I'm sick of arguing over the same thing over and over

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

Quick announcement. Me and my D1.ticker colleagues have been hard at work building a dang computer game called Athletic Director Simulator 3000. This game will allow players to face several scenarios that an AD could potentially face, managing a budget, political support, and a Director’s Cup ranking. We’ve been working on this for months and it is like, this close to being done.

It’ll look like this! You’ll be able to use it in your classrooms and everything!

If you are an AD or athletic department staffer and would like to beta test the game, please shoot me a note at [email protected]. We’d like some extra eyes on the scenarios we’ve developed and would love your opinion as to what is realistic, what type of scenarios we missed, etc. If you don’t work in college sports, don’t worry! We’ll have other beta testing opportunities for you soon.

I’ve been writing about college sports professionally for about a decade or so, and one of the biggest takeaways I’ve learned from my time on this beat is that mostly, we’re still arguing over the same stuff.

Greg Dooley, an instructor at the University of Michigan, just shared an early NIL advertisement from 1902, where a Michigan athlete appeared to endorse a local beer company, and I’ve seen other examples of Ivy League athletes promoting cigarettes and other local companies from that same era. Basically, everything from the famous 1929 Carnegie Report on amateurism feels like it could have been published in like, 2018. Higher education and college sports leaders have fretted over the proper balance between class time, amateurism ideals, commercial realities and the desire to win since…well, probably a week after Rutgers beat Princeton back in the Paleolithic era.

There can be something grounding about this fact, especially whenever some academic or legacy media outlet columnist discovers college football and pens some new polemic. The dollar amounts are bigger, the specifics are different, but many, many of the big questions are the same in 2023 and 1913. This was a core thesis from my book, and it’ll probably come again in my next one.

That being said….I gotta be honest with you all. I’m getting pretty tired of monitoring some of the same old stories and same old arguments.

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