UPDATES: Discount Library access, major games upgrades and more

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

We’ve been spending a lot of time over the past week or so adding updates to the Extra Points Library. We’ve been adding updated school financial information (more on this later), dozens of new coach contracts, vendor deals and more … and we’ll be adding additional documents every single day over the next month.

One of the most common bits of feedback I get from readers is about the cost of the Library. A $3,000 per year license is affordable for many industry professionals, from athletic departments to agencies to consulting firms. But if you’re just a regular ol’ fan, curious about some contracts, I totally understand how that price point is less accessible.

And many folks don’t actually need access to all 10,000-plus PDFs. They might only need two or three.

With that use case in mind, I’m happy to announce a new feature we’ve built into Extra Points: the Branch Library. You can access it from our homepage, under the Library dropdown:

The Branch Library is a small collection of assorted documents from the full Extra Points Library, across a variety of document types. That includes coaches (of everything from football to field hockey), athletic directors, major vendors and itemized athletic department budgets.

The Branch Library isn’t meant to have everything for everybody. But if you’re curious about what some of these documents look like or want to do some basic research, the Branch Library could be exactly what you need.

Here’s the good news: If you’re already a premium Extra Points subscriber, the Branch Library is totally free. If you aren’t … .well, you can become an Extra Points premium subscriber by clicking here. It’s only $9 per month ($84 per year), and it gives you access to Athletic Director Simulator 4000, every newsletter we write, and much more.

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I sure do!

We also have two completely free games to play on our website, and both of them just got huge updates this week.

In Concession Stand Simulator, you’re in charge of figuring how many hot dogs and beers to buy for your stadium, along with how to price them and how to set up your staff. If you ever played Lemonade Stand as a kid on the Apple IIe, you’ll understand the core concept pretty quickly.

Over the past few days, we’ve added variable weather (just like in real life, you can’t completely predict the weather … you only have forecasts), hot dogs and combo meal functionality and way more “special events.” We’ve also rebalanced some of the math behind the game. If you want to play a fun lil’ Tycoon-type game about slingin’ booze and encased meats at football games, I think you’ll enjoy Concession Stand Simulator.

We also pushed several new updates to Who’s That Football Team, our daily trivia challenge game:

Players can play a 20-questions-like game with the computer to figure out a mystery college football team (from FBS, FCS, Division II and Division III), a puzzle game with up to five specific clues and a daily challenge game. If you wanted to play today’s Daily Challenge, here’s the first clue:

Recently, I’ve made a few tweaks to the game’s AI to hopefully generate better (and less redundant) clues, added hundreds of new clues and improved some of the possible achievements and “team collections” that come from solving puzzles.

It’s fun! Sometimes the clues are easy. Sometimes, they’re very hard. There are a few Easter eggs hidden in the game as well. I hope you enjoy playing it!

I am also in the process of testing a completely new game, centered on being an agent who finds NIL deals for athletes and negotiates with collectives, which I hope to release in the next two weeks.

Whew. Tough crowd!

Well, yesterday, I wrote a story about the humble MFRS Report, the itemized athletic department budget that makes up nearly every database on money in college sports. This year’s edition is meaningfully different from last year’s, and this newsletter can help you make sense of what the reports actually mean.

I also caught up with players, coaches and administrators at Oberlin, a D-III school in Ohio whose football team was one of the very worst in the country last year. Those conversations were legitimately inspiring to me, and I think you’ll find the “why” behind a struggling football team informative as well.

And finally, you might have missed this story, so just in case: Did you know Indiana won a national title? In American college football? THAT Indiana? I cracked open the history books and the spreadsheets in an attempt to properly put this into context.

I’ve sent out some interview requests for a few possible stories next week, on topics ranging from the true market for jersey patch ads to the court cases threatening to blow up the current college sports model to video game updates, and much more.

Thanks for reading, everybody. Stay warm, stay safe, and I’ll see you on the internet.