Hope Merchants and Prop Bets: Early Thoughts from NACDA in Vegas:

Good morning, and thanks for your continued support of Extra Points.

Thanks in advance for your patience during what has been a less-traditional week. I’m still in Las Vegas for this year’s NACDA (National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics) conference, although, O’Hare willing, I’ll return to Chicago later this evening.

Thousands of administrative leaders from across DI, DII and DIII have gathered in Vegas for a few days of professional development and networking, along with reporters, vendors, academics, athletes, and many others involved in the giant morass of the College Sports Industry.

I’ve essentially plopped myself in a hallway for 14 hours a day, talking to many of my wonderful readers, as well as new faces, so I can work on reporting future stories, building new products, brainstorming solutions to problems, and just catching up. Occasionally, I’ve managed to break away to listen to a presentation or two, and once, I even managed to eat breakfast.

I’m still very much trying to digest everything I’ve heard, read or learned about from this conference, and will be sharing more of those insights on Extra Points over the coming days. But for now, I did want to share a few high level takeaways from my last 72 hours in Las Vegas….

What did NCAA president Charlie Baker want to talk about?

I mean, besides the Celtics, which….ew.

Baker addressed the entire convention on Tuesday afternoon, addressing the proposed House settlement (more on that later), the new ESPN broadcast contract for NCAA championships, and more…but there were two elements of his remarks that stood out to me, in large part because they’re not discussed as much as revenue sharing or various existential political and legal threats to the current college sports system.

One, which I don’t think will lead many stories about the convention, is the NCAA’s fan database tool. I wrote about this proposal back in January, and Baker repeatedly referenced the proposal in his remarks, seeing this as a tool to potentially significantly improve ticket sales, championship event attendance, and ultimately, NCAA revenues. In an area where multiple revenue streams that flow from the NCAA central office to the schools (including but not limited to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Unit payouts), I expect Baker and other NCAA officials to talk more and more about ways to cut expenses and develop completely new revenue streams for both Indianapolis and member institutions.

The devil is in the details, but in my opinion, one of the biggest areas where college athletics lags behind the business infrastructure of professional sports is in understanding who their customers actually are and what they want. More sophisticated data gathering and reporting tools could potentially pay off quickly.

The other Baker talking point that stuck out to me? Gambling.

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.