2026-03-31 The Annual College Football Business Update with Matt Brown

Welcome to The Solid Verbal. The Solid Verbal. Come after me! I'm a man! I'm 40! I've heard so many players say, well, I want to be happy. You want to be happy for a day? Eat a steak. It's that whoop, whoop.

Now, Dan. Dan Rubenstein, welcome back to the show, my good friend. As people are listening to this, don't give too much away. You are actually not here. Whoa, time shift? You are not here. We are recording this a few days in advance. You are spending some time away from the home studio this week.

Yeah, this episode and next episode have been prerecorded. Recording these on the Friday before. Hopefully, that doesn't give too much away, doesn't ruin any of the mystique. We've got two great episodes planned this week. On today's episode, we're doing our annual college football business update with our great friend Matt Brown from ExtraPointsMB.com. Never is there a dull moment in the world of college football business. I know it is not the preferred topic, certainly not between you and I, and definitely not out there in the Verballerhood. But if we are trying to paint a complete picture for what is going on, we'd be remiss to at least not bring this up.

Oh, I think, yeah, look, everybody likes talking about football nerd stuff as, you know, as often as humanly possible. But no, I think this topic is fascinating, obviously, with the uncertainty surrounding literally every area of the business of college sports and college football. That to have somebody on who does this day in and day out, I think is prudent. $4 word. So I'm very excited for this episode.

Yeah. And when I say it's not our favorite subject. Yeah, I know what you're saying. That doesn't mean it's not interesting. I'm very interested in this stuff, but you know this because you read the emails too. It's a very fine line to walk between presenting something that is actually interesting and that people actually will care about and not making it feel like we're just doom scrolling college football. Right. You know, because there's also another side of the coin that, again, people feel programs are being left behind, like it's all about money, like it's gone to a place that it wasn't when we were much younger college football fans. So that is the balance that we try to walk when we talk about these subjects. I'm sure it is amplified to a much greater degree with Matt and his beat because of the types of things that he's talking through. He just does a really good job of articulating these things in a way that we can understand as two dum-dums. So that's why we bring him on every year. Not the least of which is he's one of our best friends in the whole world, but he knows the stuff inside out.

So we're going to have Matt Brown on here momentarily. We appreciate everybody stopping on by. SolidVerbal@gmail.com. If you have thoughts on what Matt has to say or thoughts of your own over the state of college football, I'd love to hear about that. Hit follow, hit subscribe if you have yet to do so. And of course, Verballers.com is where you can go to support what Dan and I do.

Agree. All right, Dan, joining us now. We do it once a year. We have the annual college football business update. We would think of no one better to invite on to engage in discussion around this very issue with us than our good friend Matt Brown from Extra Points with Matt Brown, ExtraPointsMB.com. I should add that before we hit go on the recording here, the two of you were involved in a rather deep discussion singing the praises of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Two Midwesterners talking shop, I cannot relate at all. But if you guys just want to take it in a Milwaukee direction, make this a Milwaukee-cast. Sure. It's just called Cream City, Ty. It's great.

Milwaukee is a hidden gem of the United States of America. And anybody who has been there likely agrees, unless you are deeply lactose intolerant, you're probably going to have a good time. There's something for everybody. Colon: Milwaukee. I like it. I'm with you. There's very few regional Midwestern cities that I am not willing to gas up on the air here, but we were joking about this before the show. I did part of my honeymoon in Milwaukee. And part of that was because when I got married, I think I had $700 in my checking account. So it's not like Bermuda was really on the table. But it's a great time. If you like encased meats, if you enjoy beverages, adult or otherwise, if you like, I would like an old world big city experience but also the opportunity to park my car. Friends, Milwaukee is right there.

And then if you're in Chicago and you're driving up to Milwaukee, you know what you get on the way. The Mars Cheese Castle. Yep. Which is, I think, one of America's most important civic institutions. A cheese castle? Yeah, it's a giant cheese emporium, but it's in a castle shape. Visage. I don't know what to call it, but yes, you see it from the interstate, and it's called the Mars Cheese Castle. I'm envisioning like Medieval Times, but for cheese. It's not just Medieval Times, but for cheese, you can also get alcohol. Yeah, that's true. Well, you need the beer with the cheese, right? Sure. Yes. Or moonshine or spirits, if you will.

And then every bit of like tourist trap, you know, just the amazing gas station kind of cuisine and stuff. So, like, you know, Dan and I, we have small children. If we're driving somewhere and they need to make a jelly bean stop, why not do it at a place that looks like a castle? And you also pass the Haribo factory, I believe, on the way. You can't take a tour. You can't take a gummy tour, I don't believe. But your kids get to see the giant Haribo gummy factory that is right on the border of Illinois and Wisconsin.

If you want to go somewhere, Ty, and I know you were just talking about that, and you just want to talk about like Michael Redd and Tim Thomas and Robin Yount, Milwaukee is the place, man. It is. It is a perfect place for guy remembering. Sit back there with your 800-calorie beer and just think, remember Vin Baker? And you can do that, and it's okay. Paul Molitor. Yeah. Any of these guys. They'll talk to you. Paul Molitor? Oh, excuse me. Paul Molitor? Yeah, yeah. I'm mixing up two. Yeah, Paul Molitor. Great Blue Jay as well, I want to say. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. Would we talk college business or what? Yeah, on that note, we bring back Matt Brown actually to talk about college football business. We like to do this once a year, as I said, at the top. Bigger picture, Matt, if you were to zoom out, give us like the 30,000-foot view. I feel like we do this every time we bring you on as well. Like college football as a business has evolved a great deal just over the last five years. Relative to where it was, let's say, a year ago, what are the things that you are tracking the most now outside of the video game, which I know was a topic for you in the not-so-distant past? But what are the things that are most notable from your perspective that more people should be paying attention to right now?

So I think in my neck of the woods, as I'm trying to take a step away from writing the same story about Congress or about antitrust bills that I think I've been doing since 2017, I think one of the more interesting developments to me is that every athletic department, whether you're a fan of an Ohio State, Penn State, Oregon, some really big program, or an FCS school or a Bowling Green or an Akron, everybody here is dramatically trying to find more revenue. And there's a limit to how much more revenue anybody can really generate from the traditional methods. If you're a big program, you're probably already at 90, 95% capacity. And only one or two schools are really interested in building more seats in their stadium. Almost everybody wants to go the other direction. You can only raise the prices on tickets and on beer and on parking so many times before people begin to push back. Which is already happening.

So you're seeing, on one hand, a movement of schools trying to sell and label everything that isn't nailed down. That includes jersey patches, which maybe we could talk about. That's beginning to happen here. We have about seven or eight schools that have announced those. I know of another 60 that are looking for it. It's field sponsorships. It's selling new stuff within the stadium. And it's also about trying to come up with new things to sell that you weren't selling before. And some of those things I think are actually a net positive for fans or consumers. To kind of go back to Milwaukee for a second, a lot of that has been with beer, with universities embracing officially licensed beverages, mostly alcohol, but some coffee and some other foodstuffs and consumables.

And so that is video game licensing and trying to be more aggressive into getting into other video games. And Evan at Front Office Sports had a story about this a couple of days ago. We have a few programs that are basically trying to become television channels and do different versions of the Longhorn Network, where instead of trying to put your Olympic sports coverage or one football game a year, it's how can I put athlete podcasts or documentaries or super nerd behind-the-scenes stuff to try and make a little bit of extra money? Some of this is successful, some of it isn't. But in a world where everyone's trying to come up with $21.5 million to go pay players and also pay for everything else that's become more expensive, this is the driving question for almost every athletic director and associate AD right now.

So one of the interesting things that I think I saw over the last week or so, and forgive me for not remembering who conducted, who reported on the study, there was something that came out about professional sports and how, in reality, though everyone claims to want to win, in reality, the profit is actually for the bad teams. The teams that are the worst are the ones that make the most money because they can sell off players, because it just like mathematically works better to be bad than good. And I say this because I know you published something just today. We're recording this on Friday. That a P4 university president calls for dramatic reform. Okay, and you've got a big picture of Virginia Tech. Now, Virginia Tech has pledged $229 million to infuse its athletic department, to renovate a whole bunch of stuff and to essentially bring themselves into the future. But where I'm going with this, Matt, is given what we know about the economics here and given what we know about where college football seems to want to head with all of this, I don't know, search for revenue. Is the juice worth the squeeze? Like, do we know that actually spending more just to sort of keep up with the Joneses is actually going to be beneficial in any way, shape, or form? And that includes on the field, because spending money does not necessarily guarantee you're going to have a championship. So, is anyone talking about whether this is actually worth it in the long run?

That's a really great question. And before I answer that, I want to zoom out real quick for a second, right? Because I think there's an important distinction that sometimes gets lost in the weeds when we're talking about professional and college sports. If you are the Cleveland Cavaliers, or if you're the Red Sox or the Blue Jackets or anybody else, to your point, the fundamental reason your organization exists isn't to win championships. It's to make money. And you have a salary cap, and you have the league television deal, and you have limits to how much you can spend on everything else. And the remainder goes to the investors, goes to the people that own the team. And they might even be okay taking a small loss or a medium loss over a decade, knowing that when they sell the team, they're going to make a gajillion dollars. They have a liquidity event when you sell a team.

None of that happens in college. You can't right now sell a team. You can't flip the University of Oregon to a sovereign state or something to go make a financial return yet. And there's no profit. If a school's athletic department generates more revenue than it spends, nobody makes any extra money. The best case scenario, it gets kicked into the university library system. More practically, it just gets spent on other stuff, which means that, and I remind this because I think this is an important reminder, that whether it's worth it or whether you benefit is a question, I think, of values more than it is about dollars and cents.

If the only thing that you're trying to do as a university administrator is generate revenue in excess of expenses, you should get out of college sports completely. You should go join Johns Hopkins and Case Western Reserve and NYU and Tufts or whatever, and focus everything on medical research and patents and charging $200,000 for tuition. That's not the world that people want to be in for Division I schools.

So value might be winning on the field that you in turn use for political favors. Value might be a marketing exposure that brings in different kinds of students or more students if you're hurting for that. Or it could be something that's even more difficult to define. And one of the challenges that I see on my beat a lot, talking with presidents and athletic directors and serious professional higher education reform people, even members of Congress, is that they struggle to define what success looks like or what they're trying to do besides win. And if that's the only thing they're trying to do and you see somebody else in your conference is spending money, by God, you feel like you have to do it too.

And we can go to these kind of athletic administrator events, right? The NACDA is the big conference that's over the summer, but there'll be a lot of these people at the Final Four next week, too. And you don't have to get too many cocktails in them before they'll admit to you, yeah, we're spending money that we have no idea will benefit any kind of KPI or anything, which is part of why I joke a lot in Extra Points that money isn't real. I can file FOIAs and get charts and write about money, right? But it doesn't matter in the sense that it does to all three of us when running our businesses or balancing our own checking accounts.

So, yeah, long story short here, there are absolutely schools like Rutgers, but not exclusively Rutgers, that are going to continue to shovel money at problems without any real meaningful idea about whether that will help them on the field or help them with any of the big picture university stuff that they want to be doing.

One of the things that comes across my algorithm in broader life is the idea of blue zones. Ty, do you know what a blue zone is? I have no idea what that is. A blue zone is, there are five identified parts of the world where people live to be like 98 on the side of like, like northern Italy and, yeah, yes, like Sardinia. What do they do? And then Pennsylvania with all the Sardinians that went to Pennsylvania, right? Yeah, exactly. And they go somewhere to a town in Japan or a town in California, and they're like, they all walk and eat olive oil and fish and stuff.

I wonder, and this is putting you on the spot, and it's okay to say I have no idea. I wonder, is there a school, are there a grouping of schools that can be looked at as a model franchise, a model program, a model university, where people say, you know what? They spend money. They make money. They don't lose a ton of money. They're doing it efficiently. People seem to be happy there. Coaches seem to stay there. And they're doing something right at Texas State, at Montana, at Oregon, wherever it is. Are there any of those blue zones in college sports?

It's a great question. And if I'm just trying to think here in my head about the people on my phone or the ones I talk to the most, I think the coaches and ADs that are most likely to say, like, yeah, that's my life, are going to be in Division III. Where you're not trying to make a profit. You're not trying to chase a television bag. And the athletes and the vendors that you're working with are in many ways insulated from many of the major problems or issues that we talk about a lot with big-time college sports.

I also hear this more often than you might expect from Division I-AAA institutions. A Division I-AAA school is a school that's Division I but doesn't have football. And generally, when you say that, we're not talking about the Big East. We're not talking about Seton Hall necessarily. We're talking more about like, you know, Cal State Northridge, or shout out Matadors. Sure. Or like in the Horizon League or something, right?

And when you're in that world and you're coaching, you're making good money, but you're not making crazy money. Like they don't make that much more than maybe the three of us do or people listening here do. It's stressful, but you're not trying to get, you know, McDonald's All-Americans necessarily, and you're not going to get fired for going 21 and 9. And if you like living where you're living, say Milwaukee. If you're at UW-Milwaukee, for example, and you're okay not chasing that brass ring, that can still be a pretty good life. But that's again, it goes into values. If you're in the blue zone, you're not working 110 hours a week, and that's not going to get you the Ohio State job.

Is there a moment, and again, this is arbitrary, and whatever your answer is, your answer is. Is there a moment that if you were to get one and a half drinks into a grouping of presidents, chancellors, ADs, whoever, where they're like, in retrospect, this moment really screwed all of us. And if we had a time machine, we would approach X or Y in a dramatically different way.

Yeah, I mean, I can think of two right off the bat. One is we should have fired Mark Emmert way sooner. Okay. I don't think you can be, it's hard to be a good NCAA leader, but I really do think people look back at history and point to Emmert as an uncommonly bad one, in part because, kind of like Larry Scott, even if you have good ideas, but you are so profoundly alienating to everybody that you work with, you're not going to be able to execute any of those ideas. And if you talk to coaches, most ADs, members of Congress, members of the legal community, people that are kind of in charge of changing college sports now, to a man and to a woman, they'd almost all say, I hated that guy. And that mattered, right? Because that also helped drive the NCAA's legal strategy, which led then to Alston, which was an unmitigated disaster for the college sports status quo.

If you could go back in a time machine, we were all working together, you go back a decade ago to the beginning of the Northwestern unionization issues, the beginning of the video game lawsuits, and had the NCAA and power conferences given up some space rather than try to take this to its hardline legal conclusion, I think you would be missing a lot of the major issues that are happening right now. There probably wouldn't be a transfer portal had the suits in Indianapolis pursued a different legal strategy in 2012.

I wonder, is there a world in which we get, I don't know, you're talking about firing Mark Emmert. Is there a world in which effective change can actually happen? Is there a world in which people are deciding that, like, okay, these three people, this person is in charge, this person has a thorough understanding of where the world is going in five years, or are there just too many people at the table?

Now, I think there's too many people at the table. And the biggest challenge for that isn't like, it's not too many people at the table a la Greg Sankey, therefore we need to get rid of the NEC and the OVC or something, right? There's too many schools. Right now, I think the challenge is that legally the schools, presidents, ADs, people with .edu email addresses, and then before commissioners by extension, are not functionally in charge. And they're not functionally in charge because the law basically has now made it clear that the regulations you want to enforce, whether that's about athlete eligibility, whether that's about athlete compensation, whether that's about almost any amount of athlete rule, it's illegal. And it wasn't illegal in 1997, or at least the judges hadn't decided it was illegal in 1997, and that wasn't really the case in 2007.

So there were decades and decades when the room was just college sports school people. And now the room is a little bit of college sports school people, but also judges and Congress and governors and attorneys general. And that becomes a very big room, especially because many of those people know even less about how college sports works than the ADs and presidents and the three of us and everybody in the Verballers Discord. And that's where you run into, I think, some big challenges. Because even if you get all those people to agree on something and then, oh my God, we invade Iran, well, then suddenly we're not talking about college sports regulatory reform anymore. And the room is big and not focused.

You know, I wake up every morning, Matt, and I thank the higher power that we're not a politics podcast. I'm really happy we're not playing in that sandbox, but unfortunately, our world now in college sports has intersected with political discourse in a way that it's hard to understand what is actually real and what isn't. You know, there was this roundtable that happened a few weeks ago. I feel every two weeks or so, we hear new news on the congressional front that somebody is now working up amendments to a bill that may or may not apply here. I have a real hard time, and this is my beat, keeping track of what is even going on here. And I think more specifically, if any of this can actually impact change.

I think we're all in agreement. A lot's gone on over the last five years, that nobody's running this. And to Dan's earlier question: what's the plan? What's the vision? What is the right way to go about this? There's a lot that probably needs to be set in stone and run by somebody or something. But I don't know if what I have read on like the Politico website or wherever you get your news is anything that can actually influence it in a positive way. What is your view on, again, I hate to go to the politics side of this, but we have to. What is your view on how that side of this conversation has evolved, let's say, over the last year?

I think it has changed meaningfully over the last year. And part of the reason it's changed is because the political coalition that's interested in kind of college sports reform broadly is unique in that it's not completely partisan. There are both Republicans and Democrats who look at the way college sports is set up right now and think, boy, this has some problems, and we'd like to make some changes. And there are actually several issues where there's, I want to say broad consensus, but meaningful consensus, right? There are a lot of lawmakers in both parties, for example, that are deeply troubled about the influence of prediction markets and new and widespread gambling on the welfare of college athletes, on whether these games are having points shaved or being manipulated in some way. I want to put that toothpaste back in the tube. That is a kind of bill that could potentially pass.

I'd also say that, with some exceptions, there is a narrow majority of people within both parties that don't love unlimited transfers, that think that maybe some athlete compensation stuff has gone too far too quickly and that there's been some pushback on the beleaguered athletes. And I don't say trope, but like, you know, kind of framework that maybe was more popular before 2020 and before the beginning of the NIL era.

The challenge, though, is one, you know, Republican control of the U.S. House is just a razor-razor-thin margin. And there's enough Republicans that are going to disagree with almost anything. That's very hard for literally any kind of bill to get through the House under the best of circumstances. And we are not in the best of circumstances right now. You have an executive branch that, we'll just be honest, is one that is not constrained by tradition or a healthy respect for the judiciary. Like this is a White House that is willing to do its own thing aggressively. And also can get distracted by stuff. It can be unpredictable. For, love the guy or hate the guy, it's probably no secret how I feel. But regardless, Trump's a hard guy to predict. And a lot of it is based on who's talking to him at that exact moment. So he might say one thing, and Tiger Woods talks to him in two weeks, and then things are different.

When you have an issue that doesn't fit into a neat camp, and there's nobody really super in charge of kind of directing it, it's very difficult to get anything over the finish line. There's the SCORE Act, which is the bill that we've talked about the last time I was on here. You might see it in the news a lot more. That is the bill that is most friendly towards the NCAA's interests. It's not going to become law. It might eventually get through the House. It's mostly supported by Republicans, and the Republican leadership would like it to get through. But there's a reason it has never come up for a formal vote, because they don't have the votes yet, and they definitely don't have the votes in the U.S. Senate.

This is a long way of saying, like, I think there is a legitimate pathway for some laws to happen. Laws about taxation of athlete NIL, laws about sports gambling, laws about reporting, laws about potentially agents and their certification and where they have to go. But for something that's going to provide more meaningful structure about the portal, about athlete contracts, about tampering, those kind of things, it's hard to see it. And it's hard to see it when we kind of seem to be lurching from global calamity or global event every 10 days, right?

Is there one issue that is the, if somebody were to run on this issue in college sports, is the most universally agreed upon thing that every party agrees is something that needs to be addressed, right? Whether it's employment of players, whether it's portal stuff, whether it's NIL stuff, like, when reaching across the aisle, you are likely to get the most bodies and raised hands in support of this stance. What is that stance? What is that position?

I think the two positions where you can get to 60 votes in the Senate would be about, we need to better regulate college athletic agents. We need, whether, and then the question is, does that come through the FCC? Does it come through the FTC? Like, you know, reasonable people can debate and figure that out. But like, there is, in my understanding from talking to people, like, that is a bipartisan concern. And there are bipartisan concerns about how do we protect college athletes from harassment and from overreach from gambling. I don't think you can get, you're not going to get 60 votes to ban sports gambling, but could you, if you had a skinny bill that was just about prop bets or about trying to increase the regulatory teeth to protect people who get death threats for missing a free throw? Yeah, I think you can do that, even with all of the money that the DraftKings of the world are investing in Congress.

But anything about employment status of athletes, about collective bargaining, about health care and about antitrust exemptions, those are very difficult political questions because that is where you'll get pretty intense lobbying from specific interests to fight that.

Matt, I want to go back just a second because if you've watched TV, if you have read sites like yours, if you have, as Dan pointed out earlier, just been cruising through your algorithm, you may have seen something about the SCORE Act. It has been on the tip of the college football tongue now for, gosh, it feels like a couple years running. Yeah. What is that? Can you explain that to our audience so that they have a better understanding for what exactly that entails?

Sure. The SCORE Act, broadly speaking, would give the NCAA an antitrust exemption to enforce its existing rules about athlete comp. So, what that means is that, like, you know, outside of college sports, if you had like all of the restaurants in one city all get together at a secret restaurant meeting and all decide that we're all going to charge $11 a slice for pizza, and we're going to collude and set the price on that, we're going to create a pizza cartel, and no one's going to sell pizza for under $11 a slice, that would be a violation of antitrust law. You're colluding to break free market competition.

And when the NCAA says right now, hey, you can't engage in a name, image, or likeness activity that exceeds how the CSC defines fair market value, somebody will sue and say that's a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. And it is. And in order for the NCAA to still get together and vote and say, yeah, but we've created a salary cap, but now we need to enforce it unless you're doing something legitimate, you need an exception from that antitrust law. The reason that the pro sports are able to do this with their salary caps is because they've collectively bargained a CBA, right? And you can't do that right now in college athletics because athletes are not legally employees and there's no one to bargain with. There's no players' association, there's no union. So, you don't get a built-in antitrust exemption that way.

The SCORE Act says that's fine. Athletes can't be employees, regardless of whatever a future NLRB judge might say. And we're going to let the NCAA enforce the House settlement and enforce some of its existing rules. That's the most important general provision of it.

Is this why they hired Charlie Baker? This is unquestionably one of the biggest reasons why they hired Charlie Baker. Somebody who has experience in building relationships with lawmakers in both parties, somebody who has a lot of experience in professional associations and complicated policy, and someone that people enjoy being around a little bit more. That was it. And it hasn't been successful so far, even though the NCAA and the SEC and the Big Ten have spent just gobs and gobs of money. But the conversations with Baker are far, far more receptive than anything that Emmert was doing about antitrust.

All right, let me change gears a little bit here. You mentioned the jersey patch thing earlier. So this is something that the NCAA approved. We are going to start seeing some jersey patch situations. You noted that there are a couple. There are many more in the queue. Not to replay my previous question about whether this is all worth it, I know there is obviously some money there that institutions can pull in and use for whatever they deem appropriate, but what is the mechanism there? And among the athletic departments that you speak with, are they viewing this as like an exciting thing in any way, shape, or form? Are they viewing this just as like another line item that they can use to boost budgets? How do people think about this? And how aggressively are they going after trying to put a patch on the jersey?

It's really aggressive almost everywhere. Because the thing with the jersey patch that's different, that's honestly different from selling something on the field, or an ad under the scoreboard, or naming rights for something within the stadium. One is that the amount of money you can get for a jersey patch is usually a lot more than those things. I think you could very credibly argue it is better for you as a brand to have real estate on a jersey than it is to have real estate on the 25-yard line or the 40-yard line. Every broadcast, home or away, your brand's going to be on there. Every time someone buys a jersey at the bookstore, wears it to a tailgate, you're going to have brand exposure, every highlight. Like you're going to be on TV a lot more than your ad is on the football field.

So even like at the bottom end of FBS, your low-level Sun Belt, CUSA, MAC teams, the numbers that I'm hearing are like that conversation typically starts around a million bucks. And at the very high end of the Ohio States and Alabamas of the world, it should be in the $5 million, $6 million range. And if you want to just get on a basketball jersey and like a, the NEC or the ASUN or something, like that starts at six figures. Because I initially thought, I wonder if Extra Points could sponsor Western Illinois. I made a couple of phone calls. I'm like, no, we can't. Not yet. Although that would be fun.

And it's interesting, right? Because I empathize with some fans who look at this and think, this sucks. We're throwing away 100 years of tradition and commodifying everything. It makes me less excited. I also understand that we've been doing this for soccer for God knows how long. It's been around for long. It's already a thing in the NBA. And I don't know if I've, I enjoy the NBA. I don't know if I've ever looked at an NBA jersey and thought, like, because I see a Motorola patch on the Bulls uniform, I like the Bulls less. It's generally not particularly obtrusive.

Exciting may or may not be the wrong word, but like where the big conversation is happening now is can we find a patch partner that is additive in some way versus just purely transactional? And like as an example here, New Mexico State is the program that most recently signed a jersey patch deal with the Inn of the Mountain Gods Resort and Casino, which is, I believe, relatively close to Las Cruces. And if you are part of that, if you live in that area of New Mexico, like that is this place where you've taken your kids, and that is a very New Mexico-oriented, you know, brand. And I have not heard anybody on social media or anybody at the school look at this negatively unless you just really hate casinos. And Inn of the Mountain Gods is about much more than just a casino.

I think if you were Texas State, as an example, and you had an H-E-B patch, I don't think a lot of people would really complain. Or somebody in Texas got a Buc-ee's patch and like, no, that's a very Texas thing. I'm excited about that. If it was Nationwide Insurance, if it was drone company XYZ, if it was Palantir, if it was a crypto exchange, I think people might look at it differently.

You know, I'm an Ohio State fan. Like, I know this isn't going to happen, but like, would I be really upset if there was a Wendy's Baconator patch on an Ohio State uniform? Like, a United Dairy Farmers little thing, like, they go, that's a Columbus institution. That makes me feel good. If it's a defense contractor or another bank. You know what I mean? And that's kind of the push and pull here because these things are so expensive that a lot of the beloved regional chains that fans often promote for these kinds of things are just not going to be able to afford it.

Fair enough. I mean, look, everybody's searching for money. We've talked about this. You're searching for money via the patch. Are there efforts at schools to find revenue sports that traditionally have not been revenue sports, right? They have existing brands on campus, right? Like, Nebraska and Wisconsin can fill, what, a football stadium? Playing volleyball. That's who played in that game, I believe. Nebraska did, but Wisconsin can play at the Bucks arena and fill that up. Right, right, right, right. There's regional huge sports, right? You have the Frozen Four type teams. I know these places are making efforts to market and build out these sports. Are there a lot of schools that feel like maybe there's a sport that's untapped, that their efforts haven't really gone in the direction of, take your pick, lacrosse, or tennis, or soccer? That these are ignored sports relative to football or basketball or baseball when you look at the SEC. Are there renewed efforts like, you know what? This is actually like a really cool product in this part of the country? Let's put some muscle behind, take your pick sport, or do too many places just look at it as like a dollars and cents and, you know, human power thing that they're not able to do it.

I love this. And what I can tell you is that there are certainly schools that I can think of that have reached that conclusion and think about this less as, if we put some gasoline on this fire, it's going to be revenue positive for us. That doesn't happen so often. But there are ones that think we can sell out the stadium and we can be really competitive here and build a great experience. And I think a good example for this would be softball. Duke and Clemson didn't have softball teams at all a decade ago. They both started programs. Now they both compete for hosting regionals. And I've covered a softball game at Clemson before, and they can sell the park out, and there's two thousand people there.

Now, is that a revenue sport for Clemson insofar as like men's basketball might be? No. Like, men's soccer at Clemson can win national titles and they'll tell me like, we'll still lose $4 million. Like there's not really a functional way to make men's soccer at Carolina, UCLA, Indiana, Clemson like cash positive. That's okay.

I think you're seeing kind of two different trends. There's one: are there ways that we can better market and better, like, monetize some of our Olympic sports, women's volleyball, softball, to a lesser extent, lacrosse? Those conversations are definitely happening. When I was first starting my career on this beat, there were schools that wouldn't ticket for women's basketball or that wouldn't ticket for women's volleyball. That's not a thing anymore. And schools are certainly making the investments to ticket those things more efficiently.

But generally, if you're trying to make an investment, it's more for competitive reasons. And to bring this full circle, I think one interesting storyline that we're going to begin to see this offseason and especially into next year is what kind of approach schools decide to take with women's flag football, which is on track to be a varsity sport in Division I quite soon. The club adaptation is already strong. Nebraska is starting a program. Lots of mid-majors are starting programs. And the vast majority of those schools are starting programs for enrollment purposes, right? Let's go play on a field that has 300 seats. Let's go play two flag football games over a weekend. Let's try to get 30 more women paying full tuition on campus.

But could you sell tickets to this? Could this be something that generates meaningful audiences on ESPN? Could the NFL continue to throw money at this? Could this be something that's different? Yeah, I think that's entirely possible. And it really only takes two or three schools saying, we're going to really go all out here and make this a party and make this an interesting home field advantage kind of situation that will make other people want to follow along. And it'll be interesting. Will that be Nebraska? Will it be UNC Asheville? Will it be USC Upstate? Who knows?

On that sort of same token, is there a type of revenue stream that people don't realize is incredible for schools? Like, I kind of don't think it's apparel. Apparel seems sort of flat, and you're just like, yeah, you go to the bookstore, you go online, and you order. But, like, is there a type of, is it parking? Is it booze? What type of thing would people potentially be surprised? Like, yeah, this thing, if it went away, it would be so much more of a disaster than anybody would think.

No, you're right. It isn't apparel. For most schools, actually, they don't make any money from apparel, right? Like, you see a headline that says, like, oh, Nike signed this $200 million new deal with UNLV. I FOIA the contract and look at it and it's like, oh, there's no cash. This is $200 million in product. Also, a lot of apparel kind of sucks. Like, it's kind of like stylistically pretty flat, creativity pretty flat. Like, there's, you know, Homefield, types of brands like that have tried, and I think have done a good thing. But, like, I don't know, apparel doesn't strike me as a huge growth place.

It isn't, and the profit margins are not great for anybody there, right? Like, no disrespect to our friends, of course, at Homefield Apparel who are building a wonderful business, but like, I can look at the licensing reports and see that not that many schools are getting rich off of Homefield licensing alone, right? There's only so many t-shirts you could sell.

The single biggest revenue item that I think people don't think about that much is what's called MMR, or multimedia rights. When you hear multimedia rights, I think most people would think, oh, that's your television check. But that isn't true. Those are your broadcast rights. And for a Power 4 program, that's your most important check. But if you're in a mid-major, especially in the FCS, you don't get very much money from television. If you're in the Big West, you make enough money to pay for your production. And that's about it. Like, that's not a boon.

So, your MMR are your radio rights. They are your corporate sponsorships. They are the signage in and around the stadium, and it's basically everything that's not part of game day experience that gets sold. And for a mid-major institution, you might get a $400,000, $500,000 a year check from Learfield. That's bigger than any check that you get from anything else, or from Playfly. And this is an area where if it went away, that might be the single biggest income source for a lot of Division I. And it's also the place where most schools are pointing and saying, that's the place where we can grow the revenue the most. We can't sell that many more tickets. We can't raise the ticket price that much. We can only sell, I mean, you can make a lot of money from beer more than you do from other concessions, but there's limitations on what kind of spirits you can sell. Not just from the law, but like logistically.

Like, you know, real quick, that's something I think you guys would appreciate. I remember I went to visit Camp Randall, summer and a half ago. Wisconsin. And it was right before they were selling alcohol to the general Wisconsin fan base for the first time. And I remember being floored by this because, God bless Wisconsin. Like, this is a state that appreciates adult beverages. And the reason that they weren't selling stuff at the Badger stadium before wasn't out of prudishness. It was because the stadium is so freaking old, there's no place to put taps. And there was no place to put in more bathrooms. And so now the only stuff they can sell is the bottles, right? So you have a lot of these things to navigate.

That's why sponsorships and corporate partnerships and what we call this incremental sponsorship revenue is so, so important. And that's what everybody is trying to grow even more.

Is there, I mean, I like the Camp Randall allusion here. It took Ty 30 minutes to get back from the bathroom to his seat at Penn State. I don't want to talk about that. The stadium experience at a lot of places is not great. It costs money to fix this. It costs money to evaluate efficiency and bring in contractors from overseas who are like, these are your choke points, and this is why you have people who are upset at X, Y, and Z.

Are there so many things on an AD's plate that fan convenience and experience at these stadiums is just so far down the list that it's just not going to get appreciably better unless Steve Ballmer comes in and is like, we need 10,000 toilets, like he did with his new arena, and built it from scratch to be an incredible place to see a game, allegedly. I haven't been. Or are we just sort of doomed to, you know, ADs have too many problems on their plates, and we'll get to it when we get to it?

You know, I don't think we're doomed. And actually, this is kind of one of those problems that you're describing that I hear discussed more and more, right? Like an AD's job is not just hiring 12 coaches or whatever, especially because, probably for a different show, ADs do a lot less of that than you might think. Like, that's way more presidential or search firm or booster-driven.

So these kinds of problems about, we don't have enough bathrooms or going to our game kind of sucks, is a major part of what ADs talk about. Danny White at Tennessee talks about this all the time. This is something I hear about in the ADs in my phone book all the time. And it was something that I heard recently talking to folks at St. Thomas in Minnesota. They brought this up recently when they just built a beautiful new basketball and hockey arena. They're telling me part of the reason they did that is because, like, we're a pro sports town. And so if people are used to one level of experience when they go see the Twins or the Timberwolves and the Vikings, they will not accept a dramatically worse experience for the Tommies. Like, you don't want to wait in line for 45 minutes to go get $18 chicken wings. So that's something that you have to fix.

And when I talk to ADs that I would say are less traditional, people that came in from pro sports or from private business or other places, in my limited experience, I think those folks tend to be a little bit more attuned to these issues. But this is something that I think can get better and should get better just about anywhere. If you spent maybe a little bit less time worrying about lobbying Congress, you might have more time to think about how many more places in this facility can we sell stuff and have portable bathrooms and have a better experience. Because you're right. This is part of why I try to go to at least a couple games a year without a credential to remind myself what this experience is like and see it in other places. Because if it costs $45 to park and it's difficult to go get food and difficult to go get in line, you can't complain about not being able to sell tickets.

We're going to do this conversation in 2027, Matt. What are we going to be talking about then? I think mostly the same stuff, right? I mean, if we go back and we play the last couple of episodes we've done together, we're still talking about antitrust. We're still talking about athlete compensation, about the employment question. I would be blown away, especially given where we are in the election cycle and where we are with Congress right now, if that gets changed or decided in a meaningful way in the next six months. I don't think we're going to be looking at an imminent P2 breakaway or a super league or private equity coming in to buy the SEC or anything. Like those things are possible, but I don't think that they're likely in the next nine or ten months.

You know, if we're lucky, maybe next year we're also talking about a college baseball game or different college basketball video games or indie developments in college football games beyond EA Sports or something, maybe a little bit less catastrophic. The major issues are the major issues from 2021. And if we're being honest, most of them are the same things we've been talking about since the 1920s. Just the numbers have gone up.

His name is Matt Brown. You can find his fine work over at Extra Points with Matt Brown, ExtraPointsMB.com. I'm saving the best for last, Matt. I know how hard you work on your site, on this business. I'm curious what all you are working on now. I actually haven't talked to you about this recently. So I'm asking more for myself maybe than anybody else, but I feel like you're always working on like a million things over there as you have kind of expanded your operations. So what is the state of play for Extra Points right now?

You know, this is a good reminder that I'll have to share this link with you guys once we're done, where I have spent just an enormous amount of work over the last two and a half months has been trying to completely redo our Extra Points library product. The number one thing that pays my salary and the salary of my employees and buys Pokémon cards for my kids is the newsletter and the subscriptions, the newsletter, and advertisements in the newsletter. But we also have a data product where mostly schools, but also some newsrooms and some academics and some fans can look up everyone's budget, everyone's contract, all these vendor agreements, and schools use this for like benchmarking and to save money.

And we've had this product for about a year and a half and we've rebuilt it to make it faster, more intuitive. I used the new version to write the story we did about a week and a half ago about Big Ten basketball budgets that made every Indiana fan so angry at me. But I think some of the storytelling that we can do with this new tool is so much better than before. And I'm excited about that. We should be ready to release it to the general public. It's in beta testing now. We want it to be ready in maybe two weeks.

And then I'm also interested in continuing to make and refine our games. Every so often, people joke that we should put the Athletic Director Simulator in the next EA Sports College Football game. And that'd be great. I'd love to be friends with EA Sports again and consult and build something for that. But if that never happens, we have talked to other video game studios about, hey, how much money would it take? And how can we work together to make an Out of the Park Baseball, but for college football? Yeah, yeah. Or turn this into something more sophisticated. Because now I know enough JavaScript to be annoying, but not enough to be a AAA video game developer or even a single-A video game developer. And this is in the world that I know as well.

But yeah, because I'm not capable of just doing one thing, right? I'm trying to build something to help athletic directors save money, build something better that I think fans will enjoy goofing off with in May and June when we're waiting for actual football to start back up again, and then hopefully keep writing stories that people want to read.

I'm ready for you to create the seediest possible recruiting game. I'm not talking about what exists within EA Sports' College Football series right now. I'm talking about so much more detailed about, like, giving options about how pushy to be at camps, right? How weird to be with a recruit's dad. I want you to create the absolute most creepy recruiting game possible with the worst possible graphics.

I think, you know, honest to God, I think like my dream game project would be to make like an early '90s LucasArts sort of like Sierra-style point-and-click game. And I experimented with this a little bit in college. I think what you're just describing is college football Leisure Suit Larry, but it's Leisure Suit, exactly what I'd do as an assistant coach. Correct. I'm in. I'm absolutely in. Look, if you're still alive, my email is matt@extrapointsmb.com. All you pixel artists out there, I'd love to work on that this summer instead of doing spreadsheets.

Absolutely. I would love to make a Michigan football coaching simulator, Leisure Suit. No, don't do that. Don't do that. Let's pick a different school. Do we call it Leisure Suit Larry Scott? I don't know. It's just an idea. It's just an idea. There are no words. We're just whiteboarding, guys. Larry Fedora. Yeah. Oh, God. I'm trying to think of my other big-time college football Larrys. Larry Fitzgerald? I don't know. But he's like, we look at him in a positive way. I don't know. So I don't think. No, Larry, Leisure Suit Larry Scott. Easy to spell, easy to remember. Okay. And nobody likes the guy. So nobody likes it. Pretty much in the clear.

Matt Brown. Keep up the good work. We'll have to talk to you again sometime in the very near future. But enjoy the offseason, whatever that looks like for you. Get some quality time up in Wisconsin whenever you can. And ExtraPointsMB for everybody out there who does not subscribe to Matt's fine work. Go and support him.

This episode has been brought to you by Milwaukee's Public Investment Fund. It's Cream City, Ty, but it's a pretty big deal. Drink Wisconsin beer. There you go. Yeah. All right. There you go. Matt Brown. Check out his fine work at ExtraPointsMB.com. That is his newsletter. That is his business. Matt does an excellent job reporting out all things college football business.

Dan, I would have been cool to just talk about Milwaukee. I have never been. I have heard great things about it, not just from you, but from some former colleagues of mine who sent both their kids to school in Wisconsin. So it seems to be a bit of a hidden gem that I have not yet fully experienced.

I'm looking at the lineup for Summerfest 2026, which is a huge deal in Milwaukee. Okay. I think it's over, I don't know, a couple weeks of just like live festival concert situation after live festival concert situation. You got a lot of hitmakers in here. Really? You got, okay, so June 25th, June 27th, by the way, Summerfest 2026, not a sponsor. Could be. Could be. Absolutely could be.

Ed Sheeran, The Roots. Post Malone. You got Muse on July 2nd to the 4th. I don't know. You're probably a Jelly Roll guy. If you're not a Jelly Roll guy, boom! There's Sean Paul. Right. Sean Paul, he's ready for you. Sean Paul. There's so much happening. You got Buckcherry in there. You've got the Mountain Goats. I do like the Mountain Goats. You've got Goldfinger in there, Ty. Old 97s. Vertical Horizon. I know you're big with Vertical Horizon. Sure. Echo and the Bunnymen? Oh my God, Ty, there's so much happening at Summerfest '26.

Is that in Milwaukee? That's in Milwaukee. That's what I'm saying. That's like their big summer concert festival thing.

Garth Brooks is the headliner early, June 16th, 17th. Well, it only rivals Music Fest over here because Third Eye Blind is coming back. They're here! Third Eye Blind! They're coming back. I had no idea what to expect because they're considerably older than they were back when they were, you know, much more of a cultural phenomenon. That show was awesome for people of my age, I should say. And Yellowcard is coming here this year, apparently, still playing. My friends and I have all signed up for that one. So, a lot to look forward to this summer.

I'm like five lines deep. Hold on, don't take that out of context. I'm like five lines deep into the first weekend, the first full weekend of Summerfest here, and I know these bands. There's an Eagle here. Don Felder of the Eagles is playing. And it's not the Eagles. It's just Eagles, by the way. You got your, I've heard of Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. I think they're like a one-hit wonder. You got Modern English. I'll stop the world and melt with you, Ty. You know Modern English. Yep. I've actually heard of Post Sex Nachos because they're my favorite band name of 2025. They're pretty good. Juliana Theory, they go way back in the emo scene. There's a bunch here, Ty. There's just a bunch happening.

I saw somebody else that you've heard of. Oh, The Academy Is..., David Lee Roth, Styx. This is all just in one weekend, Ty. Styx was my first. That was the first concert I was ever at. Really? REO Speedwagon and Styx at the Bryce Jordan Center. With just a bunch of friends. Just like nine-year-old Ty getting down with Styx? No, this was like 19-year-old Ty. Oh, that was your first concert at 19? Yeah. I guess it would be 18. Yeah. It was the fall of my freshman year.

There's a band playing Bruce Springsteen covers at Summerfest with the E Street Band name. Okay. Gene Simmons Band, so it's not Kiss. Right. Is there a Baja Blast stage? That's a great question. Probably not, but I can't for sure say no. That was a big hit, you know. On our Baja Blast stage? Yeah, when we talk through who on the Baja Blast stage would lure you away from your tailgate. Oh, right, right, right, right. That was a very big deal. So we'll have to make sure we pay homage at some point to the Baja Blast stage and have that conversation again.

At what kind of concert, at what kind of festival, could you get both Sean Paul and All Time Low and Megadeth? And Spoon and Rev Run and the Gin Blossoms. Only in Wisconsin, man. Only in Milwaukee. That could be a whole tourism pitch. Dude, I'm not even done with this weekend. Soul Asylum, Spin Doctors. Ty, I'm just, I'm talking myself into Summerfest. I was gonna say, I should leave the room and let you, you know. Say less, Milwaukee. Say less. Let you work this out.

All right. With all that being said, Matt Brown, go and check him out again: ExtraPointsMB.com. He does a great job. Support independent journalism and what Matt is doing. I know we do. We would encourage everybody to make sure that they do it as well.

We will. Can you play the breaking news, Sal? Real quick? Can you find breaking news as I vamp? I know you've got breaking news somewhere there. I have it. Here it is. Also, that final weekend, Baha Men. We might get answers, Ty, about who let the dogs out. Oh my God, the Baha Men at the Baja Blast stage? It's too good.

All right. I don't know where to go from here. We've got an exciting episode planned for you on Thursday. It is nine years in the making. I will not give too much away. People on Patreon know where we are going with this. Verballers.com. Even if you are not signed up as one of our paying members, if you go and sign up as a free member, you can see the direction that we are pointed. I'm excited about this. I think going into the weekend, it gives us a nice little opportunity to explore the world beyond college football, which is something we do not do as often as I think you and I would like. But a little bit of a different show coming up later this week. Hope everybody enjoys it.

For that guy over there, Dan, for our honored guest, Matt Brown, for myself, Ty Hildenbrandt. Thank you as always for downloading and supporting. Hit follow, hit subscribe. Until next time, stay solid. Peace.