan. 5. I’ll also be updating our games section multiple times over the break.
Historically, I do a predictions-type post near the end of each year … and then check back to see if I got any of them right. Since I know nobody is reading all of their emails right now, we’ll do some 2026 predictions next week.
I guess I was tired of looking stupid every year, so for 2025, rather than making very specific predictions, I highlighted a variety of storylines I thought would be huge for this year.
Was I right? Well, let’s see.
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Will a need to drive new revenue upend the MMR industry?
Last year, I wrote:
That model can still work for many schools and companies, but it’s been facing headwinds for a while. The pandemic and declining ad spends in many industries pushed some MMR firms to end or renegotiate existing contracts. And now, every single school is trying to aggressively find more revenue in order to pay for revenue sharing and House settlement penalties.
My hunch is that there won’t be much more revenue to squeeze from typical broadcast rights agreements, and there are only so many more tickets you can sell. It will be easier for schools to find new money by expanding their potential MMR inventory (by selling stuff they haven’t before, like field sponsorships, jersey patches, new sponsorship categories, etc), taking their sponsorship sales in-house, or pushing for more favorable terms from existing partners.
Will the existing MMR companies find ways to successfully pivot to selling not just school intellectual property, but sponsorships that combine school and athlete IP? Will new sponsorship categories mature quickly enough to pay for some of these massive new expenses? Will new companies enter the MMR space? Will more schools take their operations in-house?
I think I might have been a bit early on this one. Yes, everybody is hunting for more money, and yes, many large brands have begun to make headwinds with creating new partnerships that combine athlete and institutional IP. But the biggest new revenue category, jersey patches, are only just starting to be announced, and the NCAA hasn’t even formally allowed them yet. Folks around the industry have told me that it’s often been harder to sell field-level sponsorships than schools anticipated … or at least for as much as they’d like.
I’m sure reform in sponsorship revenue will continue to be a story in 2026, but I’d argue that Utah’s new LLC endeavor with private equity — and other schools (and conferences) getting very deep into those conversations — is a much bigger deal than anything a Van Wagner or JMI launched in 2025. If you’re not working in the industry, I’m not sure if you had to think about MMR all that much.
What are the other major political stories that will impact college sports?
Now that Trump is headed back to the White House, along with unified Republican control of Congress, it’s a lot more likely that the NCAA will be able to get the labor legislation passed that they’re hoping for. Congressional Republicans tend to be more sympathetic to the NCAA’s arguments about labor and control, after all.
But I’m not sure that athletic directors, university presidents, industry lawyers and the rest of the College Sports Industrial Complex is ready for how some of the Trump administration’s ambitious agenda may impact college sports in other ways.
Well, it’s late December 2025, and we still don’t have any federal college sports bills, despite the support of President Donald Trump and most congressional Republicans, plus significant lobbying efforts from the NCAA and power conferences. Maybe it’ll finally happen in 2026, but I’m pretty skeptical.
I do think it’s fair to say that other federal government policies impacted college athletics quite a bit this year. Significant cuts in research funding and assorted federal grants squeezed higher education budgets across the country, which of course impacted college sports. Any athletic department or institution that heavily relies on student visas and international recruiting is more concerned than it was two years ago. The sorts of stuff I projected in that story from last year … really did happen.
Higher education has been a major flashpoint in the cultural policies of this administration, especially when higher education intersects with immigration policies. There’s a lot more going on here than just NIL and antitrust.
Who is actually going to run college sports?
I look at this question on two levels. For one, we have the question of what the NCAA is actually going to be, long-term. Virtually everybody I’ve talked to, from D-I ADs to D-IIIs, agrees that the current NCAA governance structure is too unwieldy, particularly in D-I. Pretending that UCLA and UC-Riverside are really competing in the same ecosystem is getting harder and harder to pull off, especially as the largest conferences openly pine for more championship access and power.
So they take their ball and go home? Do we get to the point where some low-major D-I programs begin to openly wonder if the chance at a 15-seed in the NCAA Tournament is worth the legal exposures and other hassles? There have been white papers and discussion groups floating around for years, but the talk of more meaningful breakaways is only going to get louder.
But beyond the NCAA, there’s also the question of whether college athletics governance and control begins to shift explicitly away from the traditional uneasy marriage of athletic departments and broadcast partners
I mean, I guess we did talk about this stuff a lot in 2025. It’s even happening now, as multiple athletic directors going to Twitter to pitch collective bargaining and various NCAA administrative breakaways for football.
But did anything really change? U.S. Soccer put out a few white papers about a potential change-up, but NCAA bylaws haven’t changed, and schools have been slow to respond. Sport federations in places like basketball, hockey and volleyball aren’t talking (at least in public) about a post-NCAA world.
Maybe I was early to this storyline too. I can’t say an awful lot happened over the past year to move any governance conversations from Twitter/Knight Commission PowerPoints/investor pitch decks toward something resembling concrete policy. But you know how this stuff goes … slowly, slowly, slowly, then suddenly all at once.
And finally,
Who decides to go on offense?
If you’re an athletic director or a coach right now, especially outside the P4, there’s an enormous amount of stuff that is completely outside your control. Your league wasn’t consulted in the House settlement. You have limited sway with broadcast partners. You have no idea what’s going to happen in Congress or with the various college sports cases moving through federal court. The list goes on.
On some level, I wonder how many constituents in college sports decide, screw it, if we’re going down, let’s at least have that happen on our own terms and start swinging.
We could see that in conference realignment, with one-bid leagues launching preemptive membership strikes on peer conferences, or in being willing to dramatically change how they operate, in an attempt to regain some control, like the WAC a few years ago.
We could see this with individual sports, who might look at post-NCAA governance options, or even more aggressive federal lobbying. We could see this with individual schools, who decide to sue the proverbial big boys and hope for the best. I think we could even see it in the marketplace, as many of the entrenched firms in various subcomponents of college sports (travel, ticketing, software, consulting, etc) could face more aggressive competition than ever before.
Again, I think Utah is probably the best example, swinging for the fences with its private equity cash infusion. There have certainly been other institutional investors who have been aggressive in wanting to grab a piece of the college sports action, from FCS football to the Big 12, Big Ten and beyond.
But I don’t know if we saw as many “screw it, chips in the middle” plays from non-investment companies, mid-major conferences, specific athletic departments, etc. Maybe you could call the ASUN/UAC merger/partnership an ambitious effort to regain some sense of control, but even now, that partnership has almost as many questions as answers.
If anything, I can’t help but think that so many of the college sports reform stories I wrote in 2023 could be written almost note-for-note next week. The parameters of the conversation have been set. The stakes are very clear. But there haven’t been a lot of decisions — outside of those forced upon the industry by courts, outside businesses and external forces.
I dunno, I’d give myself a B- on this one. I was pretty good at catching a few other stories, but my crystal ball skills remain subpar. That’s not why I’d recommend you subscribe to Extra Points.
Will that stop me from making a bunch of predictions next week? Nah. But first, it’s time for Family Holiday Memories.
Thanks for reading, everybody. Have a wonderful holiday season. I’ll see you in your inboxes next week.
Play the Daily Challenge
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CLUE #1
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This team just had a heartbreaking playoff loss |
