Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
Friends, I am still in Las Vegas for NACDA, and won’t be back at Extra Points Home Office HQ until later on Wednesday. I spent the last 14 or so hours talking to ADs, future-ADs, vendors, industry professionals and more, and I’ll be doing it again today.
Which means today is a perfect day to smash the GUEST POST button and turn the time over to KC Smurthwaite, who wants to talk to you about AI. Don’t worry, this isn’t LinkedIn-Bro Hustle Baloney. I promise.
I hope to see you around the convention today, and on the internet when I get home!
-Matt
There are days when Tyson Hutchins knows his post might not be universally popular.
Hutchins, BYU’s Senior Associate Athletic Director for Creative Strategy, has become one of the more visible voices in college athletics on artificial intelligence, not because he believes AI is magic, but because he believes it is becoming part of the job.
ChatGPT. Claude. Grok. Gemini. You name it.
For many fans, the phrase “AI” still comes with baggage. It can mean “AI slop,” weird fingers, plastic-looking graphics, fish-eyed videos and a social media comment section asking whether something was made by a person or prompted into existence. It's usually accompanied by someone asking, “Hey @Grok, is this true?” Even in professional sports, schedule releases and creative campaigns can become the internet’s favorite guessing game: Is this AI or not?
But inside athletic departments, the conversation is moving past gimmicks.
AI is no longer just the weird image generator someone opens during a staff meeting for a quick chuckle. It is becoming a workflow tool, creative assistant, copy editor, transcription service, tagging system, first-pass reviewer and, in some corners, a staffing strategy.
“Two years ago, AI was a party trick,” Hutchins said. “People would generate a weird image, laugh, and go back to Photoshop. Today, it’s woven into almost every step of how my teams work, from brainstorming to copywriting to graphic production to video workflows.”
That change has happened fast. OpenAI released ChatGPT on Nov. 30, 2022. Less than four years later, the question inside college athletics is not whether artificial intelligence will be used … The better question is, who will use it well?
For Hutchins, the change came when AI stopped being a toy and started helping with the actual work.
“The tipping point for me was when AI could actually augment real work, take action and start handling things I used to do myself,” Hutchins said. “That ‘agentic’ style of workflow is something I’m wildly bullish on, and I believe it’s the future.”
That future is already visible in the unglamorous jobs most fans never see. The hours spent organizing files. Logging footage. Transcribing interviews. Searching for the right photo. Writing and rewriting captions. Building multiple versions of the same graphic. Checking whether something matches brand standards.
That is where AI is making its first major impact.
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