Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
Two quick things to add to your calendars here on a Monday morning….
First, if you’re not sick of talking about the Protect College Sports Act and various machinations in Washington D.C., good news! I’m moderating a panel conversation with the Drake Group about the bill, what it impacts, and where college sports goes next, pass or fail. The conversation will be held on November 12, from 2:00-3:30 ET. Registration is free! If you’d like to hear me ask questions to folks who know far more about antitrust and labor law than I do, sign up and come join us.
And in non-legal and political news, don’t forget, the Extra Points Bowl is back next month, and we’d love for all of you to join us. The third edition of the Extra Points Bowl, which features elite D-III football teams that didn’t qualify for the playoffs, will be held at the Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium in Canton, Ohio, on November 21st. More information, including on how to get free tickets, can be found here. Also, we’re bringing together sports management professors for an afternoon of networking, fun and D3 football. Click here to register.
In non-announcement news, I want to highlight a recent post from Friend of the Newsletter David Hale over at ESPN. Hale’s Substack is excellent for a) encouraging folks to think deeper about particular trends on college football and b) shoehorning references to dad music. Last week, he delivered on both:
Ah yes, a simpler time…
Let’s take a closer look at Hale’s concept of the ACC “squishy middle”, referencing the estimations of FB payroll via the Athletic:
BC is the bottom. There are nine teams estimated at more than $40 million, 13 more at between $30-40 million, and 45 that are basically between $14 and $28 million… the squishy middle.
Now, all of those teams spending money are helping to thin out the overall talent pool (or cesspool if you’re Texas A&M), so even the ones spending at the top don’t have as much of an advantage as the blue bloods of years past had.
But also, the marginal difference in wins between spending, say, $17 million and $23 million is probably negligible from week to week. Over the course of a full season, spending more probably helps a great deal because it buys you depth and margin of error. But in a sample size of one, a distribution that looks like this can create all kinds of wonky outcomes.
Hale actually hit on something here that I’ve been thinking about all season…is the marginal difference in wins between $17 and $23 million actually negligible from week to week? What about over a season? My gut says that is probably correct, but I have no idea how to potentially measure or study that sort of relationship. The biggest challenge, of course, is that we don’t really have accurate enough data to get that granular with an analysis.
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The Athletic story uses ranges for potential player payroll numbers for a reason…not many people even inside the football building completely know the exact payroll number, and that number may fluctuate over the season, thanks to incentives, injuries, transfers, etc. I’m pretty confident the vast majority of the their rankings are directionally accurate, (I don’t think Purdue has a secret $52 million football payroll this year), but when you’re trying to figure out exactly how much spending matters, and where, the difference between $17 and $23 million might be pretty important!
But let’s assume Hale is correct…there isn’t a huge week to week difference in that salary range, and that a clump of similarly resourced football programs leads to a clump of close games that could easily go in a different direction had say, six plays gone differently. Is that just a function of the ACC’s payroll distribution?
I tried running the numbers against this season’s results in the Big 12, another league that mostly features programs within shouting distance of each other, payroll wise. The “bands” didn’t look quite as dramatic as they did in the #ACC:
There are still some very big swings! TCU is pretty nationally irrelevant this season, but there might just be a few plays from being in the playoff conversation. And perhaps BYU, Cincinnati, and WVU are a little fortunate to be in their current positions.
What’s perhaps more interesting is that when you plug in data for the Big Ten, a league that allegedly has significant gaps between the biggest spenders and the pack, the ranges look a lot more ACC-ish:
Look at that! The defending national champs are a handful of plays from being #1 in the country by a healthy margin…or sitting at .500. Michigan could be anywhere from the Playoff drivers seat to firing everybody right now, Rutgers and Penn State look particularly unlucky, and Nebraska is, well, Nebraska.
So far into the season, at least nationally, I think there is a convincing argument we’re seeing uncommon amounts of parity. After all, we’re not even to Halloween yet, and there are only three undefeated FBS teams. Via the Athletic:
So how rare is all of this? Glad you asked.
In the 12-game era (2006-2025), the average number of undefeated teams in the AP Top 25 after Week 8 was 7.8, more than double our current situation.
In the NIL era (2021-2025), that number’s only dipped to 7.4, with as many as nine just two late-Octobers ago. So we’ll hold off on declaring how much 2026’s madness has to do with The Portal And Stuff.
The most recent year with just three ranked undefeateds right before Halloween was 2003. It’s happened five other times since 1979. The legendary 2007 season had five unbeaten teams at this point, similar to the other Chaos Years of 1990 and 1984.
Since 1968, when the AP Poll expanded to 20 teams, the year with the fewest ranked unbeatens at this point was 1977, when Texas stood alone. So yep, as usual, the weird college football thing of the moment was just as weird at some point in the past.
I’m happy to keep reading various smart people’s opinions about why this is happening this year, and I’m sure player payroll and talent distributions have something to do with it. But is there a straight line between how payroll is distributed across a conference and how wacky the individual games are?
I don’t think we have enough data yet…or at least, not enough good, verifiable data. But perhaps that changes at the end of the season!
There’s certainly enough to show that whether it’s because of injuries, bad luck, payroll decisions, Mercurcy being in Retrograde, or whatever else you want to cook up, this is shaping up to be a deeply unpredictable season.
And as long as my favorite team isn’t playing…that’s pretty fun!
What does it cost to build a winning D-I women’s basketball program?
We dug into the financial data from across the country and created detailed reports on both D-I softball and baseball programs. Which programs spent the most? Where are budgets growing? What spending actually correlates with winning? What programs are generating the most revenue? Where that revenue comes from?
Dive in and see how your program stacks up.
