We're growing again. Help us decide where to grow next

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

Last month, I wrote an entire newsletter laying out many of our plans for 2025. We added our first additional FT hire back in November (Steven Toroni, who is helping us with sales), and I mentioned that we planned to make additional FT hires in 2025.

Today, I’m excited to announce one of those new hires.

Please welcome Sam Weber to the Extra Points family! 

Sam will be working as our Vice President of Marketing at Extra Points. Prior to joining our team, Sam served as one of the earliest employees at NIL industry leader Opendorse. He brings a track record of building award-winning brands, executing best-in-class public relations plans, and leading marketing strategies that support business growth in the world of college sports. 

Sam will be helping our team by focusing on newsletter audience acquisition, content and PR strategy, and brand development. Essentially, he’s going to help Extra Points grow, tell our story to the world, and mature as a business. 

Sam is based in Lincoln, Nebraska. We now have employees sitting in Southern California, Nebraska, Chicago, and Maryland…so Extra Points is basically the Big Ten. Come sponsor us, Casey's Pizza.

He’ll also be helping us with Extra Points Library

We first announced EPL, a searchable database of athletic department contracts, budgets, and vendor agreements that we’ve obtained via open records, back in the Fall. Dennis and I (and others) have been in the lab nearly every day, trying to grow our document library, improve quality of life features, and make this as useful a tool as possible for athletic departments, industry leaders, academics and more. 

If you haven’t taken EPL for a spin recently, we’ve grown our document list to nearly 5,500 documents across D1, with more being added weekly. I imagine Sam’s deep knowledge of the college athletics industry, growing tech brands and storytelling will only make Library even better. 

You can check out what we’re building with EPL right here. 

So what’s next?

I’m flying to Nashville tomorrow morning for the NCAA Convention. Then I’m going to swing by to visit a few colleges (Belmont, UT Chattanooga, maybe others) and head to Atlanta for the National Championship Game and some other Sports Business-y meetings. I’ll be on the road for about a week. 

When I get back, beyond writing and reporting on my trip, we’ll be huddling up as a team to solidify our other big plans for the year.

And this is where you come in. We’d love your help in figuring out where want to go next.

One of our goals for this year is to find a few places to expand what we offer beyond the newsletter, What If book, and Athletic Director Simulator 4000. We’re considering getting into the events world, creating Special Reports, getting into original video, and perhaps taking another swing at the software space. And hey, maybe one of you has another idea we should consider as well.

I'm going to list a few potential ideas we’re considering. I’d love to know which of these sound like something you’d potentially be interested in. Please do not vote for more than three ideas. I know we won’t have the time or money to do ALL of this stuff, and we’re trying to get a better understanding of what our readers may be most interested in.

Those ideas include:

• A webinar series on The State of College Sports Video Games, which would include a roundtable discussion of video game industry professionals, licensing professionals, and consumers. This would be to help folks inside and outside college sports better understand how college sports video games get made…or don’t get made.

• A webinar series on How Agents Work. We’d invite multiple certified, Actual Legitimate Agents to discuss what they do, how athletes can find one, what school officials, brands, and the media need to know about their work, and how to stop the bad guys in their industry.

• A completely new computer game that would center on running an NIL agency. Players would recruit and sign athletes, try to negotiate and find brand and collective talent deals, run their business, etc.

• A complete revision of Athletic Director Simulator 4000. I’m imagining a world that moves away from the multiple-choice question format and into a system that rewards player skill more often, while including far more parts of the AD role (like hiring and firing coaches, building new facilities, fundraising, etc).

• A new computer game that would center around college sports trivia. Unlike the other two games, we imagine this as a free-to-play game.

• An original video series where I interview reporters, ADs, coaches, professors, and other leading industry figures…while playing EA Sports College Football 25, and potentially talking trash.

• An original video series highlighting Great Moments in Dumb College Football History.

• A special report, somewhere between 5-10K words, to serve as a Beginner’s Guide to the Business of College Sports. Essentially, a mini-ebook to serve as a primer for the big issues regularly discussed on Extra Points.

• A special report, somewhere between 5-10K words, along with original videos, highlighting the most interesting people working in college sports. Like a 30 under 30, only nobody has to be under 30, and (hopefully) the people we highlight won’t go to prison for financial crimes.

Please do not vote for more than three things. That will help us gather more useful data.

Thanks for your votes and feedback. We’re excited to have Sam, excited to cover this NCAA Convention, and excited to work on building new stuff that you’ll all enjoy.

I’ll see you in Nashville!