Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
Two quick notes before we jump into everything today:
I’ve added a few more updates to our Who’s That Football Team? game, which is free for everybody. Not only do we also offer a 3×3 grid mode puzzle, but users now have the ability to build their own grid puzzles. I look forward to seeing your creations, your category suggestions and your creativity. My goal is to push other QOL updates this week for Concessions Stand Simulator and ADS4000.
Speaking of free things all Extra Points readers can take advantage of, I’d encourage you to check out our website community. I’ll run a free mailbag newsletter once we get enough good questions submitted via the community chats, and I’m throwing up sports business stories that are worth deeper conversations. We also have a few VIP sections for our premium subscribers. I’ll add some video game reporting to that area early this week, as well.
And now, on to the story:
Akron really did let a fan call some offensive plays on Saturday. The drive ended in a fumble, but the Zips were still able to comfortably beat Robert Morris. The school’s stunt was perhaps the most ambitious and audacious yet in a series of bold promotions from Group of 6 schools trying to grab attention (and money) from the bigger brands in college sports.
ESPN examined several of those promotions, including Delaware’s announcement that it would give a massive VIP package to a fan who managed to win a national title in EA Sports College Football 26 with the Blue Hens. The Delaware plan couldn’t have worked better, as player usage of the team was so high that the school ended up earning more in licensing revenue than some Power 4 programs.
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But the story isn’t all sunshine, rainbows, and plucky Davids seizing six-figure checks from Goliath. This paragraph from the ESPN story really stuck with me:
The results have showed on the field, where Group of 6 schools are pulling fewer upsets. And while UMass and Tulsa garnered headlines for big Week 1 wins this year, it was otherwise a dismal set of games in which the Group of 6 went 2-26 and were outscored, on average, by nearly 27 points. Add in the increasingly transitional rosters -- with top players leaving for bigger paydays at power programs -- it's harder than ever to engage with fans. (70% of Group of 5 all-conference players from 2025 with remaining eligibility transferred at year's end.) Charlotte athletic director Kevin White compared it to minor league baseball, where attracting fans is as much about the game-day experience as the product on the field, and schools have to pull out all the stops just to get fans into the stadium.
G6 programs nearly sprung upsets in a few games in Week 2 (like when Utah State gave Washington all it could handle), but those were few and far between. In fact, we had just as many FCS over FBS wins this season (two, and very nearly four) as we’ve had G6 over P4.
For most of my career, I argued that the gap between “power conference” and “non-power conference” was more about branding than the quality of the roster or team. But in the post-House, post-NIL, post-portal world, I don’t think that’s the reality. Some individual teams can hang, yes, but overall, the gap has never been larger. Or at least, the gap hasn’t been this large in the past 50 years. I’m open to arguments about the era, like, right after World War II.
According to fiscal year 2025 NCAA MFRS data from the Extra Points Library, the average for total football expenses (not including revenue sharing or athlete payments) for an American Conference team was about $20.2 million. The Big Ten, SEC and ACC all reported figures more than double that number. And again, that’s before we get to a single dollar in player payroll.
White is not the first AD I’ve heard made that explicit comparison to minor league baseball. Only true baseball degenerates are going to, say, Double-A games because of the individual players or a generations-long bond with the, uh, Rocket City Trash Pandas. Most fans go because it’s Star Wars Night (somehow, minor league baseball teams host 800 Star Wars Nights a season), tickets are $10 and drinking cold beer in the sunshine while semi-watching baseball is fun.
But there’s a potential risk in fully committing to the minor league baseball bit: Programs lose the ability to care about tradition. Most minor league teams change names, if not cities or leagues, every decade or so. Today’s Trash Pandas were yesterday’s BayBears or Port City Roosters. There is nothing truly anchoring any franchise to any sense of place or history. They’re gimmicks. Fun gimmicks, sure, but gimmicks nonetheless.
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Smaller college sports still try to be something different. A person does not attend the Rocket City Trash Pandas and leave with a degree and permanent real estate on their LinkedIn profile. College is a far more identity-based relationship than the transactional one of minor league sports. A schools also wouldn’t want to risk alienating the wider university community or running marketing campaigns that don’t align with the greater mission of the institution. The Kane County Cougars don’t have that problem.
I don’t blame anybody for throwing some stuff at the wall to see what sticks. Outside the P4, money is a major challenge, not just for paying athlete labor costs, but for running the dang department, and anybody who slept through “Moneyball” remembers that you can’t try to replicate the New York Yankees’ strategy without New York Yankees money. Akron can’t afford to run the same playbook at Ohio State. If that means hitting the gimmick book a few times, go for it.
But I do wonder, just a little bit, if there’s a point where flirtation with the minor league sports model provides diminishing returns. Eventually, and nobody can really predict exactly when this might happen, you end up doing your 800th Star Wars night of the year, and you wonder why you can’t sell season tickets anymore.
I’m happy to celebrate creativity and ingenuity, and many of those stories come from athletic departments with limited staff and budgets. But I can’t help but wonder how much longer this operation can hold up with its various duct tape fixes.
Maybe a lot longer than we think! Maybe.
