GUEST POST: Reimagining the “Dream Factory” in 2026

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

Super Quick Announcements: I will be in DC next week from the 13-15th for the NCAA Convention. My schedule is starting to fill up, but I still have plenty of time to catch up with folks, speak to classes, meet new people, etc. If you’d like to catch up while I’m in town, drop me a line!

Extra Points will also jointly hold a happy hour with the good folks at College Sports Solutions on Wednesday, Janurary 14, a 8:00 PM ET at the Belvedere Lobby Bar. No RSVP required (although it would be nice!), but feel free to join us for some beverages and off-the-record conversations.

Today, I’m particularly excited to share the mic with a special guest author. Daniel Marks is the General Manager for Howard Men’s Basketball, one of the most entreprenurial mid-major programs in college basketball. Daniel’s gig has changed quite a bit, even over the last year, and while it’s one thing for me to hold up a mic and ask questions for him, we thought it might be more interesting if he explained what he does every day. I’ll turn the time over to him:

You stabilize your ticketing stack, sales rise, operations run clean. Then NIL, revenue sharing, and shifting compliance hit the system. Suddenly, the fan transaction carries more weight: it must fund athletes, recognize donors, and stay transparent without hurting conversion.

Programs already prove where this is heading. One major school added a 10 percent talent fee directly to each ticket to support athlete compensation. Ticketing now sits at the intersection of policy, finance, and fandom, and legacy checkouts cannot keep pace. In 2025, treating ticketing as static infrastructure is no longer an option.

The programs that thrive will be the ones that treat the fan transaction as strategy, not plumbing, flexible enough to adapt, transparent enough to build trust, and powerful enough to support what college athletics is becoming.

If you want to understand what this shift means for you, let’s walk through it together.

Learn more here.

by Daniel Marks

In April 2023, Kenny Blakeney took a vacation to Mexico. The Howard men’s basketball coach was four years into his tenure, coming off a season with a story that read like a movie script. His team had won 22 games, the second-most in school history, making the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1992. Off the court, the program had re-engaged alumni and organized a nationally recognized social justice project centered on Black maternal health advocacy.

In the three weeks since the season had ended, things had been relatively calm. Star wing Steve Settle III had entered the transfer portal, but the rest of the team’s core remained intact. Coach could finally take a breath and appreciate what he had built — but then his phone rang. Twice.

The first call came from forward Jordan Wood, who announced his intention to transfer. The knockout punch hit that afternoon when all-league point guard Elijah Hawkins called to say he was also planning to enter the portal. Before Coach could unpack his bags, his vacation was ruined, destined to be spent Zooming potential recruits from his hotel room. 

While this was taking place, I was in Washington, D.C., fresh off an afternoon of pickleball, ready for some downtime. I’d come to Howard the previous year as the team’s chief program strategist (my title has evolved to general manager and NIL strategist) after spending nine years in the Milwaukee Bucks’ front office. 

After winning an NBA championship in 2021, I’d become intrigued by the changing landscape of college athletics and was eager to find a program where I could use my NBA skill set to help navigate NIL, the transfer portal and athlete activism. By the time I met with Coach Blakeney at the 2022 Final Four, I had spoken, formally and informally, with a dozen college coaches about opportunities, but in New Orleans, Coach Blakeney sold me on his grand basketball experiment at Howard, which he’d come to call the “Dream Factory.”

His vision was a program with the best combination of on-court success and off-court impact. And the foundation was taking shape: In 2020, Howard had signed the first five-star recruit in HBCU history (Makur Maker), and in 2021-22 the Bison had put together their first winning season since 2002. That foundation, combined with Blakeney’s conviction and belief in the future, led me to take the (giant) leap from the NBA to the MEAC.  

Now, in the spring of 2023, I was thrust into the depths of the portal as the Dream Factory faced its biggest crossroads yet. It had survived a 4-29 inaugural season, a COVID shutdown and political upheaval in D.C., but could it survive this new era of college sports? 

You see, Coach’s vision was never for Howard to be the steppingstone; it was supposed to be the destination. A player could come to campus and immerse himself in one of the most powerful and engaged alumni communities in the country, all while keeping his professional basketball dreams alive. He wouldn’t have to compromise. The personal and athletic aspirations were not mutually exclusive but mutually enhancing. 

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Coach’s approach is defined by seeing possibilities where others see roadblocks. Whether it is challenging a player to run a marathon to build his mental toughness, recruiting a law student despite knowing his academic courseload would interfere with his basketball responsibilities or hiring a journalist as an assistant coach, Blakeney is comfortable with unconventional decisions. (He was also the first college coach to publicly discuss private equity.) His approach is rooted in shattering the limits of what people believe is possible and pushing them to believe in themselves the way he believes in them. 

That ethos, along with the principles of  the Dream Factory, has led Howard to produce 18 all-MEAC conference performers, four MEAC rookies of the year, and one MEAC player of the year since 2020. It’s also helped launch more than a dozen professional basketball careers, and two former Howard players have signed NBA contracts.  

Off the court, we would stack our community impact up against any team in the country. Howard is the nation’s number one HBCU according to Forbes Magazine and LinkedIn, and road trips feature alumni dinners at Black-owned restaurants and civic engagement projects. During the Biden-Harris administration, the team spent time with Vice President Kamala Harris, a Howard alum, on 10 different occasions, including a trip to the West Wing to present her a 2024 MEAC championship ring. That day, President Joe Biden’s receptionist, recent Howard grad Venus Johnson, brought us inside the Oval Office for 30 minutes.

Howard also boasts the largest student-manager program in the country; we surround our players each day with the next generation of Black sports leadership. Managers have gone on to land jobs and internships with USA Basketball, CBS Sports, the NBA x HBCU Fellowship and more.

In addition to all of that, our players are immersed into the campus community, serving as student tour guides, pledging Greek life and hosting yoga sessions for the student-body. Summers feature internships on Capitol Hill and at NBA summer league. 

That’s the power of Howard in a nutshell.

Every aspect of the program is designed to set players up with resources, connections and opportunities, but how do they value those benefits compared to a large NIL paycheck?

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On the opening night of the 2024-25 season, we played on the road at No. 1 Kansas, and though the Jayhawks won, 87-57, it was clear we had a rising star. Little-known freshman wing Blake Harper, a D.C. native, scored 16 points. He had a 30-point triple-double a month later. 

By then we’d realized: The more the rest of the basketball world knew about our superstar freshman, the more likely we were to lose him. Even so, we weren’t afraid of shouting that Harper was a star to the entire basketball ecosystem (including all 30 NBA teams who came to see him).

That season, Harper became the first player in MEAC history to win both rookie and player of the year at the same time. We did everything in our power to pitch him on staying: We arranged a Sports Illustrated cover story and a potential docu-series. We offered a competitive NIL package, access to the highest levels of city and U.S. government and an NBA rolodex with summer training sessions alongside his idol, Jayson Tatum, led by renowned trainer Drew Hanlen. We saw Harper as the pinnacle of the Dream Factory: a potential first-round NBA draft pick with a built-in portfolio of business deals and high-level political connections, plus the chance to be etched into the university’s storied history. 

Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough; in late April, he announced he was headed to Creighton. But there was a silver lining: forward Bryce Harris — whom Coach has called the most important recruit in Howard history because of his toughness and competitiveness on the floor and his character off it  — elected to stay with the team. The weeks after the season were a whirlwind, just as they had been two years before, and then it was time to reflect.

First, we took a cold, hard look at the money. 

In 2024, Opendorse CEO Blake Lawrence named Howard the most innovative team in NIL thanks to the creativity we’d shown in NIL. We had entered into an agreement with a local surgeon and Howard alum to provide free LASIK to eligible players in exchange for social media promotion. We created a “Beyond the Ball” series spotlighting player interests off the floor, which led to Harris getting an NIL deal with JBL. 

But we knew we would have to double down on that entrepreneurial spirit. Donor fatigue was real, and we had to find new revenue streams that wouldn’t cost us money up front.

The first step was renewing NIL partnerships with brands like Vegetable + Butcher and &pizza, which provides NIL cash and post-game meals for all our home games. That freed up about $15,000 from our budget, which we used to hire a team chef, allowing players to keep much of their meal money from the university. 

We also signed an agreement with FanStake that brought $27,000 to our NIL collective, partnered with Players Health on health insurance and incentive-based premium packages and brought in Signal Federal Credit Union as a partner. We jumped into the AI space, forming partnerships with Cache AI to help our players understand their true brand values and with Athletiverse to get real-time social media metrics and post valuations for our corporate sponsors. Nuna Baby continues to sponsor our floor rights, and Jordan Brand provides us with cutting-edge equipment.

In addition, we took a close look at our scheduling. With the advent of revenue sharing, we had a new tool at our disposal: We could put the money we received from playing buy games at high majors toward NIL. So we were strategic about playing those games and about our travel schedule. Fewer flights and more buses meant less money spent on baggage fees and more money into our players’ pockets. 

With those changes, we were able to offer most of our players some form of NIL this season, which puts us ahead of the curve among low-major programs.

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After three straight offseasons featuring significant portal losses, it would have been easy to flush the concept entirely and stop pouring resources into the most unique student-athlete experience in the country. However, we took the opposite approach.

The Dream Factory just had to change its scope. The initial expectation in 2019 was to nurture players through their four years of eligibility, and while those expectations have shifted, the experience hasn’t. Whether a player stays with the Bison for two years as a grad transfer (like Jelani Williams), for nine months as a freshman (like Harper) or for five years (like Harris), the experience can still be transformational.

For Williams, the reach of the Dream Factory has extended to the streets of Harlem. In the winter of 2024, a stranger stopped him in the street when he was celebrating Harlem Day. The man was a Howard alum, and he’d recognized the two-time MEAC champion, striking up a conversation. Williams shared that he was in the midst of a job hunt, and the following day, his new connection recommended him for a chief of staff position at one of New York’s premiere political consulting firms. Williams landed the job less than a month later. 

And though the portal has pulled people away from D.C., it has also allowed us to expand the tent of the Dream Factory. 

It allowed Seth Towns the opportunity to finish his long collegiate career at an HBCU, an experience he called “one of the most empowering I’ve ever had.” Towns combined on-court health and an NCAA tournament berth with the intellectual stimulation of a Howard literary curriculum, merging his passions for basketball and writing. 

It allowed us to bring Cam Gillus, a local high school standout at Sidwell Friends, home for his last two years. 

It opened the door for Ed Holland III to fall in love again with the game of basketball after a year off — and to pursue his political passions with a congressional internship for Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), a Howard alum.

It is easy to fall into the trap of complaining about college athletics today: the lack of guardrails, the inconsistent rules across states and conferences, the inability to plan a roster for more than six to nine months at a time, the challenges of fundraising to meet an NIL payroll. I have complained about those very things multiple times. 

However, for those within college athletics to find the joy that brought them into this business in the first place, I recommend taking a long look at the Dream Factory. The people may change, and the dreams may be different, but the mission remains the same regardless of the turmoil around us.

If interested in partnering with the Dream Factory, Daniel, or in learning more, please reach out to