Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
I’m finally back home in Chicago after a few days in Washington D.C. (okay, fine, a few hours in DC and a few days in Maryland) for the NCAA Convention and a Congressional College Sports Summit.
I’m glad that I made the trip. These conventions give me a chance to get out of my basement office HQ and get face time with so many folks I only really know over the phone, plus a chance to meet a lot more people who can help shape future newsletter stories. This industry is just so dang big, and there are so many wrinkles and subsets that I just don’t know enough about. Setting up shop in a conventional hallway or coffee shop for 11 hours helps me fill many of those gaps.
It wasn’t hard for me to find folks in the D-II and D-III worlds at the convention, and you couldn’t head downstairs to grab a coffee without tripping over a sea of consultants, software providers and vendors.
But as has increasingly been the case at these things, it’s also hard not to notice who wasn’t there. There weren’t too many conference commissioners or athletic directors from P4 leagues. Honestly, I didn’t even see that many FBS athletic directors this year.
There were exceptions! ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips stopped by, and even broke a little news about future ACC football tiebreakers, and I saw a few others…but there weren’t a lot.
As SEC commissioner Greg Sankey once told Yahoo, “Big problems are not solved in big rooms filled with people.” The Gaylord Convention Center certainly was one big ol’ room with a whole lot of people. So maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise that no major decisions or news came out of the convention, specifically. Shoot, even the anticipated vote to formally allow jersey patch sponsorship sales didn’t appear to actually happen. While I ran into tons of folks talking about patches and planning to eventually participate in that market, if the starting gun officially shot this week, I must have missed it somehow.
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I plan on writing on a few of these topics in greater depth next week, once I have more time to go through all of my notes and think for a second, but here are a few quick takeaways I can share…
I do expect the jersey patch thing to happen, and I do expect most D-I institutions to participate, or at least attempt to participate, as soon as the rules are formally approved. There are operational questions that need to be answered, like how sponsorship packages may differ across uniform types, or how many different sponsorship packages could be sold (i.e. postgame uniform patch vs practice patch vs game patch vs something else?), and I still haven’t gotten a straight answer about how Nike and adidas are made whole by slapping another logo next to theirs…but I expect these problems to eventually be resolved.
As of right this second, my suspicion is that not everybody is going to be able to find a sponsor in year one. A third of P4 schools apparently don’t even have field sponsorships yet, and while we’re early in this process and maybe some folks are pulling numbers out of thin air a little bit, I’m hearing that the going rate for these patches is gonna be expensive, even for mid and low-majors. Nobody is going to want to sell a patch package for like, $15,000, just to have one, out of fears that it would kneecap their ability to increase the price in the future. If there aren’t big money partners knocking on the door, many schools would rather go patchless than take less money or the wrong partner.
On that note, I think fans should expect the typical patch partner to be in health care, financial services, insurance, or tech…not consumer products, regional gas stations, or the type of things that the internet might consider “fun.” As much as I might be excited about the idea of a Wendy’s Baconator Ohio State football jersey (it’s a Columbus company! Look it up!)…I’m pretty confident that isn’t happening.
And before you ask, no, Extra Points won’t be buying a uniform patch for anybody in D1 this year. We can’t afford it. Yes, I already asked around.
I get the sense that the conversation around college sports and Congress is more complicated and nuanced than just “are they gonna pass SCORE or not.”
For one, many college leaders have concerns that have nothing to do with athlete compensation, employment status or antitrust. News broke on Thursday morning that nearly 40 players were caught up in a massive college basketball point shaving scheme, and they might not be the only ones caught up by either law enforcement or gambling integrity officers in the coming months.
NCAA president Charlie Baker used that story to further push for regulations and limitations on prop bets and the growing “prediction market’ industry, which everybody with a brain knows is just a rebrand of sports gambling. There’s bipartisan congressional interest in revisiting this topic, I’m told, but gaming interests are also a major lobbying force in Washington these days.
When folks joke about “everything being gambling’ these days, well, it isn’t totally a joke.
There’s also at least some congressional interest in giving closer attention to how college athletic departments may take on institutional investments from private equity firms or other groups. The more explicitly professionalized college athletic departments and conferences become organized…the more (at least some) lawmakers will openly question the current tax status of big time college sports. Maybe that’s a threat, maybe that’s a leverage point for future negotiations, maybe it’s a few backbenchers yelling at clouds. But it’s another wrinkle for the coming months.
For what it’s worth, I did have a chance to catch up with some congressional staffers (from both parties and in both the Senate and House) over the last few days, and also listened to the speakers at Rep. Trahan’s (D-MA) Congressional College Sports Summit on Thursday. My read is that Charlie Baker is probably correct when he said that “In Congress, I believe there is common ground around the period of eligibility, academic standards, reasonable transfer policies and other bedrock principles.” I think it’s also clear that there simply isn’t enough of a margin in both houses to give the NCAA as broad of antitrust protection as it’s been asking for.
I’ve heard that not everything about SCORE’s (so far) failure to get out of the House is completely because of the NCAA or any individual lawmaker’s deep ideological principles about antitrust law. Some problems also stem from increasingly weak GOP control of the house, a stronger-than-anticipated effort among Dems to whip against it, a few individual lawmakers being mad about Lane Kiffin (that’s not a joke), and emergencies that changed lawmaker priorities. Even if Baker and the NCAA’s K St Gang can craft a perfect ideological package to get more than 220 House votes, there’s no guarantee that something else crazy won’t happen in like, Greenland, that won’t derail the entire thing.
Nobody got elected to Congress because their constituents have strong opinions about athletic antritust policies. It’s not the thing that lawmakers wake up thinking about. Even for the few that are legitimately very interested and informed about the in the topic, there’s a feeling that this isn’t the most important thing to worry about right now.
And I have to admit, it’s hard for me to shake those feelings, even as I sat in the Library of Congress and listened to lawmakers talk about Title IX and Olympic sports access. I personally do believe that stuff is important, and honestly, I’m becoming more convinced that Congress probably should do something eventually. Even a solution that is centered on collective bargaining with athletes is likely to require some sort of legislative blessing to protect it from legal challenges, after all.
But even if I accept the premise that this is a federal government issue…I can think of two dozen massive problems right now that deserve more direct and immediate attention from Congress than “these dang kids keep transferring too much and asking for too much money.” I bet all of you, be you conservative, progressive, libertarian, apolitical or whatever, could probably do the same.
In a world where our country is weighing military intervention in like, three different countries, and where our neighbors are getting picked up off the street, is this what I want our lawmakers to be working on right now? Instead of, I dunno, what to do about ICE? Or affordability? Or corruption? Or a zillion other things?
There aren’t easy answers here. Anybody that has a three sentence blurb “on how to fix everything” is a vapid LinkedIn influencer who isn’t worth your time.
But sitting in DC, listening to legislative updates, and even intellectually understanding that the true folks in control of making the very big college sports decisions right now are more in DC than Indianapolis or in any conference office…bummed me out. I wasn’t alone.
Maybe Sankey is right. Maybe the big problems don’t get solved by large groups in big rooms. I can attest, after spending a few days in a crowded big room…that those conversations are slow.
But the folks huddling in the smaller rooms better hurry up, then. Or else somebody they don’t like may be making big decisions for them.
Finally, a quick note. Expect some big updates to the Extra Points Library over the next few days. The FY25 MFRS Reports should have been filed to the NCAA now, which means the (small, but growing) army of FOIA dorks like me, FOIABall, Sportico and beatwriters can all start getting more current school by school financial data. As of 9:53 PM CT on Thursday, I have the FY25 documents from New Mexico, Miami OH and Murray State in the Library right now, and I’m sure more will be coming very shortly. Keep an eye on the Extra Points Library for new documents, new features and new analysis, coming soon.
(and if you get stuff before I do, I’m always happy to trade documents! Drop me a line at matt @ extrapointsmb dot com)
Enjoy your Friday. I’ll see you on the internet soon!
