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

A few quick housekeeping notes before we get started.

First, I’d like to welcome a new addition to the Extra Points team. We’ve added KC Smurthwaite to the Extra Points family. KC is a former athletic department staffer at Utah State and Southern Utah, and currently a consultant in the college sports space. KC will occasionally write newsletters for Extra Points and NIL Wire, but will focus most of his time in helping sell Extra Points Library and sports management curriculum support materials.

Speaking of NIL-Wire, I’m excited to announce that we’ve also made our hire to run that newsletter. I believe she’ll be introducing herself to everybody on Monday, so make sure you’re subscribed. We’ll have a lot more news about NIL Wire in the very near future.

In non-hiring news, if you have a second, I’d LOVE if you could fill out this very quick survey about Extra Points. We’re working on our budgets and plans for the rest of this year (and early Q1 of next year), and we want to make an Extra Points subscription as useful as possible for you. Knowing what you actually like and don’t like…helps an awful lot! I’ll close the survey on Monday.

Finally, I’d like to share a quick message from one of today’s sponsors, Swipe Less, Live More

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One of the frustrating things about writing four Extra Points newsletter a week is that I seldom get time to really go back to a topic and provide additional context. There’s just too much dang stuff happening all the time! But often, after I publish a newsletter, folks in and outside the industry will reach out, share additional context, ask thoughtful questions…and make me wish I could go back and take another swing.

I’d like to do that a bit today.

That Tennessee was going to flip from Nike to adidas was one of the worst kept secrets in the college sports industry. I wrote about this last month, as I think this deal will be part of a very active apparel market free agency period. There are a lot of big name programs whose contracts are set to expire around 2026.

A few of those schools are now off the board. Kentucky, for example, recently announced an extension with Nike. Industry sources have also told me that LSU is expected to remain a Nike program for the foreseeable future. But other big names, like USC, Penn State, Ohio State, South Carolina, Georgia Tech, Wisconsin, West Virginia and Iowa, have contracts that are scheduled to expire. My educated guess is from that list, at least South Carolina and Georgia Tech will change partners.

I’ve said this several times, including in my previously linked story, but it’s important to reiterate for our non-industry friends. The big number you see in the headline about an apparel contract is not cash. These contracts provide a bunch of stuff, like athletic apparel and equipment, which has a cash valuation. If schools are lucky (and if they’re a huge brand, like Tennessee), then they also get cash. But most programs don’t.

I think it’s quite clear that Tennessee is very important to adidas. The three stripes have a portfolio of many major college sports brands, like Kansas, Louisville, Washington and Nebraska, but I think it’s easy to argue that the Volunteers are now the most well-rounded and prominent across all sports. When the musical chairs stop, Tennessee may very well still be the biggest athletic department under the adidas banner. There will unquestionably be a healthy cash check coming to the UT athletic department every year.

I am a little more skeptical about the value of the cash going directly to athletes…or at least, in the competitive advantage of that cash. Adidas is going to allocate sports marketing dollars to directly compensate Tennessee athletes above the House Cap in multiple sports. But as Chris McGuire, the adidas vice president of sports marketing, North America, admits to Yahoo! Sports here, “This is the first one.”

If that works, there’s no reason adidas won’t do the same thing for Miami, Nebraska, Kansas or their other university partners. Nike, Under Armour, and hell, New Balance, will almost assuredly do the same. And shoot, if adidas thinks they need to offer a better deal to USC or Ohio State to get them to flip, they won’t hesitate to do so, no matter what they promised (or didn’t promise) to Tennessee.

I don’t have a strong opinion about what athletic apparel brands are “best”, and none of them are currently sponsoring Extra Points at the moment (you can change that, of course, by emailing [email protected]). My gut is that athletic apparel companies will try to compete on NIL deals, but will find that factors beyond pure cash will ultimately hold the most sway for most of their negotiations. I won’t be shocked to see a major program let athletes wear whatever shoes they want, brand deal be damned, in the near future.

As Learfield CEO Cole Gahagan told Yahoo, driving deals for athletes is a major area of focus for the company.

Dedicated resources on the ground was a major theme of my conversations with company executives. Learfield has personnel on campus to help get to know the actual athletes, help produce and shoot the content, and to pair it with the best possible brand partners. That process isn’t heavily automated or done programmatically….it takes lots of people.

Solly Fulp, Learfield’s Executive Vice President, NIL Growth & Development, mentioned a campaign to me earlier this week that has stuck with me. Learfield was working with the University of Texas and the St. David’s Medical Center, a hospital in Austin. Everybody wanted to find sponsorship activations that could include athletes, but it also needed to make business sense.

The solution was a video series full of testimonials from Longhorn athletes who were born at St. David’s. Not only would that video series be particularly impactful, but the school could run those videos as in-game programming on scoreboards over the course of the season, creating additional sponsorship assets.

I don’t think it is reasonable to expect any MMR company, be that Learfield, JMI, Playfly or anybody else, to simply cut checks directly to athletes without care or thought. Not only do athlete NIL deals still (for now, I guess) have to pass muster with the CSC clearinghouse, but MMR companies aren’t booster clubs. They work with brands who want a meaningful ROI on their marketing spend, and if they don’t get one, they won’t renew.

So the question becomes how do those companies bring new types of deals or brands to the table (perhaps beyond industries that already regularly advertise in college sports, like financial services, health care, insurance and automotive), how they incorporate athlete intellectual property with university IP, and how they make enough of a buck doing it to keep the operation going.

I legitimately believe there’s untapped potential in revenue generation, both for athletic departments and athletes, on the MMR side. Fulp told me he sees potential in MMR firms getting better about the type of sponsorship assets being sold (perhaps moving more away from static images and more towards storytelling or deeper campaigns), as well as getting better in partnering with the right athletes. I’m sure the folks at the other major companies (and schools) have good ideas too. It’s a space I want to continue to monitor.

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These are useful figures, I think, for showing trends, or relative spending among peers. But the data isn’t completely standardized, and can lack context. A few ADs and coaches reached out to me after the last story, not to critique what I had written, but to share some info about why some figures showed up the way they did.

If a sport spending number looks much higher, or lower, than you’d expect, a few things worth considering could be,

• Does the school own the arena or facility it uses for home games, or does it need to pay rent?

• Does this program need to pay guarantees to get home games, due to difficult geography or RPI rating?

• Does this school need to pay higher staff salaries due to the local cost of living?

• Did this school have to buy out a coach contract that fiscal year?

• How much of the sport’s reported revenue came from student fees or institutional support that year?

I wish I could go over all of that in depth for every school and every sport, but this is an email newsletter, and my CMS starts screaming AWOOGA AWOOGA once my emails hit 1,750 words. For those school and industry personnel who are really interested in the nitty-gritty of this data, I’d encourage you to grab an Extra Points Library account (or pay me to run reports for you). Otherwise, I’ll share the raw numbers with as much context as I can squeeze into an email.

Thanks for reading. I’ve got some big news to share next week, and some original reporting in the hopper. Tell your pals to read Extra Points, and I’ll see you on the internet.

Texas Tech has new threads ahead of the 2025 college football season.

The Red Raiders announced Thursday a new uniform package celebrating the team’s 100th anniversary. Texas Tech will wear the new uniforms for its matchup against Kansas on Oct. 11.

The new uniforms feature a gold “100-Year” label on the back neck plus the years “1925” and “2025” on the front collar. There are also several vintage-inspired Texas Tech logos on the jerseys as well as the helmets.

While the Red Raiders are coming off an 8-5 season, expectations are high in Lubbock for the season ahead and the future, as Texas Tech is seemingly all in on the NIL era of college football.

The Red Raiders recently landed the commitment of 5-star offensive tackle Felix Ojo, who landed a reported fully guaranteed three-year, $5.1 million contract, per ESPN’s Eli Lederman.

David Ubben, Justin Williams and Chris Vannini of The Athletic reported quotes from a handful of Big 12 coaches about Texas Tech’s NIL spending, and the common theme was that the Red Raiders are ready to compete in the new era of college football.

“They’ve built the best team money can buy,” one head coach said. “But if they don’t win the Big 12, holy cow.”

On3’s Pete Nakos reported in July that Texas Tech’s roster cost more than $28 million for the 2025 season.

Texas Tech, which is ranked No. 23 in the AP Preseason Poll, will kick off the season against Arkansas-Pine Bluff on Aug. 30.

The News of the Week broke during Tuesday’s Champions Blue LLC. Board Meeting at Kroger Field when UK announced an extension with JMI Sports through 2040. Following the meeting, we heard Mitch Barnhart’s side of the story. On Thursday, we got JMI’s perspective on the situation.

JMI President Paul Archey spoke with Tom Leach, the play-by-play broadcaster for JMI, to answer a few basic questions about the arrangement, which should give fans a better idea of how the two entities will operate in the revenue-sharing era of college athletics.

JMI’s Role in NIL

Alarm bells started ringing in the heads of Kentucky fans when they learned that all NIL operations will be moving in-house as a part of JMI’s NIL Suite. Mark Pope built an impressive roster in conjunction with Club Blue. If it isn’t broke, why fix it?

Archey made it clear that JMI will have no part in roster management. The goal is to streamline the process in order to ensure Kentucky student-athletes strike the most lucrative deals in a timely manner.

“We’re not a general manager at all. We’re not involved in roster management or the recruitment of athletes, only just with the respect as it would relate to their NIL value and getting some NIL deals. It’s changed because the system has changed, starting with the House settlement and the new rules in place starting July 1, every deal over $600 has to pass through NIL Go,” said the JMI President.

“So we’re best positioned because of our relationships with brands. We have over 200 brand partnerships with the University of Kentucky. It’s turnkey for us in that respect. We’re best positioned to take advantage of what I like to call hot markets. You only have a limited amount of time as an athlete. You have a great performance, hit a home run to send you to the College World Series. Well, you’ve got five days until that hitter could also go 0-4. How do you take advantage? We have built-in partnerships to allow us to take advantage of those types of opportunities, but also the brand prominence of the University of Kentucky on a local and regional level.”

He added, “We have more long-term partnerships, the value of those partnerships, than any other school in the country, and that puts, in this rev-share model, very low risk on Kentucky.”

The most crucial aspect for this to succeed is that this rev-share model succeeds. NIL Collectives successfully filed suit to continue operations. Those collectives can still live in the “pay for play” world. The only way for that to change is for the House settlement to be codified by Congress, via the SCORE Act.

Why Extend an Agreement Through 2040?

Kentucky fans feel snake-bit by long-term contracts. That was the case for John Calipari until he made a move to Arkansas. Some football fans certainly feel that way about Mark Stoops’ enormous buyout. Unlike those deals, Archey believes this long-term deal is much more financially lucrative.

“Why is that a good idea? Because the way the deal is structured, we’re moving from a straight guaranteed agreement to a guarantee with revenue-share that is much more lucrative for the University of Kentucky athletics,” he said.

The projected $465 million figure that was floated around in press releases is only a projection for the totality of the deal. It does not include future assets that do not currently exist, like the proposed entertainment district on campus, which could also include a lucrative naming rights deal.

“That’s what’s great about this deal. It’s set up to keep Kentucky at the forefront of multimedia rights, sponsorships, (and) partnerships,” said Archey. “It doesn’t contemplate what has not been developed yet. Furthermore, if you believe college athletics is going to continue to grow, and you’re a big brand, which Kentucky is, they share in 80% of net revenues, which is a far greater percentage than the current deal.”

When the television cameras pan around the US’s newest sporting temple to show the cavernous stands, elegant brick exterior, VIP suites and massive video board, viewers might believe they are looking at a professional venue.

Yet the occupants of Phillip Beard Stadium, the Buford Wolves, are not a professional team or even a college one. They are high-schoolers. In the exorbitant world of high school football, Buford’s $62m, 10,000-capacity arena is not the biggest or most expensive taxpayer-funded student stadium in the US. But it may be the most luxurious.

The Wolves host the Milton Eagles on Thursday in the stadium’s first regular-season game, which will be broadcast nationally on ESPN. With 13 Georgia state championships from 2001 to 2021 and a long record of players progressing to college scholarships and, eventually, the NFL, Buford is a football powerhouse – and the new stadium is a loud statement of the school’s desire to keep it that way.

If it feels like half of Buford is at the big game … they probably are. The Atlanta-area city has roughly 19,000 residents and the well-regarded high school (rebuilt in 2019 for $85m) has about 1,900 students. In 2010, another educational institution in the Atlanta region, Kennesaw State University, built a smart 10,200 capacity multi-use stadium for $16.5m. In the past 15 years, however, construction costs have soared, fan expectations have evolved, streaming and social media have changed how we consume sports and college athletes are now allowed to earn significant sums by monetising their personal brands. The trend is clear: newer, fancier, costlier.

Phillip Beard Stadium has the typical uncovered benches familiar to anyone who’s seen Friday Night Lights. Yet it also boasts more than 1,500 premium seats, 15 suites, a 3,600 sq ft double-sided video board and a 10,500 sq ft event space with a trophy wall. Buford City manager Bryan Kerlin told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the stadium had been paid for by the city general funds and its funding “had no impact on teacher salaries, classroom resources, or any educational funding”. Still, there may well be other parts of the city the money could have been diverted to.

Besides, blending spartan spaces for students and high-end facilities for corporate clients and rich alumni is increasingly common. It could make financial sense for schools aiming to maximise revenues and claw back some of the construction and operating costs, according to Victor Matheson, an economics professor at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. “The economics term is price differentiation,” he says. It’s long been common in professional sports as teams adopt a strategy beloved of airlines, with their myriad fare classes and options: charging wildly different amounts for the same product based on variations in the customer experience.

As the masses in the cheap seats generate the noise, corporate boxes can deliver thousands of dollars in income per event, giant video screens appeal to advertisers, and perhaps former students who’ve been wined and dined in air-conditioned comfort and enjoyed a perfect view of the action will be inspired to make generous donations to the alma mater.

Upscale new arenas are also a way to entice fans off the couch in an era when it seems like almost every sporting contest, no matter how obscure, is streamed. “Everyone knows their biggest competitor is being able to watch on TV,” Matheson says. Climate-controlled facilities mitigate against extreme weather, and with gargantuan video boards, televisions on concourses, myriad food and drink options and glitzy graphics on LED ribbon displays, fans can go to the stadium, experience the live atmosphere and still gaze at screens.

Northwestern University in Illinois is building a privately-funded new stadium guided by the principle of “premium for everybody,” reports Front Office Sports. At a projected cost of $862m it will be the most expensive college stadium ever, yet with only 35,000 seats it will hold 12,000 fewer people than the venue it is replacing. The theory underpinning the design is that modern fans want a more intimate and luxurious experience, with changing tastes – and a changing climate – rendering even relatively recent venues obsolete.

In 2020 Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers quit their open-air 48,000-capacity ballpark, which opened in 1994, for a new 40,000-capacity building with a retractable roof. This season a minor league baseball team, the Salt Lake Bees, moved from Smith’s Ballpark, which also opened in 1994, to a new home, hiking ticket prices and halving their seating capacity in the process. The concentration on high-end customers, of course, prices out fans who cannot afford to spend heavily on a night out at the game.

“In all, premium seating makes up one-sixth of seats at the new ballpark, whereas it contributed to just 3% of Smith’s Ballpark’s capacity,” the Salt Lake Tribune reported. “The seats closest to the action aren’t available for sale on a per-ticket basis; instead, those are field-level suites that must be reserved in their entirety.” Sports’ growing focus on premium customers mirrors a shift in the American economy as a whole: this year a Moody’s Analytics study found that the US economy is now deeply reliant on the richest households, with the top 10% of earners accounting for 50% of consumer spending, a sharp rise from recent decades.

Logically, better facilities should breed better players, with victories leading to bigger attendances, swelling civic pride, adding to the appeal of the fast-growing suburbs where large high school stadiums are often located and boosting the prospects of the kids who dream of reaching the NFL. The trickle-down effect from the professional and college ranks to high schools isn’t only a matter of swankier facilities. It’s also visible in the potential financial incentives.

College players have been permitted to make money from their name, image and likeness (NIL) rights since 2021. In June this year a former high school player filed a class-action lawsuit in California challenging restrictions on the ability of the state’s high school student-athletes to profit from their NIL rights. It could pave the way for high school stars across the US to earn income and to transfer to other schools for sporting reasons. “Corporations see a lot of untapped economic value in high school athletics,” Yaman Salahi, an attorney representing the player named in the suit, said in a statement to Front Office Sports, “and we want to ensure that value is shared equitably with the athletes that create it.”

Like teenaged soccer starlets at professional clubs in other countries, 16- and 17-year-old American football players might one day be wealthy and famous, with a status to match the grandeur of their home stadiums. “The difference here is that it’s the local public school that’s doing the development,” Matheson points out.

For now, stadiums as sizeable and expensive as Buford’s remain rare outside Texas, the state that is the centre of the high school football infrastructure arms race. In 2017 the independent school district in the Houston-area suburb of Katy opened a $70m, 12,000-capacity stadium adjacent to its existing and still operational 9,800-seat venue.

According to the website TexasBob.com, more than a quarter of the 1,267 high school football stadiums in Texas can hold over 5,000 people, with eight seating at least 16,500. The combined capacity of 4.4 million is larger than the populations of 24 states. About a quarter have video scoreboards and 27 high school stadiums have opened in Texas since 2020. A $56m multi-purpose venue in the Houston-area city of La Porte is set to host its inaugural match this month.

Texas produces more NFL players than any other state, found a study by the data analysis firm Lineups, with Houston the leading city. On the other hand, Texas is ranked 34th for educational attainment by US News & World Report, is far below the national average for teacher pay and expenditures per student, and according to one study, this year Texas teachers expect to spend on average $1,550 of their own money on classroom supplies. Many would argue there are better things to spend money on than school sports.