Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
Greetings from wonderful Canton! I’m in town, of course, for the 2025 EXTRA POINTS BOWL. Also the Foreverlawn Bowl … but mostly the Extra Points Bowl.
Mount St. Joseph (HCAC) and Westminster (PAC) will kick off at 6 p.m. ET on Saturday at the Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium. You can buy tickets here or at the gate. You can also watch the game on FloCollege. It should be a lot of fun!
I’ll share photos and updates about the game from our social media accounts (Instagram, Bluesky, Twitter), as well as in Monday’s newsletter. Hope to see you there!
Last week, I wrote that college athletics would benefit from substantially increased transparency about athlete compensation. Many institutions have pushed back on the idea that athlete compensation data — everything from specific contracts to high-level disclosures of how House money is being spent — should be subject to open records requests.
Friend of the Newsletter Daniel Libit of Sportico has gotten a bit of information from a few institutions. In a Nov. 6 column, he reported that Kentucky had made 98 payments to athletes totaling $1,486,099.20 from July 1 to Sept. 30 and that Colorado had made 262 payments for $7,672,052.88. Earlier this week, Libit also shared info from Florida State.
That’s better than nothing! But it isn’t very much information. Inspired by Libit, I decided to send off 30 FOIAs, targeting mostly mid-major institutions that might not have been the subject of reporter inquiry before.
Most institutions from that group have either failed to respond or told me the information is not subject to open records requests. But a few schools have shared information with me, and I’m now I’m happy to share that information with you.
Here, for example, is the information on House payments Bowling Green shared with me:
Central Michigan told me it had distributed $290,390 over 57 transactions between July 1 and Nov 10. The breakdown included:
FB - $80,540
MBB - $140,000
WBB - $53,100
VB - $4,250
Baseball - $12,500
Eastern Kentucky told me that the athletic department has spent $514,730 over 123 transactions between July 1 and Nov 10. Broken down by sport, that includes:
football: $87,753
men’s basketball: $256,056
men’s track: $18,000
volleyball: $7,479
women’s basketball: $125,042
women’s track: $20,400
And Sam Houston State told me it has only processed eight payments, all to men’s basketball players, for a total of $40,482.
If and when other institutions share this data with me, or if and when other enterprising reporters find similar disclosures, I’ll update this post.
I don’t know about you, but I think this data is a little surprising.
Three schools (or six, if we include FSU, Colorado and Kentucky) isn’t nearly enough of a data set to yield any sweeping conclusions. My suspicion is that many athlete contracts for football (and/or women’s contracts around volleyball) will be backloaded to incentivize athletes to remain with schools instead of hitting the portal. Filing similar requests in late January may give us very different data.
I’m a little surprised to see Sam Houston and Bowling Green spent more money on basketball than football, at least during this particular time period. (EKU, as an FCS institution, makes a little more sense to me.) I’m not expecting anybody in the MAC or CUSA to commit $10 million to football payroll or anything, but football rosters are a teensy bit larger than basketball, so I assumed total spending would skew more towards football.
Will that be the case once the transfer portals close for both sports? Maybe, maybe not. Is this a common mid-major financial distribution? Maybe, maybe not. The only way to know for sure is to file more FOIAs … or hope schools decide to share this info without being prodded by nosy reporters.
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Here’s what else we’ve been working on this week:
The Big Ten investment package with UC Investments looks to be (at least temporarily) on ice. But that doesn’t change the fact that Big Ten institutions haven’t been very public about why they support this idea, or what they hope to do with the money. That’s bad news, in my humble opinion.
I hit the phones and shared what I learned about the OVC (which looks to be sticking together), the Summit, the WCC and other mid-major conference realignment moves.
We’ve got even more info about the Extra Points Bowl, one of the coolest things we do around here.
We’ve been adding even more data to the Extra Points Library, including administrative salary information for over two dozen more schools, new general manager and head basketball coach contracts, FRS data for six more schools and much more.
We’ve also added more than 20 new questions for Athletic Director Simulator 4000, one of our biggest content updates yet.
If you enjoy Extra Points, you can get every single newsletter we produce, get access to Athletic Director Simulator 4000 and ensure the survival of independent media by upgrading to a paid subscription. It’s only $9 a month, and that pays for everything from our salaries to our Extra Points Bowl sponsorships to all my FOIA fees.
We’re taking an abbreviated schedule next week on account of the Thanksgiving holiday, but we’ve got some great guest posts to share, updates about the EP Bowl and much more.
Thanks for reading, everybody. Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you on the internet once we get home from Ohio.
