Introducing Extra Points Library:

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

Filing open records requests has been a cornerstone of my sportswriting career, especially since I started Extra Points back in 2019. Multiple times a week, I’m filing requests to inspect contracts, emails, itemized budgets, and other administrative documents, from the largest P4 schools to small public schools in D-III.

These type of requests help me find all sorts of things, like how a former football coach tried to raise NIL money from Saudi Arabia, to how intellectual property licenses work for EA Sports College Football 25, to why private equity investment in college sports is so challenging, to why Maine has a shoe deal with New Balance instead of one of the major apparel companies.

These documents are critical to my ability to explain how the college sports industry works. But obtaining them also means that I have a hard drive now with thousands of PDFs from hundreds of colleges. I barely know where everything is, so trying to share that data with anybody else feels impossible.

Previously, we offered something called the FOIA Directory, to allow other folks to look at the documents I’ve got squirreled away. But that directory was literally just a giant Google Drive. It was barely organized, the documents didn’t have uniform naming systems, there were duplicates everywhere…it was a mess. Essentially, the FOIA Directory was the digital equivalent of a junk drawer, the place where you shove batteries and twist ties and mostly-dried-out-pens. Is there useful stuff in there? Yeah, probably. But good luck finding it!

As a result, not many people took advantage of the FOIA Directory.

When I relaunched EP under new ownership this year, we took the FOIA Directory down, vowing to only relaunch it when we could offer a better user experience. If we were going to do this, we wanted to do it right.

So we hired some developers. We sketched out a plan. We built supporting systems. And now, we’re ready to share it.

I’d like to introduce the Extra Points Library

The EPL is our new database to house all the documents we obtain here at Extra Points, making it easy for users to search for the specific things they need, download them, and move on with their day.

Users can now search by document type, sport, year, conference, and more, as well as easily download from the directory.

What type of documents are currently in the directory?

At launch, Extra Points Library has over 3,500 documents from hundreds of D-I institutions. Those include:

• Itemized athletic department budgets (FRS reports)

• Athletic Director employment contracts

• Employment contracts for head coaches across every NCAA sponsored sport, from football to water polo

• Employment contracts for assistant coaches across every NCAA sponsored sport

• Athletic department apparel contracts

• Other major vendor contracts, like NIL consulting companies, pouring rights, multimedia rights, software tools, and more.

This is not meant to be a static list. Over the coming weeks, we plan to add hundreds more documents from those categories, along with documents from D-II institutions. We also plan to add documents in new categories, like football and basketball game contracts, or football feasibility studies. If enough people ask for something, we’ll take the time to find it!

Who can access to Extra Points Library?

Anybody can search EPL to see if we have the document you’re looking for. But the ability to view and download documents is limited to users who have purchased EPL account subscriptions.

How much does an EPL subscription cost?

A monthly subscription to EPL, which allows for users to download 50 documents a month, is $199. An annual plan is $1,999 a year. We’re running a 25% off sale for this week as well. Use code LAUNCH at checkout before 10/1.

We are happy to offer discounts for larger organizations that want to purchase multiple licenses, or for the ability to download unlimited documents. We’re also happy to offer FOIA-as-a-service, where we file requests for specific documents on behalf of others who might not want their names on a public record request. Just shoot me an email, and I’ll be happy to offer a quote.

An EPL license does not come with a paid Extra Points subscription. These are separate products.

Why isn’t EPL included for free with an Extra Points newsletter subscription?

Good question!

Candidly, one of the ways we are able to justify throwing the FOIA Directory access in with an Extra Points subscription is that we didn’t spend a ton of time on the actual directory product. We weren’t software developers or database managers, and didn’t have the technical know-how to improve that system. It was a very bare-bones product, and our data showed that not many people used it.

We spent a fair amount of resources (both in time and developers) over the last several months to build a better, more robust system. We also stepped up our FOIA filing efforts in an attempt to build more comprehensive collections of each type of document, efforts that required us to pay a lot of money in fees.

I thought a lot about accessibility, and my hope is that our current pricing system is affordable enough for multiple kinds of users to take advantage of the system, while still allowing us to pay to support and maintain a quality tool.

Who is EPL for?

I think all sorts of people could potentially benefit from the Extra Points Library, but we built this tool with the following type of folks in mind.

• Newsrooms who want to use college sports financial data to flesh out stories, but don’t have the time or capacity to always file all their open records requests themselves

• Athletic departments or conference offices who want to make more informed decisions about vendor contracts, staffing decisions and other business relationships

• Agents and consulting groups who want to negotiate with more confidence in the college sports marketplace

• Academics or policy shops who want to use these documents for research purposes

• Anybody who sells to the College Sports Industrial Complex

But you don’t have to be a .edu email or a sports industry professional to use or benefit from EPL!

I don’t have two hundred bucks, but I do have some documents that aren’t included in the directory. Could we make a trade?

Sure! Shoot me an email at [email protected]

I have other questions that were not answered in this helpful FAQ type newsletter!

I probably have other answers! Drop me a line at [email protected]

Do you have any pithy closing thoughts?

I’ve joked about this a few times, but I really mean it. I want Extra Points to be in the solutions business. The first priority of Extra Points is to inform, educate and entertain my readers. But after that, to the extent possible, I want this publication and business to be a resource to help solve problems and makes thing better, not just provide a microphone for folks to complain.

My hope is that EPL can be a positive force for some of those changes. I’d like this tool to be a resource for better media coverage of the college sports industry, more academic research on the industry, and for buyers and sellers to have information they think they need to feel more confident in how they do business.

We’ll keep tweaking and updating it to achieve those goals. But it’s ready for use today.