Mailbag! Future video game projects, DIII NIL rules, and more:

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

Quick announcement from the jump: We’re thrilled to announce yet another huge commitment to the Extra Points Library: Cal Poly!

Now, folks in the Cal Poly athletic department can browse our 10,000+ PDF library of college sports contracts, budgets, consulting agreements and much, much more. This helps the department make more informed decisions and save money.

You don’t have to be an athletic department to benefit from Extra Points Library, of course. We serve academic departments, consulting groups, newsrooms, startups, agents, and many more. Learn more about how you can use Extra Points Library as an affordable college sports data solution here.

I won’t lie, I’ve really had my head down these last few weeks on traveling to different campuses, guest lecturing, and adding the most current data to the Extra Points Library. As of today, we’ve got 182 FY25 public school FRS reports, with most of our stragglers coming from states like Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee which have those pesky in-state residency requirements. I’ll be writing about more data analysis from those reports, like sport-specific operational budgets, in the very near future.

But that story, plus a few other reported stories we have in the hopper, need a teensy bit more time in the oven. So you know what that means?

MAILBAG TIME!

As always, mailbag questions are taken on a rolling basis. But the best way to get questions to me is via email or BlueSky (MattBrown).

Reader Michael asks,

We’re not as technologically sophisticated as I’d like to be, but whew buddy we’re in a better place than we were in like, 2021.

Between Extra Points Library collections and specific-reporting related FOIAs, we send a lot of requests. Now, we have a special gmail mailbox ([email protected]) just for sending and managing the loads of documents and requests we get each week.

I don’t mind admitting that we’ve hacked together a tool that makes it easier to send athletic open records at scale. We use multiple spreadsheets to track where various requests are during the process (think of something like the Dominos Pizza Tracker, but way nerdier), and another custom-built tool to help us convert the MFRS reports into sortable CSV files that are more easily manipulated.

As far as getting info from the documents themselves? I don’t know any shortcut to just good ol’ fashioned reading the darn thing. I…do a lot of that.

Reader JQ asks:

Welllllllll mostly?

It kinda depends on what you mean when you’re talking about NIL. All athletes, regardless of division, can participate in marketing deals or economic activity related to their name, image and likeness. They should be sending compliance paperwork to their athletic department, and if the deals are over $600, they should also send them to the College Sports Commission. My understanding is that is true, even  if an athlete is at non-D1 institution or a school that did not opt into the House settlement, those athletes are still supposed to disclose NIL deals above $600.

Update: WELL ACTUALLY, a sitting DII AD texted me this morning and told me that no, only D1 athletes are obligated to report deals to the CSC. DII and DIII athletes only need to send information to their compliance department and comply with any relevant state-specific laws.

The fact that some school compliance folks I texted about this last night told me “we actually don’t know” probably isn’t a good sign for how the NIL compliance process is working out, but there you go. We’ll go with No, non-D1 schools outside the House Settlement don’t need to send stuff to the CSC.

But nobody in the NCAC or the American Rivers Conference is doing revenue sharing or anything. And shoot, if we’re being honest, not very many college athletes beyond D-I are doing any sort of marketing activity where individual deals regularly exceed $600.

D-I institutions, or schools outside D-I that are participating in a D-I sport (like Johns Hopkins lacrosse, or Dallas Baptist baseball), can opt into the House settlement and directly play athletes, so long as they follow the House settlement rules around roster limits and “salary caps.”

Buuuut, a few formal emails notwithstanding, I think all of this stuff about rules is mostly academic. Sure, different states might have different reporting obligations, and the CSC says that marketing deals beyond the cap must be tied to fair market value ... .but until somebody actually get punished, and that punishment survives a federal lawsuit, all of this is just hypothetical.

So I guess you could say that everybody has the same NIL rules…in that there aren’t really any NIL rules.

Reader Nam asks,