Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
The 2026-27 college sports season is practically here. If I’m not mistaken, women’s soccer matches will start later this week, and you don’t need me to tell you that college football is just around the corner.
Which means now is the perfect time to finally tell you about a series of product updates and improvements we’ve been working on for months here at Extra Points, whenever we have a few moments between reporting, writing, FOIAing, teaching, game development, and everything else we do. I think you’re all going to really like them, especially because nothing I am going to announce today will cost any extra money. Today is not a fundraising email. Today is a hey, look at this cool new stuff! email.
Let me tell you all about it. But first, a quick note from Desert Cactus:
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Presenting: The Extra Points Community
Right now, there technically is a place for EP readers to discuss the latest EP newsletters: the comment section. That isn’t going away, but I understand that not many people look to comment on email-based newsletters. It’s unusual for me to see any newsletters launched after 2021 with robust comment sections.
In practice, that conversation happens across lots of other platforms: on Twitter, Reddit, Bluesky, Instagram, across my DMs and, perhaps most often, in my email inbox. None of those places are going away either … but you all understand that I can’t invite 65,000-plus of you into my email inbox. It gets messy in there.
So today, we’ve launched a new place for EP readers to chat: the Extra Points Community. All EP readers, including free subscribers, can access the EP Community. You can do so from the homepage, or you can add this link to your bookmarks.
The community will function as sort of a cross between Slack and a typical scrolling newsfeed. There will be places to talk about the latest newsletter article, but also separate “rooms” where you can talk about college sports news, FOIA fun, our games and game development projects and more. Most importantly, anybody can create a new thread or post for others to discuss.
So for example, if you click on the FOIA Fun "channel," this is what you’ll see:
To start, I’ve established two premium channels, one for discussing conference realignment and another for college sports video game discussions. Reading and writing in those areas is limited to our users on premium plans (which are an affordable $9/month, I might add). Everything else is open to all users. As more people use our community and as we get more feedback, we’ll revisit and decide if we need to add more channels, combine channels or make other tweaks.
I plan to share stories or notes that haven’t appeared in the newsletter in our College Sports News channel, since I read all sorts of things that I find interesting but don’t become full-fledged newsletters … or maybe sometimes I’ll want to bounce an idea off readers before I decide to report it out.
Updates and new rewards to the Extra Points Referral program
One of the most important ways this newsletter grows (and thus remains commercially viable) is when existing EP readers recommend it to their friends. This has become a well-read publication within the college sports industry largely due to word of mouth, which I am so, so thankful for. We want to encourage that as much as possible, which is why we have a built-in referral rewards program.
Not many people have taken advantage of it, so we wanted to refresh the rewards and reintroduce the concept.
At the bottom of nearly every EP newsletter, you’ll see a call to share Extra Points. It looks like this:
We’re keeping the first reward the same. If you refer just two people to the Extra Points newsletter, we’ll give you a free month of Premium access. That means you can read every newsletter, play every game, download my book … the works.
At five referrals, I’ll mail you an Extra Points pin! We got these made ahead of NACDA earlier this summer, and we have plenty of extras. They look great on a backpack, suit jacket, messenger bag, or anywhere else people stick pins these days.
At 11 referrals, we’ll give you a free annual subscription to Extra Points. If you’ve already got one, I’ll either refund your subscription (pro-rated) or give you a gift code that you can share with a friend.
At 20 referrals, we’ll give you a free Zoom call with me, Matt, AND the ability to pick a future newsletter topic. That means I’ll come to your SAAC meeting, speak in your class, shoot the breeze with you about college sports history, whatever you want.
At 40 referrals, we’ll send you a huge gift card to Homefield Apparel.
I’ve tried to tweak the rewards to make them more accessible and more relevant. If folks have suggestions for other rewards, I am all ears!
This is active today, so feel free to pass along that URL at the bottom of the newsletter. I know tons of you are already forwarding these emails across your conference office or athletic department … so use that code to get your colleagues to sign up! I get to stay in business, and YOU get cool stuff.
Significant new updates to our free games
We currently offer three games, completely for free: Concession Stand Simulator, NIL Agency Tycoon 95 and Who’s That Football Team?
I’m probably not going to support Concession Stand Simulator much in the future, but I have spent a lot of time over the past week pushing new updates to the other two games.
For Who’s That Football Team?, we’ve added thousands of new questions, covering academic classifications, geography, stadium history, nicknames, postseason history and much, much more. Beyond just adding more clues, I’ve also rebuilt how the game and clue engine is set up, so the game’s AI is more fluid and conversational.
We’ve also tweaked the game’s difficulty and added more achievements. I like seeing all the schools I’ve guessed correctly:
For NIL Agency Tycoon 95, I completely rebuild the game’s deals system, so the math behind recruiting athletes and signing deals should make more sense. We’ve also added rival agencies (who will steal your athletes if you aren’t making them money), a newspaper that sums up what is happening in the industry, new items and some GUI improvements.
uh-oh, that seems bad.
I’ll be monitoring player activity a lot over the next week or so and will make rebalance adjustments if needed.
Athletic Director Simulator 4000 remains behind our subscription payroll. I’ll go ahead and #break a little #news here too. While we’re continuing to add new questions to ADS4000, we are working on updates that are so significant that we’re calling it ADS4500 internally. Once we’re far enough along for me to share screenshots of the new features, I’ll do so!
And finally, we just launched a big Extra Points Library update:
I work on Extra Points Library just about every day. I’m either FOIAing for more documents, uploading and coding new documents, responding to user questions, or doing one of any number of other tasks. Today, I’m happy to announce a few feature to help users who want some institutional information beyond what you might read in an athletic department budget.
We’ve added scores of institutional data reported via IPEDS, so users can now look up a school’s student demographics, enrollment trends, endowment, research classification and more. Users can also pull reports that compare Division I institutions across those metrics.
For example, if I wanted to look up which athletic departments reported the largest percentage of female students (which might be useful for athletic department benchmarking or Title IX compliance), I could pull that via our School Data Exporter:
Or I could look up institutional data for specific schools, even private schools. Here’s a snippet from my American University Eagles:
That is also live right now, along with our database of 15,000-plus PDFs (which is update multiple times a week), our free game-scheduling tool GamePlace, our FOIA-as-a-service system and much more.
Extra Points Library’s GamePlace feature is free for school personnel. Searching the database is free, but full access runs for $300/month or $3,000/year, with discounts available for research departments, newsrooms and more. Check out Extra Points Library today.
The best way to support our work, besides reading and sharing it? Upgrading to a premium subscription.
We offer huge discounts on bulk subscriptions for athletic departments, graduate programs, lawmakers and other organizations. (Just email me for details.) The fastest and best way to support Extra Points and get access to everything we build is by upgrading to a premium subscription.
Thanks for reading all of that and sticking with us! I’ve got more reporting coming soon, and that will always be a major focus for me. But I also want this newsletter/website/community to be as useful and fun as possible.
I’ll see you on the internet.
-Matt
