Extra Points is leaving Substack. Here's what that means for you:

Pardon our dust while we do a little bit of spring cleaning.

I know, surprise email today and all, but I wanted to let you know about some big news that’s been in the works for a minute. I’ll get to the really important stuff first, and then if you want to read any of the self-indulgent media background stuff, well, I’ll include some of that at the end too.

Extra Points is currently hosted on Substack, a very popular newsletter hosting service. This weekend, I’ll begin the process to move Extra Points to a completely new service called Ghost. This domain will go offline this weekend and maybe on Monday, and then it will redirect to a new website. If I did everything correctly, it will look like this:

What does this mean for me, the Extra Points reader?

Ideally, things won’t change very much. Your subscription will carry over, so there is no need to re-subscribe or change anything in the billing department. Stripe is still processing the payments, so everything should still look exactly the same on your credit card statements.

I’m not going to be able to accept new subscriptions for a few days, but everything should be live and working again by early next week. If you’re reading this and want to be added to the free list and absolutely do not want to wait, just shoot me an email and I’ll add you manually.

What is going to change about Extra Points?

Right from the jump, the move will allow me to make a few changes.

• The layout of the newsletter is going to be tweaked a little bit. The goal is to make it load a little bit faster and actually go to your email inbox a little more often, rather than ending up in spam or promotions.

• Extra Points will now be a WEBSITE, not just a newsletter. There will be static pages for our merch options, podcasts, subscription discounts, sales information, and more. No more digging around for an old newsletter that has the info you’re looking for. It’ll always be there.

• I’m going to finally have that FOIA directory I’ve been talking about for a year. It’s going to take some time, but the goal is to have all of the financial reports, contracts and various other documents I obtain to live in one central place, so anybody can access them. I will also upload documents that others share with me.

• Ghost allows for way more integrations, so I’ll be able to create a better referral program, an easier e-commerce experience, and other quality-of-life improvements.

• Ghost allows me to build out a better tagging system, so it will be easier to find older newsletters about similar topics, and will allow more folks to find Extra Points via search.

Is anything going away?

In the short term, yes.

At launch, commenting will be disabled, and previous comments won’t port over to Ghost. Based on the last year, this wasn’t a feature very many people used, as they were way more likely to comment in my email inbox, on Twitter, or on Discord. I do plan to eventually restore commenting at a later date, but that is a little bit of a technical lift, and I wanted to focus on other priorities first. I still want to hear from you!

I’m also updating my pricing system. Ghost does not immediately support tiered-pricing, so I will no longer offer the $150/year deluxe subscription package. If you really love Extra Points and want to help pay for someone else’s subscription, I’m working on an easy way for you to do that.

I’m also going to update my pricing. Starting next week, Extra Points will cost $8/mo, and will run $75/year.

Every single person’s current pricing will be honored. So if you’re on a $7/mo deal now, as I understand it, your rate should remain the same. Going forward, new subscribers will pay the new rate. If you’re on a university-related discount, I’ll have to create new discount codes for you when it’s time to renew, but I’ll make sure everybody has what they need.

If you have any questions about this, drop me an email. Matt@ExtraPointsMB.com.

The TL:DR

Your subscription should carry over. You shouldn’t have to do anything. The email will still come to your inbox. It’s just going to look a little different, have some more features, and you’ll need to wait a few days before you can give me money.

Okay, I want the inside baseball media business stuff. Why are you leaving Subtack?

Here is the Honest To God truth.

I really do think there’s a lot to like about Substack. I personally like the people I’ve interacted with there. I really appreciate that it’s a company of writers, trying to create products specifically for writers. For a lot of writers, I still think this is a very good place to run your newsletter.

Specifically, this format is really good for two kinds of writers:

• Technical novices just trying out the idea of a newsletter, or writers looking to experiment with the format.

• Very established writers with large, built-in audiences.

If that’s you, perfect. If you don’t care about charging for your newsletter, in my opinion, this is the best in class publishing tool. If you don’t need to sweat new user acquisition and just need a format to quickly monetize that audience without fussing over the technical details, I think this is the place.

When I launched two years ago, I was absolutely in the first group. But now I’m not. My business overwhelmingly depends on subscriber revenue, but I also make money from ad sales, and merch, and a podcast, and even consulting. I do not believe that Substack’s current tech product is best equipped to handle publishers like me, folks with more diversified platforms. The tech simply doesn’t play well enough with others, and it gets expensive.

I talk to newsletter writers all the time, and am happy to share other positives, and negatives, about this tool or any other I’ve worked with. If you’re really curious about the real nuts and bolts, just drop me a line. 

***

Thank you for your patience and understanding. With luck, this will be a quick and painless transition, and then we all get to enjoy a better product.

-Matt Brown

Extra Points

Matt@ExtraPointsMB.com

Which FBS programs COULD pull off going independent?

Plus: more conference realignment insights, Mark Emmert's potential golden escape plan, and more:

Via Shutterstock

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

Over the last few days, paid Extra Points readers have gotten:

• A look at the various proposals the Big Ten considered for the final week of the regular season in football, including playing games in St. Louis, plus the breakdown of the controversial vote to allow Ohio State to play in the Big Ten Championship Game despite only playing five games.

• An interview with former Wake Forest star Brandon Chubb about what college athletes ought to do now to take advantage of the coming NIL marketplace.

• My take on how to create real incentives for athletic departments to not cut sports in the event that they actually have to share athletic department revenues with athletes

• I interviewed the AD of an NAIA school in Pittsburgh, thanks to your questions, and learned about facility challenges, how they’d decide whether to add sports, and what they put on salads in Pittsburgh.

and more. These readers also have access to our Discord server, where they can talk with other Extra Points readers about FOIA requests, college sports news, our dogs, and more.

You can have access to everything I publish here at Extra Points, and help support this publication, with a paid subscription:

In other news, the latest episode of Going For Two is now available wherever you get your podcasts. This was our mailbag episode, and we tackled a bunch of your questions, including:

• Which FBS programs actually COULD pull off going independent? We went down the list, conference by conference, and perhaps some of our arguments might surprise you. Honestly, I think the path is more viable for struggling G5 teams right now than it is for big-budget P5 programs.

• How to think like a university administrator when you’re evaluating rumors over whether a D-I team should reclassify down, or if a D-II program should bump up. There are other Hartfords out there, but not every struggling low-major is the same!

• How should we define what a “revenue” sport is in the year 2021, and what sports could potentially generate more revenue. Surprise! We’re both pretty bullish about the financial prospects of several women’s sports.

• The best places to eat across the college sports universe, or where I sing the praises of the delicious press box food at Rutgers.

Man. I cannot wait to get out of this basement and hit the road again. Travel has been nearly impossible since Extra Points became my full-time job, and I can’t wait to actually talk to coaches, administrators and academics face to face…and also eat something very stupid on my way home.

A few other stories caught my eye recently…

Deion Sanders is delivering attention. Is that enough?

Last month, I wrote about how ACU claimed that their upset of Texas in the Men’s Tournament was worth $200 million in exposure…and how that figure should be considered as something very different from $200 million in, you know, actual money.

They’re not the only school to make a similar claim. Via USA TODAY:

A university spokesman told USA TODAY Sports on Friday that the Tigers athletic department has generated the equivalency of $185 million in advertising and exposure since Sanders was hired in September to revitalize the football program — and more — at the HBCU school. Surely, this is “The Deion Effect” that athletic director Ashley Robinson stated during a recent interview with USA TODAY Sports.

The story goes on to detail the various marketing initiatives Sanders is pushing for.

The potential value of Sanders-related exposure might be different for a Jackson State than it might be for ACU. Jackson State’s athletic department is under-resourced compared to most PWI peers, and if the relentless promotional pressure that Sanders applies leads to better equipment, facilities or athlete opportunities, then that might actually provide a bigger long-term benefit for the Tigers than say, beating Alabama A&M.

My gut is that Jackson State will attract outsized media attention, even if the team doesn’t win the SWAC, just by virtue of Sanders’ personality and media connections…but perhaps not all publicity is good publicity. After all, an awful lot of those national Jackson State stories this season weren’t about the school’s biology department or their recruiting class, but about the bizarre was-Deion-robbed-during-a-game-or-nah incident. The school’s press infrastructure better prepared to handle that increased scrutiny.

After all, one of the items on the Sanders marketing Big Board?

Condoms.

We’ll see if that idea gets through the university licensing department.

That’s why you have one of those, right? To give the school some…protection?

Okay, let’s talk about something else before you all unsubscribe.

Could Mark Emmert get a new gig?

NCAA head Mark Emmert is one of the easiest punching bags on the internet, and not entirely without a good reason. It’s tough to find anybody who really thinks the NCAA is doing a great job right now, from athletic directors to coaches to media members to politicians. Sure, the job is probably impossible, and absorbing slings and arrows so specific university presidents don’t have to is part of the gig…but still.

The Greater Baton Rouge Business Report says that Emmert may be a target for a new gig…or an old gig, depending on how you look at it.

LSU did not respond to questions about how many applications the executive search firm that has been retained by the Board of Supervisors has received and the agenda for Wednesday’s 3 p.m. meeting had not been publicly posted by publication deadline.

Regardless of the official slate of applicants, multiple sources familiar with the situation say back channel but legitimate efforts are under way to try to recruit former LSU Chancellor and current NCAA President and CEO Mark Emmert for the position.

Emmert, who served as chancellor at LSU from 1999 to 2003, is widely considered to be one of the best leaders in the university’s history. He is credited with creating the LSU Flagship Agenda, attracting top-flight faculty and researchers and hiring football coach Nick Saban, who led LSU to its first national championship.

Emmert has close friends in Baton Rouge, including LSU Athletic Director Scott Woodward, whose stepson is married to Emmert’s daughter, and LSU booster Richard Lipsey, who recently returned from a wine-tasting trip he and his wife take annually with the Emmerts.

Emmert has also been a university president at Washington.

On one hand, an Emmert departure would certainly be a welcome development for the legion of frustrated conference commissioners, athletic directors and university-level staffers, and allow Emmert a measure of dignity in how he left the NCAA. But given the problems around LSU’s athletic department right now, from Title IX compliance to legal exposure to a litany of side issues that could be described as extensions of the proverbial Good Old Boy network…do you really want to be seen as potentially doubling down on that culture? Will that hurt the long-term goals of the institution?

Emmert also makes well more than the typical university president in his current job, (nearly $3 million, while many state flagship leaders make under $1 million) but if he had reason to believe he wasn’t long for Indianapolis, taking a paycut isn’t the worst thing in the world.

Without structural governance changes, I’m not optimistic that an Emmert replacement would automatically be better for the NCAA and member institutions, especially if they went out and got like, Arne Duncan to be the replacement.

It would be pretty strange to see a change like this happen, only for Emmert to end up on some NCAA subcommittee, throwing barbs at his replacement.

Higher education is a weird business. And man, it’s even weirder in Louisiana…so maybe this is a development worth monitoring.

Oh, here are two other newsletters I think you’d like reading:

Hey, you can appreciate a good newsletter, right?

• I’m not a big pro football guy (can you blame me? I grew up in Ohio), but I know a lot of you are, and you’d probably enjoy Going Long with Tyler Dunne, which seeks to provide deeper, way more insightful commentary on professional football. But he also did this really interesting story on Coastal Carolina, and what they’re trying to build from a talent evaluation and team culture perspective.

• I *AM* a big public records guy, and pound for pound, not many people in the college sports game do a better job of finding them and using them to tell interesting stories than Andy Wittry. His newsletter, Out of Bounds, is practically a sister publication to Extra Points, and one that I think is worth checking out.

Those aren’t #ads…they’re just two other sports newsletters that I think my readers would enjoy.

This, on the other hand, IS an ad.

***

Today’s Extra Points is sponsored by Proper Good.

Proper Good makes the tastiest and healthiest zero-prep meals you could ever wish for - made with ultra-clean and functional ingredients, zero added sugar, and they’re ready to eat in just 90-seconds... plus there's no fridge needed so enjoy at home or on-the-go at work, just tear the top off and pop in the microwave. With 1,000's of 5-star reviews and options for Plant-Based, Keto, Gluten-Free and Dairy-Free lifestyles, we've got your healthy quick lunches and dinners covered!

You can grab 10% off your first order by clicking this link right here.

****

Thanks again for your support of Extra Points. If you enjoyed this newsletter, why not share it with some friends?

If you’d like to sponsor future newsletters or podcasts, or would like to secure a 50% discount code for your classroom, school or organization, drop me a line at sales@extrapointsmb.com. For article feedback, story ideas, FOIA tips, exciting rumors, hate mail and more, I’m at matt@extrapointsmb.com or @MattBrownEP on Twitter dot com.

Here's why everybody should care about what's happening at Hartford

It's clear Hartford's administration doesn't want to be in D-I anymore. Whether they actually reclassify, and how they justify that decision, isn't just about the Hartford Hawks.

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

Before I get today’s story, I want to remind everybody that all paid Extra Points subscribers get access to our Discord server (think Slack, but…fun). I run that in conjunction with my old SB Nation buddies at Moon Crew, so you’re not just joining a community of Extra Points readers, but fans of Split Zone Duo and the Shutdown Fullcast.

Last week, we experimented with some audio Q&As (like Clubhouse…only not, because I have an Android), we play games together, chat about our dogs, and generally, have created something that takes the good parts of Twitter, without the soul-crushing parts.

If you’re a paid subscriber and can’t find your log-in, drop me an email or a DM and I’ll get you squared away. Anybody else who grabs a paid subscription is welcome to join us. And hey, you also get four newsletters a week with your subscription, not just two!

In non-subscription news, this week’s episode of Going For Two will be a mailbag episode. I think we have room for one or two more questions, so if there’s something you’d like Bryan and myself to tackle on the air, drop me a line. I’m at @MattBrownEP and Matt@ExtrapointsMB.com

Okay, let’s talk about Hartford for a second. We’ll get to the other announcements at the end.

***

Last month, the Hartford Hawks of the America East conference made history, earning a trip to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament for the first time since jumping up to D-I. The Hawks weren’t the best team in the conference this year. KenPom had them third, and the Hawks finished fourth in the standings, behind UMBC, Vermont and New Hampshire, but Hartford got hot at the right time, won the conference tournament, and grabbed a 16 seed. Sure, they got demolished by eventual national champion Baylor in the first round, but that’s not the point.

The point is, they’re in the record books. They got to play on national TV. And now they have some positive momentum to build on, a commodity often in precious short supply for Hartford men’s basketball…right?

Well, not everybody apparently sees things that way. Hartford’s administration secretly engaged with Carr Sports, a consulting company, to study whether the school should even remain in D-I. On February 12, just as the Hawks were wrapping up their regular season, they published it.

That study says that “Athletics’ current Division-I funding model is not viable” and that “UHart should explore viable membership options in NCAA Division III.”

The existence of the study remained a secret until WTNH in CT reported it. The Day then published a copy of the entire thing, which you can read for yourselves here.

Hartford’s administration has taken a beating from local sportswriters, but local sportswriters are seldom in the business of applauding the reclassification of local programs.

I read the entire document, hoping to get a better idea as to why Hartford would consider such a drastic move. Here are some of my takeaways.

Based on the assumptions built into this study, I don’t see how Carr could have reached any other conclusion

You can have the smartest quants and the best researchers on your team, but they can only crunch numbers with the parameters you give them. If you put garbage in, well, chances are, you’ll have garbage come out.

Carr’s report was asked to model what would happen if UHart stayed in the America East, if they moved to another D-I conference, or if they reclassified to D-III. Before any scenario was considered, Carr was asked to presume that UHart would reduce institutional funding for athletics over the next four years, and that the school is seeking a “more financially self-sustainable athletics model.” Additionally, the current university budget calls for “10% annual subsidy reductions to athletics'' from FY 2022-2025.

If your athletic budget is only around $14.5 million a year, and you plan on cutting that budget even more, and your goal is to achieve an additional level of financial self-sufficiency despite operating in a high cost market and with a basketball arena that only sits about 4,000…you almost don’t even need the rest of the study. Anybody with a cursory understanding of college athletic finances would know that there’s no way to make that math add up.

If a low-major school is going to judge their athletic department primarily on their ability to be financially self-sufficient, they’re in the wrong division.

But Matt, who cares if Hartford can’t sell any tickets or earn big TV money? Surely the school makes plenty of money in tuition, right?

Often, I’ve written that schools are making a mistake when they decide to drop Olympic sports programs in the name of saving money. After all, if you’re carrying say, 30 athletes on your swim team, and only four are on full-scholarship, then everybody else is bringing in tuition money that you might not have been able to earn otherwise. Depending on your average discount-rate for the athletes and the size of the roster, it’s entirely possible for a program to be financially self-sufficient, or close to it, without selling a single ticket.

But that’s only true if you can recruit non-scholarship athletes to pay close to sticker price…or at least, closer to sticker price than a typical student. According to this study, that isn’t the case at Hartford. The paper claims:

“Athletics is not viewed as a major contributor to UHart’s branding and enrollment goals. Net tuition revenues from student-athlete enrollment are negligible”, likely because current athletes have a “94% discount rate”, compared to a 53% discount rate for other students.

The paper also says that:

FY 2018-19 data shows that Athletics consumed over 9.15% of total University resources16, while its student-athletes represent only approximately 6.77% of undergraduate enrollment.

If all of that math is correct, it really is reasonable to conclude that Hartford’s enrollment and tuition revenue goals would be better met outside of athletics investments. That’s not going to be the case for plenty of other D-I schools, but it appears to be the case at Hartford.

Hartford probably isn’t a great long-term fit in the America East

There are ten teams in the America East, and Hartford is the only private school. It has the smallest enrollment in the league, one of the smallest total budgets (8th out of ten), and has the smallest number of total college athletes participating. UHart’s facilities are among the worst in the league, and their athletic programs are generally not very successful (average all-sports Commissioner’s Cup ranking? 8th). It’s hard to imagine a world where any of that improves after the school cuts the department budget.

Based on UHart’s enrollment, budget, athletic offerings and institutional profile, the school looks much more like the rest of the MAAC, a league of 11 private schools in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. If the institution actually wanted to remain in D-I, but offer a more competitive experience for their athletes and fans, I’d argue the MAAC would be a better option than the AE (or the NEC or any other D-I league).

It is a little curious that Carr didn’t model UHart in any D-II leagues, like the NE-10, but if Hartford isn’t seeing many advantages in tuition revenue from athletes, perhaps they’re unlikely to see enough revenue from cutting oh, 40% of their scholarships, to justify a halfway measure.

The most interesting thing about this story, to me, isn’t the final result. It’s the process.

I can understand the frustration from Hartford athletes, fans and local media, but honestly, I think the hypothetical decision to reclassify probably has some merit. They’re not in a great position to be competitive athletically in their current conference, the athletic department doesn’t appear to be an important partner in their student recruitment and retention strategy, and costs are only going to go up. Moving down to a different classification could undoubtedly alienate some donors, and between enrollment declines and the million-dollar America East exit fee, any financial savings might not be realized in the short term. But that decision would be defensible.

What’s less defensible, I think, is the process. I can’t understand why on earth a school would begin a reclassification study while the men’s and women’s basketball season was in progress, knowing the potential political risks of that information becoming public. The timing now looks almost like a college basketball version of Major League, which is embarrassing for everybody.

There’s also important questions about communication strategy. If you’re a university president hoping to gently apply some public relations pressure to help drum up support for a reclassification, you don’t want to have a private conversation with a professor pop up in the middle of a student Zoom.

If you want the general public to believe that you actually haven’t made a decision, you should probably give a more convincing defense of the department, or at least the process, once the news of the study actually leaks.

Now you have a messaging nightmare. Anybody who reads this report and reads the WTNH story is going to assume that Hartford is either going to reclassify or make significant leadership changes. If you’re an athlete, a coach, or anyone tied to this athletic department, what reason do you have to stick around? Shouldn’t you start trying to transfer or find a new job right now?

If external political pressures somehow keep Hartford from reclassifying, best case scenario, they have completely nuked any goodwill from the men’s basketball team’s run into March. The longer they wait to actually cut the cord, the more they’re hurting their students, employees, and external community members.

I promise plenty of other schools are going to watch to see how the greater Hartford community reacts

Hartford isn’t the only private, low-major school wondering how they’re going to pay for D-I athletics in the near future. I know they’re not the only D-I school in the northeast that has reached out to consultants for “strategic reviews” that might include recommendations about classification levels. But reclassifying is rare, in part because administrators tend to pay a heavy political price for scaling down.

If Hartford, after bungling the messaging on multiple levels, goes through with this decision without the world catching on fire, I feel confident that it will embolden other similar institutions to seriously consider going down a similar path.

And this decision bleeds into the summer, with more angry TV spots and editorials muddying the waters, I’m sure you’re going to see emails from administrators wondering how they can prevent their school from a Hartford situation.

At the end of the day, this isn’t just a story about a perennial basement-dwelling D-I school deciding if they should pack it in and move to a different (and cheaper) level.

It’s about how schools define success of an athletic department that will never sell out an arena or be an ESPN flagship regular. It’s about how that definition of success evolves in a post-COVID and resource scarce environment. And it’s about to what extent university presidents will be allowed to make sweeping athletic changes, even if they’re unpopular.

That’s not just a Hartford story. That’s a big college sports story.

Because Hartford isn’t the only Hartford in D-I. And all the Hartfords are watching to see how this particular story ends.

****

Today’s Extra Points is sponsored by Proper Good.

Proper Good makes the tastiest and healthiest zero-prep meals you could ever wish for - made with ultra-clean and functional ingredients, zero added sugar, and they’re ready to eat in just 90-seconds... plus there's no fridge needed so enjoy at home or on-the-go at work, just tear the top off and pop in the microwave. With 1,000's of 5-star reviews and options for Plant-Based, Keto, Gluten-Free and Dairy-Free lifestyles, we've got your healthy quick lunches and dinners covered!

You can grab 10% off your first order by clicking this link right here.

****

Thanks again for your support of Extra Points. If you enjoyed this newsletter, why not share it with some friends?

If you’d like to sponsor future newsletters or podcasts, or would like to secure a 50% discount code for your classroom, school or organization, drop me a line at sales@extrapointsmb.com. For article feedback, story ideas, FOIA tips, exciting rumors, hate mail and more, I’m at matt@extrapointsmb.com or @MattBrownEP on Twitter dot com.