Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
And a hearty congrats to Denison University, the pride of my wonderful hometown of Granville, Ohio. The Big Red are the D-III college baseball national champions!
One last little reminder: I’m flying to Las Vegas on Sunday morning for NACDA, and will be at the conference until early Wednesday AM. My schedule is filling up, but I do still have some open spots on Monday and Tuesday, if you’d like to catch up! If you’re around, drop me a note at matt @ extrapointsmb.com.
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As I’m sure you’ve all seen over the last few months, in addition to writing and reporting this newsletter, I’ve been hard at work building out and improving the Extra Points Library. Version 2.0 of our tool dropped earlier in the Spring (see the updated features here), and since then, I’ve been working to improve our chatbot tools, provide more depth to our financial benchmarking tools, and add hundreds of new documents to our database.
One area where we’ve added a ton over the last several weeks? Game contracts. As of today, we have over 2,300 D1 game contracts in the database, including football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, baseball, softball and volleyball. If there’s interest, we’ll work to add hockey, lacrosse and others sports into the directory as well.
We’ve used this data to break some scheduling news (there are dozens of unannounced 2026-2027 MBB and WBB basketball games in there, for example), track game guarantees, and provide data for academic researchers and reporters. But shortly after launch, several of our athletic department users reached out to us and asked “can you help us with scheduling?”
Well….sure! We can give that a shot.
So today, I’m happy to announce the beta version of our new tool, GamePlace, within the Extra Points Library. This is a completely free resource meant to help schools find potential opponents in any NCAA-sponsored sport, from basketball to lacrosse to field hockey and beyond.
Here’s how it works.
1) Sign up for an Extra Points Library account, using your real name and school email address. You don’t have to actually pay for a subscription, although I sure would love it if you did.
2) If you’re an athletic director, head coach or assistant coach, you’ll have access to GamePlace with the ability to browse the game listings, as well as post your own. The listings will look like this:
You can also post your own listing. Again, you do not need to be a paid subscriber to do this. You can spell out the dates you’re looking for, whether you need a home or an away game, what type of guarantee you can offer, etc.
If you want to discuss a particular opening, we’ve created a simple message prompt to send an email to the poster with you email attached to start the conversation.
3) We’ve also working on an optional outreach tool for any game post where users can select the school or conference and we’ll reach out directly through email to the right Administrator and Coach. Our goal is to help get more games scheduled, faster, and cheaper. This should be live within the next week.
4) Paid subscribers will also be able to pull previous game contracts from that school, if they want to see previous game cash considerations or contract terms to understand what market rate is.
As more schools use this, I’m sure we’ll continue to refine the feature set, just like we have for everything else within Extra Points Library. If you have suggestions or requests, send ‘em my way at matt @ extrapointsmb.com.
I will just quickly note that GamePlace is a feature that will be open only to athletic department personnel. A random user, for example, won’t be able to post that Texas Tech football is looking to schedule Texas in 2026. Yes, that would be very funny, but unless you work for Texas Tech football, you’ll just have to do that on Twitter like everybody else.
We hope that GamePlace will be a useful tool for the industry, like the other features of the Extra Points Library. We look forward to showing it off and talking shop at NACDA!
In non-EPL news, I wanted to quickly go into more detail about the College Sports Protection Act, something I’ve been asked about quite a bit on sports talk radio and various podcasts (like the latest episode of Split Zone Duo).
Last week, I wrote about my early thoughts on the bill itself…what ideas were good, and what ideas I thought weren’t so good. There’s plenty more of that type of analysis on the internet, and if you’d like more, I’d be happy to write it.
But will the bill actually become law? Unlike SCORE or the various other messaging bills that have been proposed about college sports reform, the CSPA really does have a chance of passing. It has at least some measure of bipartisan support in the Senate, the White House supports it, as do plenty of other college sports stakeholders.
The bill will need 60 votes to get out of the Senate and beat a potential filibuster. That is possible if every single Republican votes for the bill and seven Democrats join in. At least two, Maria Cantwell of Washington and Chris Coons of Delaware, as co-sponsors, feel like relatively safe bets. So only five more Democrats would need to join in.
But I don’t think it’s completely safe to assume every Republican is automatically on board. One trend to watch? If any lawmakers decide to jump ship (or push for politically toxic revisions) in the name of making the bill more friendly to conservative interests. Take this tweet, from Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio:
On the House side, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) apparently feels CSPA doesn’t go far enough either:
The employment status of athletes is one of the few red lines that cannot be negotiated over if a senate bill hopes to get any Democratic votes. SCORE, the House GOP-led effort to regulate college sports, explicitly stated that athletes could not become employees…and the bill was so unpopular that it couldn’t even get all of the Republicans in the House to support it. Democratic support fell apart after leadership whipped against it.
There is a pathway, albeit a narrow one, for a college bill to pass so long as a) the Republican voter conference sticks together, b) the legislation punts on the employment question and c) Congressional Black Caucus and organized labor opposition doesn’t become so strong that voting Yes becomes too politically toxic for any Democrat. That’s a tall order, and it gets taller if the Big Ten and SEC lean hard on their senators to kill this thing.
The clock is ticking. If CSPA doesn’t get across the finish line, nothing is happening until the next Congress, where Democrats are highly likely to control one, if not both, legislative houses.
Here’s what else we worked on recently:
I applied to be the athletic director for the University of Wisconsin. Here’s the cover letter I submitted. I’m calling for a world where Wisconsin becomes even more Wisconsin, not just a pale imitation of Ohio State and Michigan.
The most interesting new apparel contract in college sports, in my opinion, belongs to FDU. The Knights are going with an Italian company that mostly works in soccer, rugby and European basketball, and it will have no shoe component, so athletes can wear whatever they want. Will this work?
I interviewed the folks at Waypoint, who believe they have a pathway for schools to generate new revenues without asking their fans, or select donors, to open their wallets even more. That strategy starts with influence.
And I am sad to report, as one of college football’s Special Brazil Stuff Correspondent, that the first major college football game in Brazil won’t actually happen this season. I still think playing a game there is a good idea, but not the way NC State and Virginia tried to do it. Here’s my advice on how to get it right.
We can file FOIAs, fly to conferences, pay software developers, and do everything else that we do every week, because of your support and your subscriptions. If you enjoy Extra Points and want it to keep going, please consider upgrading to the full subscription experience.
I’ll see you all in Vegas!
-Matt
