Let's talk about some actual football games for a second

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

A few quick housekeeping notes before we get into everything:

• You might have missed this, but I've since restored commenting ability at the bottom of each newsletter. We had comments turned off for months, not for any moderation purposes, but for technical ones. That functionality has been restored, and I am in the process of rolling out a few small quality-of-life upgrades. I love that folks email me, DM me, etc...but feel free to comment as well!

• Speaking of quality of life upgrades, I've also been working on finishing tagging for our huge backlog of newsletters. I've published over 200 Extra Points newsletters, and many of them are evergreen, but I know that navigating those archives is a huge pain in the butt, especially for stories published before we switched from Substack to Ghost. I'm adding a few more each day, and hope to be finished soon. You can browse the tags at the top of each story. For example, here is a collection of all the newsletters with FOIA related stories.

• I am leaving next week for Atlanta to attend the North American Society for Sport Management (NASSM) Conference. I'll be in Georgia from Wednesday afternoon until Saturday morning, hoping to network, learn more about exciting research in sports management, finally meet people I've been tweeting for the last two years, and more. If you're going to be in town, I'd love to say hello! Feel free to drop me a note. I know that I am moderating a panel discussion on Thursday morning, but my schedule otherwise right now is flexible.

• Finally, speaking of flexible schedules, there will be no Extra Points published on Monday. It's Memorial Day, and none of you are going to be reading your email anyway lol.

Would you like to listen to folks talk about actual football games for a second?

This is, of course, a newsletter focused on the off-the-field forces that shape college athletics. But that doesn't mean that we do not care about the stuff that happens on the field. In today's Going For Two, Bryan and I peel ourselves away from NIL and NCAA bylaw coverage to remind ourselves that hey, we actually know some TV times now and can begin to plan out, and look forward to, the start of the 2022 football season.

In particular, this podcast discusses:

• The first game (so far?) of the 2022 season...is going to be a Nebraska/Northwestern game...in Ireland. Why?

• Why somebody should play a college football game in Brazil. No, I wasn't actually the one that suggested this...although if somebody does decide to do this, por favor, me leve com você.

• How we would prefer to set up Week Zero if we were the czars of college football, including how we'd structure  huge FCS games

• The big, and sneaky big, games to watch over those first few days

• How you can save 15% off your first order at Homefield Apparel by using promocode EXTRAPOINTS as you consider Arizona State,

• and much, much more.

Going For Two is the free podcast of Extra Points, which drops every Wednesday and Friday. You can find it via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving us a nice review, or perhaps letting your internet friends know about it.

You can also find the videos of our previous podcasts right here.

Here's what else we published this week:

Thanks to everybody who shared, DM'd, texted, and emailed about my dispatch Wednesday evening about burnout. I promise we'll be talking more about burnout from college athletes, coaches, and all levels of college administration over the next few weeks. I'm existentially tired, and from the looks of my mentions and inbox, a whole hell of a lot of you are too. I guess we'll get through it together!

Bryan and I also interviewed Florida gymnast Leah Clapper about her involvement in NIL, how she keeps herself balanced (get it????) amid major pressures from school, athletics and NIL, which SEC fan base has the audacity to boo gymnasts (I'm gonna go ahead and spoil this one for you, it's LSU lol) and more.  

I wrote a big essay about how challenging it is for anybody to get really accurate baseline data on NIL. We don't really know the size of the TOTAL NIL marketplace, we don't know going rates, we don't really know how to help athletes best price themselves...you name it.

And I also wrote about a new trend of large school launching brand-specific streaming services...why they do it, what programming goes on it, and what they need to do in order to be successful.

You can get access to everything we write and record with a full subscription to Extra Points, which is just eight bucks a month, or $75 for the entire year. In my humble opinion, given how much we publish, and how much of this you can't really get anywhere else, this is a pretty good price!

I'll see you all on Tuesday. Have a great weekend, and be good to each other.

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To sponsor a future Extra Points newsletter, please email [email protected].  For article ideas, newsletter feedback, FOIA tips, athlete NIL sponsorships and more, I'm at [email protected], or @MattBrownEP on Twitter, and @ExtraPointsMB on Instagram.