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

Friends, I can’t believe where time went! It seemed just like a few weeks ago, it was 80 degrees and sunny, and the college football season was full of hope and promise. Now, it’s getting dark at 2:45 p.m., it’s cold, and the regular season is nearly complete.

But it isn’t all bad news! You know what the change in seasons also means? It means we’re this close to the 2026 Extra Points Bowl. Stay tuned as the Division III regular season wraps up this weekend, as we’ll have game announcements, ticketing information and much, much more coming early next week. The game, of course, is Nov. 21 at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium in Canton, Ohio. We’ll see you there!

Earlier this week, athletes at one SEC school completed an important hypothetical exercise. Men’s basketball players at Tennessee, along with Athletes.org, completed a mock negotiation to create a hypothetical Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) with Tennessee athletics.

The term sheet that the sides agreed upon might look a little different from what fans or some Twitter lawyers might have imagined. It included a spending floor as well as a “salary cap,” financial incentives for staying with the program, guaranteed payments if athletes miss time due to injury and multiple other codified agreements that have nothing to do with salary at all.

It also included some surprisingly strict penalties for evading the cap:

The hypothetical term sheet was the product of negotiations between multiple Tennessee basketball players who were elected by their teammates, personnel from Athletes.org, and Tennessee athletic department leadership, including athletic director Danny White, a public advocate for collective bargaining in college athletics.

I believe these sorts of exercises have value for students and athletic administrators. It’s useful for students, and, quite frankly, the general public, to understand what sorts of things can be negotiated during the bargaining process, how a team would handle disagreements over what priorities to pursue during bargaining and how management may respond to some of those asks. I particularly think it’s important for the public to see that athletes care about aspects of their jobs beyond salary, like health care, schedules, working conditions, etc.

But I keep using words like “hypothetical” and "exercise," because that’s what this was. It wasn’t a real CBA. And proponents of collective bargaining in college sports, in my humble opinion, need to be realistic about what has to happen in order for classroom whiteboard exercises to come close to becoming reality.

What it costs to build winning programs

We’ve been digging deep into sport-specific budgets in the Extra Points Library so we can understand what it really costs to build teams that can compete for league titles and championships. That’s not just about rev-share money or coach salaries, but also what winning teams are spending on meals, travel, recruiting and more. Get your reports and see where your teams stack up from our sport reports:

Read the men’s basketball report | Read the softball report | Read the baseball report | Read the women’s basketball report

The truly hard part isn’t getting athletes (or their representatives) to sit across a table from athletic directors (and their lawyers) and hash out an agreement. That part will be hard, and feelings will probably get hurt, but collective bargaining is usually painful and laborious the first time around.

But it does work, even when both sides drag each other to the negotiating table at 2 a.m. to cuss each other out.

The hard part is getting to a situation where the two sides are legally even allowed to have that conversation and have the agreement be worth a damn in court.

If you want to engage in collective bargaining, right now, you have to be employees. It is the personal and professional opinion of Extra Points that major college basketball players (and potentially lots of other athletes) should be classified as employees, but should and are mean two different things, especially to judges and the sorts of professionals who charge $300 an hour to read things.

There are universities that could, if they wanted, elect to voluntarily recognize some of their athletes as employees, wait for those athletes to organize and then engage in the CBA process. Women’s basketball players at Oregon State, for example, are attempting to do exactly this, via the legal process, since OSU declined to voluntarily recognize their union. But another blue state school could do that, if it wanted. SPOILER: The schools don’t actually want to do that.

Tennessee can’t, because Tennessee is a right-to-work state that also expressly forbids public employees from engaging in collective bargaining. Danny White believes that if UT athletes, along with other SEC athletes, were employed by a third party (say, a for-profit national entity), instead of the school, they could all engage in bargaining and still be covered under the NLRB.

The labor lawyers I’ve spoken to are more skeptical about this plan, especially if individual schools are the ones making hiring, firing and local management decisions, rather than some national league office, but the only way to know for sure is to attempt it and win any resulting litigation.

I struggle to see how a whiteboard plan with current students is a meaningful step towards an actual CBA reality. If you want a CBA in college sports, you’ll need athletes that are organized enough to create a legally defensible negociating body and a legal pathway to create and defend that CBA.

If Power 4 ADs (and their presidents) are really about that option, one way they could support it would be to stop having their conferences lobby politically for legislation that undercuts collective bargaining. If you can go through all the effort to get Congress to create an antitrust exemption, you could go through the effort to get an amendment to the NLRB, FLSA or similar labor legislation.

With Democrats now slated to hold substantial majorities in both the House and Senate next year, such an argument would have a far more sympathetic audience.

Failing that … this is a good and interesting and useful exercise, and it created a PDF. But at the end of the day, it’s just a PDF, no more legally binding than a PDF of any of these newsletters.

A bi-weekly look at the rapidly changing licensing landscape in college sports, as part of a paid sponsorship with Desert Cactus.

Holiday gift guides are a low-cost revenue driver schools are already using — and there are tons of ways to maximize potential and make the guides as fan-friendly as possible.

For instance: Organize the gifts by price point, so small items get the shine they deserve. Plenty of shoppers are looking for stocking stuffers and less costly treats. That's what Cornell did in its 2025 gift guide, keeping items under $20 separate.

Those lower-priced items can be big hits, like UC Davis's $9.99 ornament from last year. (The Aggies gave their ornament top billing in their guide last year, which also helped boost sales.) Keychains, bottle openers and magnets are also popular add-ons to bigger gifts. So are school-specific greeting cards and other small licensed items; for most schools, Desert Cactus offers officially licensed holiday greeting cards, which are adorned with festive team artwork. Each card has a different design, allowing fans to customize their greetings to family and friends!

Guides are also versatile and can point to several storefronts and partners, sending fans to every place a school sells licensed product.. UC Davis’s guide last year linked to the campus store, the athletics store, the NIL Store and Amazon. St. John’s opened its guide by naming partnerships with more than 40 brands, and it gave NIL merchandise its own section.

And a gift guide can be so much more than just a list of links. UAB's 2025 guide featured a custom ornament that supported a scholarship fund, and the school's bookstore also ran three holiday pop-up shops. Causes and in-person events give fans a reason to buy now. So do social media campaigns, like Virginia Tech's 10-day Instagram series last December. Alumni and campus figures — including an Olympic hurdler, Miss America 2020, therapy dogs and Michael Vick — each unboxed a curated box of licensed gear, with a giveaway of the same box after each video.

Get the guide on five licensing considerations in the NIL world here.

Here are a few other updates you might have missed:

Thanks for reading, everybody. Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you on the internet.