Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points. Lots of stuff I want to share with you all this morning, right after this quick sponsor message:
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Friends, the Division III college football regular season has concluded, and the playoff bracket is set. And you know what that means?
That’s right. The matchup for the 2025 Extra Points Bowl is now official.
Your 2025 Opendorse Bowl Series will be:
The 2025 Forever Lawn Bowl: Ohio Northern (OAC) vs Wabash (NCAC), Nov. 22, 1:00 p.m. ET
The 2025 Extra Points Bowl: Mount St. Joseph (HCAC) vs Westminster (PAC), Nov. 22, 6:00 p.m. ET
Both games, of course, will be played at the Tom Benson Memorial Hall of Fame Stadium at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. These games will be played Saturday, Nov 22.
You can buy tickets right here. Just like last year, the game will also be streamed on FloCollege.
What can you tell me about Mount St. Joseph University?
Mount St. Joseph is a private Catholic university juuuust outside Cincinnati. The Lions play in the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference, a D-III league that includes institutions in Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio. The Lions finished with a 6-4 record this season, but they went 5-1 in HCAC play, good for second in the league.
The Lions average a whopping 37.6 points per game, paced by an aggressive passing game. Quarterback Jaxon Schreiber has thrown for more than 250 yards in eight of his 10 games this season and accounted for a whopping 44 touchdowns. That’s the highest mark in all of D-III.
MSJ is also the alma mater of Jesse Minter, the current defensive coordinator for the Los Angeles Rams.
What can you tell me about Westminster?
The most important thing, of course, is that the Titans won the 2024 Extra Points Bowl, beating the Marietta Pioneers, 27-13.
The Titans finished 7-3 this season, third in the always competitive PAC, behind playoff participants Washington & Jefferson and Grove City. The Titans dropped heartbreakers against those teams on the road, as well as a 2024 Extra Points Bowl rematch to open the season against Marietta, but dispatched the rest of their schedule with relative ease.
This year’s squad averages 36.7 points a game, behind the best rushing attack in the PAC and an aggressive defense that hasn’t given up more than 24 points in a game all season.
It should be a great football game! Actually, they will both be great football games. A ticket gets you access to both events, and I hope you’ll join us, either in-person or on the broadcast.
I’ll start driving to Ohio on Wednesday, and I’m happy to swing by your campus/office on Thursday or Friday if you’re in the NE Ohio neighborhood and want to catch up. Otherwise, I’ll see you all at the stadium!
Are regular fans going to get priced out of college football?
Tickets to the Extra Points Bowl aren’t very expensive. You can get a general admission ticket for under $30, which is a pretty good deal, in my opinion, considering (a) it’s at a professional-caliber stadium and (b) that gets you two football games.
But I also recognize that our bowl game is a D-III game. At the FBS level, and especially for the larger schools, affordability is increasingly looking very, very different.
One of the best things I’ve read recently on the subject came from the Athletic, using Florida State as a specific case study. Consider the following:
The budget model called for capital gifts — industry-standard, one-time fees separate from ticket prices and booster contributions. For former Seminole Boosters board member Rob Hackley, the gift requirement was $10,000 per seat to stay on the west side (out of the sun) — plus whatever the seats themselves cost. He said no and ended his season tickets after 53 years.
When a ticket representative told lifelong Seminoles fan David Walker his old seating area required a $5,000 gift, Walker laughed on the phone.
“Even if I had another $5,000 to spend on tickets, I would absolutely, on principle, not pay that,” said Walker, who moved his seats closer to the corner to stay at his original price point. “It just sort of feels like — I wouldn’t quite say a middle finger, but it definitely feels like I’m not valued as much as the surgeons of the area.
“We’re all just variables in that formula, and I’m a much, much smaller variable than some people.”
I have sympathy here for everybody. As the Athletic story notes — and this is something I’ve written about multiple times in this newsletter — stadium capacities are generally shrinking across major college football. In order to grow revenues and balance the athletic department books (where expenses are rising beyond just paying the players), schools are focusing on premium seating and “experiences” at the expense of total capacity.
I actually think that’s the correct decision. Many college football stadiums are really old, with amenities that fall substantially behind their professional peers. If you want to convince people to watch games in-person, rather than on TV, you have to give them legroom, make sure their WiFi works and give them something to eat besides popcorn.
But if you’re going to focus on the wealthiest subsection of fans who want (and can pay for) premium experiences, you run the risk of pricing out other people … or, at the very least, altering your stadium’s in-game experience. Nobody gets much of a home-field advantage from a “wine and cheese” crowd, after all.
But — and this isn’t really the thing that I think folks want to talk about — FSU’s choices are a reflection of where our economy is going. Via the story:
Florida State’s move reflects what Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell recently called a “bifurcated economy.” As low-income families spend less, the wealthiest households spend more. Companies and colleges cater their offerings accordingly.
At theme parks, it means Walt Disney World can charge roughly $260 for a one-day park hopper ticket. At pro sports venues, it means replacing cheap hot dogs and sodas with BBQ burnt end fries ($16.89 at Astros games) and campfire milkshakes ($15 plus tax at White Sox games). Fans hoping to attend one of the 2026 World Cup matches are facing record-high ticket prices, and a parking pass alone ($75 at least) costs more than a Category 3 ticket to a group match in 2022 ($69).
….
Jason Penry has seen the trend for years. When he worked in fundraising at Oklahoma State, the general axiom was that 80 percent of the money came from 20 percent of the donors. Now the ratio is probably closer to 95-5. And that top 5 percent expects high-level amenities.
This is a good time to be in the luxury goods and experiences business. That is not traditionally what college sports were.
I don’t have a neat proposed solution to this problem, which I think warrants much deeper newsletter dives. But I do believe there’s a meaningful risk for athletic departments that chase away potential fans in the name of maximizing current revenues. That could be very harmful 20 years down the line.
Of course, everybody involved with a department’s current decision-making will be gone in 20 years. And it’ll be a hell of a lot harder to recruit new fans, even if you’re affordable, if your team sucks because your payroll is 28 percent of your conference peers’.
But the supply of money, and fandom, isn’t infinite. Make fans sign up for too many streaming subscriptions, or raise the prices too many times, and some will decide to do something else on Saturdays. Focus your game-day experience too much on the richest 10 percent of your fan base, and, well, you might be in for a problem once that 10 percent dies and isn’t replaced by a new cadre of super-rich guys.
And if that happens, well, we’ll have plenty of seats at the D-III game.
