What we learned from Year 2 of the Extra Points Bowl

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Thanks so much to everybody who made it out to Canton on Saturday to support the 2025 Extra Points Bowl.

It looks like we have the makings of a Division III bowl dynasty on our hands! The Westminster Titans, who also won the 2024 Extra Points Bowl, won the 2025 edition, beating Mount St. Joseph, 40-21.

The Titans jumped to a 20-0 lead and looked like they were going to completely walk away with the game. But the high-flying passing attack from the MSM Lions finally hit pay dirt in the second quarter, first with this bomb that made me jump out of my seat and yell something I’m not supposed to yell in front of my two children.

This sure looked like it was going to be an interception, right? NOPE!

But before the Lions could establish any sort of momentum, Westminster grabbed it right back. This bomb riiiiight before halftime pretty much closed the book on the game:

This is particularly impressive, given that Quentin Goode was Westminster’s third-string quarterback at the start of the season. Injuries forced the freshman into action a little bit earlier than expected, but he didn’t disappoint.

Last year, I shared a few high-level thoughts about what we took away from our bowl sponsorship experience. This year was different, but now that I’ve had a chance to sleep on it, I’d like to share a few quick takeaways from the 2025 game:

The day before the game, the Opendorse Bowl Series puts on some special programming. All four teams were able to get private tours of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, enjoy a special dinner, learn a little about how NIL works at the D-III level and enjoy some time for themselves.

I’ve spent most of my sportswriting career around Division I athletes, and one thing is clear when you hang around D-III guys for a little while without pads: The D-III guys … are a lot smaller.

That’s not an insult! But there might be two or three guys on each roster who are actually three hundred pounds. This a level of football where guys are often just a step slower than their peers at Pitt … and also a few inches shorter and a few (dozen) pounds lighter. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard to go to the NFL from this level, simply because most of the guys do not have NFL measurables.

But you don’t need to be 6-foot-4 and 225 pounds to sling the pigskin, and you don’t need to be 300 pounds to send a linebacker on his ass. These are good football teams and good football players. After watching both games, I came away really impressed with the ball placement from the quarterbacks, the physicality along the line of scrimmage and how nobody gave up. The earlier game, the ForeverLawn Bowl between Wabash and Ohio Northern, was decided in the final two seconds, after a crazy back-and-forth battle. And nobody threw in the towel in our game, even with the outcome mostly settled for large swaths of the second half.

You can watch good football at all levels in college sports. Anybody paying attention to what happened on the field in Canton saw four good football teams, with guys who clearly put the work into their craft and had the mental toughness to respond to setbacks and mistakes.

Outside of the folks with Visit Canton and the Hall of Fame, not many people involved in last year’s bowl efforts had much experience putting on a major event like this. But in Year 2, just about everybody who’d been involved last year was involved again, and I think that experience lead to many improvements.

The folks at Opendorse, for example, were able to get connected with the team at the Bowl Season, to make sure every participating player in both games got the same shirt with the same logos as the FBS teams playing in FBS bowls will get. That’s a pretty cool player benefit and something I hope will be bragged about for years to come.

And though I thought last year’s Extra Points Bowl trophy looked pretty cool, it was also, uh, a bit smaller than we’d thought it would be. Our partner conferences were able to put together a more robust model for this year, which I think turned out great.

So many of the smaller logistical things — from figuring out how to maneuver four college football teams around the HOF to concessions and merch options in the stadium to the player experience — improved in 2025. Not every plan we discussed over the summer came together this year, but I think absolutely everybody involved should feel great about how the games turned out.

I don’t have a great solution, but one meaningful challenge of this game, to me, is the calendar. The bowl announcements aren’t set each year until after the NCAA playoff bracket is announced, which happens a week before the games. I learned which teams were going to play in the Extra Points Bowl about an hour before the public release, and my understanding is that even the commissioners didn’t get that much more advance notice.

Unlike 2024, we also didn’t know exactly what the conference pairings were going to be, because we all wanted to avoid regular-season rematches and create the best games possible. In 2024, we could kinda estimate who was probably going to be in the Extra Points Bowl a few weeks out, but this year, I had no idea who we’d get until last Sunday. My understanding is that conference officials were planning on several different contingency plans.

That’s not a big deal, logistics-wise, but it does make it much harder to promote the game in advance, build a meaningful content schedule or do many of the other promotional activities that other bowl games might do. I drove to Ohio on Wednesday morning, not quite three days after learning the matchup, and the game was on Saturday. That’s just not much time.

Last year, I figured an indie newsletter sponsoring a bowl game was a crazy enough story that we might be able to generate some meaningful earned media, enough to at least help offset the sponsorship costs from Extra Points. While we got some of that from our sportswriter peers and from a few pockets of the “weird college football internet,” we didn’t get nearly as much as I had hoped. That surprised me.

This year, we got even less. Part of that may have been because I did not promote the game enough over the course of the college football season, since we were also re-launching NIL Wire, building computer games, expanding the Extra Points Library and doing many other projects. But I suspect that because we didn’t add a ton of crazy new features, there wasn’t much of a novelty factor to grab the attention of college sports weirdos or national audiences.

We sponsor these games because we care deeply about college sports at all levels, including D-III. I’m an Ohio guy, and I want small college athletics to be successful, so cutting a check, writing newsletters and showing up is something that easily lines up with my personal values. It’s also a restorative event, seeing how much this game means to the players, parents, coaches, and administrators.

I also recognize that I have a responsibility to be a good steward of our resources, and we want to make sure that our marketing expenses don’t just line up with what makes us feel good, but with our business goals as well. I think we’ll need to do some more thinking about how we can best combine our personal goals with what we need to help Extra Points as a business.

I still very much consider this year’s event a success. The game might not have been as close as last year’s, but it was still compelling, the players loved it, and it filled my bucket a little bit. I once again brought my family, including my in-laws. Everybody had a great time, which is a big deal, because my girls normally do not care about football.

I even impressed my in-laws! Do you guys know how hard that is to do?!? That alone was worth the sponsorship cost.

I want Extra Points to inform, educate and entertain, and I want it to be a part of solutions in college sports. Any day you feel like you did that, you had a good day.

We had a great day on Saturday. And we’re able to do that thanks to your support.