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

A few quick housekeeping notes I’d like to share:

A premium Extra Points subscription also gives you access to the computer game we made, Athletic Director Simulator 3000.

In order to make this game as realistic as I possibly could, I talked to lots of ADs (as well as other industry professionals) about our scenarios and success probabilities. We had a few ADs play beta versions of the game, and I know that at least a handful have played the game post-release, even though most of them have registered using their personal email addresses.

But you know what I thought might be fun? Actually playing the game with an actual athletic director.

So earlier this week, I sat down with Craig Pintens, the AD over at Loyola Marymount University, in the WCC. Craig was kind enough to play a few rounds of the game with us, and talk through how he would approach those particular scenarios. You can watch that playthrough below:

I’m going to go ahead and spoil something here. In his first run of the game, Pintens, a successful, actual AD in real life…got fired.

Is this because he’s secretly bad at video games? Is it because I made a lousy game? Did he just get tremendously unlucky? Am I trying to drum up business for an Athletic Director Simulator Strategy Guide?

No, he just got unlucky, since the game does have semi-randomized results. Sorry, I’m not very good at teasing videos.

I’m going to try and play the game with a few other folks at Women Leaders, and will be happy to share those videos. I am also happy to announce that we just kicked off a process to make some pretty significant improvements to the game, from updated graphics (the game won’t look like it was released in 1981 anymore! Maybe…1989 instead!), school profiles, customization options, tools for educators, and much, much more. We hope to release the next version of that game by Christmas.

Let’s pause for a moment for a quick word from one of our sponsors:

This edition of Extra Points is brought to you by AMPLOS:

Here’s what else we published this week:

Thanks for reading, everybody. I’ll see you in your inbox from New Orleans.

If you’d like to buy ads on Extra Points OR in ADS3000, good news! They’re affordable, and we still have openings for this year. Drop me a line at sales@extrapointsmb.com. If you have news tips or FOIAs you want to share, I’m at Compliance@ExtraPointsMB.com. Otherwise, I’m at Matt@Extrapointsmb.com, @MattBrownEP on Twitter, @ExtraPointsMB on Instagram, and @MattBrown on Bluesky