Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
Over the last few months, you’ve probably read me talk about Extra Points Library a lot. EPL is our database tool that includes tens of thousands of college sports documents across D-1 and D-II…from coach contracts, itemized budgets, vendor deals, and more. It’s a critical tool for my own reporting. Athletic departments, newsrooms and researchers use it every day as well.
But I have to be honest with all of you. It was clunky. It was slow. It didn’t do everything you hoped it would do. We knew it, and we wanted to fix it. But momentum has been growing for the last 6 months. We’ve seen more schools sign-up, more users on the platform and Library helping our customers solve real problems. Our customer base now includes agents, consultants, die-hard sports nerds, and athletic departments or professors from some amazing schools, like Dayton, Fresno State, Florida, Ohio State, UCSB, UC Irvine, Robert Morris, McNeese State, South Dakota, UIW and North Dakota, just to name a few.
Today, I’m thrilled to announce the biggest update in EPL history, one so large we’re calling it Extra Points Library 2.0. And I want to tell all of you about it, because I think there’s useful updates here, whether you’re an athletic director, college professor, graduate student, reporter, or just curious fan.
What are some of the biggest changes in Library 2.0?
There’s a lot, but I’ll try to hit some of the highlights.
Introducing: Sport-Specific Analytics
I’ve teased this a few times on social media and in some of our previous Extra Points Library stories, but now, any EPL user can create their own analytics reports.
We currently have data for Football, Men’s Basketball, Women’s Basketball, Women’s Volleyball, Baseball, Softball, Field Hockey, Men’s Soccer, Women’s Soccer, Men’s Lacrosse, Women’s Lacrosse and Water Polo. Our goal is to add functionality for Men’s and Women’s Hockey very soon, as well as other sports.
Within the analytics page, you can run different types of statistical models, and chart how various MFRS line items line up with RPI ranking, NET, postseason appearances, and other metrics. You can easily create tables to rank teams not just by total spending, but by specific line-items, as well as postseason results. Like this, for the 2025 softball season and spending on coaching salaries:
You can also use these forms to analyize official attendance data (currently for FB, MBB, WBB, Baseball and Softball), as well as Directors Cup rankings. For example, I can now look up the men’s basketball programs who saw the largest % increases in attendance. That includes big programs (NC State, Iowa, St.John’s BYU), and mid-majors (Miami OH, Sacramento State, St. Thomas, etc). Wake, Memphis, Pitt, Texas A&M and Penn State declined the most.
Will I run these reports for other sports in the near future? Yeah, probably.
Speaking of finances, data comparison has never been more powerful or flexible
One thing we wanted to do in Library is make it easier to compare data across institutions. Now, users can create their own custom benchmarking reports. Just go to Finances—>Benchmark
The computer will try to build a benchmark table for you, based on conference affiliation, budget ranges and sport sponsorship. But with a few clicks, you can add or remove whoever you want.
You can also compare Y/Y trends, export the charts to PDFs, and more:
Finally, we’ve built tools to allow users to look up the itemized spending/revenues of specific programs at specific schools. So as an example, here’s a segment from my alma mater, Ohio State, and its football program:
Need help finding something? Ask our Chatbot!
I’m not about to have AI start writing my newsletters or doing my interviews. But when it comes to navigating a database with over 11,000 documents, we thought a chatbot could be useful.
Right on your homepage, feel free to ask the bot about specific documents, to run comparisons and analysis for you, create new tables, and more.
Introducing: Game Contracts
We had some game contract data in Extra Points Library 1.0, but our data organization system didn’t make it easy to tag multiple schools, and extracting the useful information was a challenge.
Now, we’ve added support to make it easy to quickly not only read the entire game contract, but get the year, sport, participating teams, and the game guarantee.
Just click on a contract you want to inspect, and you can see the relevant info right above the actual PDF. For our example, we can see here that Arizona State will pay a $30,000 guarentee to the UTRGV women’s basketball team for a game on December 8th, 2026. Is that game announced yet? Well, if not, surprise! We just broke some news.
We have more than 600 game contracts currently uploaded, from football to MBB, WBB, baseball and softball, with more contracts being uploaded nearly every work day.
The day to day experience is much, MUCH better
If nothing else, I think you’ll find that searching, downloading and comparing information now is much, much faster and more intuitive.
You’ll be able to see what documents are contract amendments, vs original longform contracts. You can run searches quickly, without browser lags, and without having to constantly re-enter your search terms.
And oh yeah, we’ve added cheaper pricing options too
The sticker price for an Extra Points Library license is $300/month or $3,0000/year, a license that allows you to download up to 50 documents a month. If you’re an athletic director, consultant or researcher, we think that’s a more-than-fair price for all the data you get.
But I also understand that if you’re just a regular fan, that’s too much money. Sometimes, you just need one document, or a few things, rather than the entire database.
Starting today, you can also pay $40 to download a single document, without having to pay a monthly fee.
We’re also more than happy to discount, or even give free access, to folks who share documents with us. If you have coaching, game or budget contracts that we don’t have (and I know many EP readers do), shoot me an email, and I’m happy to give you a discount code.
Want to learn more?
There are so many other updates that I can’t fit all of them into one newsletter. So we’re running a demo for EPL on Thursday, April 16, at 2 PM CT. I’ll go over the tool, the biggest changes, and answer questions. This event is free (you don’t need to be current customer).
Can you make the Library 2.0 Demo on Thursday, April 16th at 2pm CT?
What’s next?
While our plans are written in pencil, not pen, I’m happy to share our rough product timeline for future updates:
Dramatically increase our data set for game contracts. We’re currently adding contracts for football (FBS and FCS), men’s and women’s basketball, baseball, softball and volleyball. If there’s user demand, we’ll expand to other sports. We want to get to a point where users can search average (and range) of game guarantees across particular sports/conferences, and potentially improve their scheduling processes.
Extract salary information and contract terms from AD and coach contracts for improved searchability. I’ve spent the majority of our time working on data analysis of MFRS reports, both because our customers are very interested in that data, and because those PDFs are standardized, so it is relatively easy to convert them from PDFs into CSVs we can manipulate. It’s harder to do this (accurately, anyway) with coach contracts. But we’ve making great strides and expect to have product updates on this feature soon.
Extracting key terms from Vendor agreements. Similar principle here. We’ve got all the shoe deals, MMR contracts, ticketing service deals, etc….or at least, hundreds of them. But we’re working to make it easier to sort and compare this data at scale.
Improve our institutional datasets. There’s so much data that can be added beyond just what you can get from contracts and MFRS reports. We’re always on the lookout for other information that would be useful for our users, affordable, and accurate….and we have some big ideas. Enrolment? Endowment? More sport-specific analytical data? We’re on the hunt!
I’ll just say that we’ve spent a lot of time on this project over the last few months, and I’m personally very excited about it. I hope it’s useful, and that you enjoy using your upgraded EPL database! See for your yourself at https://library.extrapointsmb.com.
If you have comments, questions, suggestions, etc. please, send ‘em my way at [email protected]. If not, enjoy, and I’ll see you around the internet!
