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

Folks, we’re hitting the stretch run of the college football season. In fact, in D-III, the regular season is almost over. And you know what that means?

It’s almost time for THE EXTRA POINTS BOWL.

In case you forgot to put this on your calendar, the Extra Points Bowl will kick off Nov 23 at the Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium in Canton, Ohio. This game will feature the top teams from D-III’s OAC and PAC that do not qualify for the NCAA Playoffs.

General Admission tickets for the game, which will also include access to a bowl game featuring teams from the Heartland and NCAC, can be purchased here for $20. You can also get club seats for $40. We’ll be doing some ticket giveaways shortly before the game as well, so stay tuned.

We have a few updates about the game, as well as Extra Points as a company, that we’d like to share this morning.

Let’s start with the good news!

Way back in the Spring, when we first started having conversations about potentially sponsoring a D-III bowl game, we started brainstorming some of the trappings of major bowl games that we wanted to try and emulate, or at least right-size, for a D-III event. We knew we weren’t going to be able to recruit the hospitality partners, crowd size or musical acts for a major New Year Six bowl game, but we thought there were some things we could try.

One of those was trying to get an Air Force Flyover for the game. That process began by me literally googling “how do you get a flyover for your event”, which put me in touch with some Air Force public affairs officers, a whole bunch of forms, and then a lot of waiting.

Thankfully, the Pro Football Hall of Fame also experience with this sort of thing. While I do not know the exact airplane model, I have been told that the Extra Points Bowl will have a flyover. That’s pretty exciting, in my humble opinion.

I also feel good about the quality of experience this game should be able to deliver. Our partners at Opendorse have created some very engaging and accessible programming around building athlete brands that I hope will be useful for these athletes. Our buddies at Homefield Apparel are making championship shirts and have gifts for everybody participating. We have other #swag partners (and probably still have room for one or two more! Matt @ ExtraPointsMB dot com), a great venue partner, and some great teams.

The closer we get to the game, the more excited I get.

So…who is going to be playing in the game?

It’s pretty wild that we’re so close to the end of the season, and the answer is…we honestly don’t know!

The PAC has a huge logjam at the top of the standings. Washington & Jefferson, with an 8-1 record, is sitting in first place, with only a single game left, (at 1-7 Allegheny). Carnegie Mellon, Grove City, and Case Western Reserve are all right behind them, with the Spartans finishing the season against Grove City and CMU. Westminster is currently 5th, but also gets a shot at Grove City.

I am not a D-III bracketologist, but I’m told it is more likely than not that the PAC gets multiple teams in the Playoff, meaning the Extra Points Bowl bid could potentially go to any of those five schools.

On the OAC side, Mount Union is in the first place and is overwhelmingly likely to make the Playoff. Marietta is also currently undefeated in league play, but still has to face Mount Union, along with the third place squad, John Carroll. My guess is that the loser of the Marietta/John Carroll game is most likely to go to the Extra Points Bowl, but that is only an educated guess.

So will we get a John Carroll/Case Western Cleveland area showdown? A PA vs OH battle? Something completely unexpected? Who knows! Lots of drama as the regular season winds down.

For the other game, the NCAC representative is likely to be either Wabash, or my hometown Denison University. The HCAC rep is most likely to be Hanover, but Rose-Hulman, Franklin or Mount St. Joseph could potentially find their way there.

What’s the bad news?

Two weeks ago, I posted that we wanted the community to help us pick a trophy design for the Extra Points Bowl trophy. Over a dozen of you submitted creative designs, with a few of you also sending very stupid suggestions that made me laugh (no, I don’t think these conferences are gonna let us roll out a Major Award for the bowl champion)

However, we’re going to have to tweak our original plans. Many of the best suggestions riffed on various Goalpost related themes, which would make sense, because…you know….Extra Points. But our conversations with manufacturing partners made us skeptical we could pull off that design in a) our expediated timetable and b) without risking damage to the trophy.

After additional consultation with manufactures and our school partners, we decided it would be better if the trophies for both games were similar. Since it’s already November, that meant we had to go ahead and make an executive decision, inspired by many of your suggestions, and pick a design now. The final trophy will look similar to this. I will be reaching out via email to make sure we make good on the #swag promises to those who submitted high quality ideas.

One limiting factor in a lot of our plans was the calendar. Our sponsorship contract wasn’t finalized until July, and we weren’t able to start some of the logistical conversations around the game until after the season started…which was too late for many of our original ideas. That isn’t a criticism of anybody involved in the game, just an acknowledgement of the reality that we’re all small companies/organizations. I am confident that the lessons all of us learn will help make for an even more ambitious bowl game in the future.

But does that doesn’t mean this game won’t be great. I think it will be! We’ll get to watch a great football game and have a ton of fun. We’ll share more as we get even closer to the game….but I hope to see many of you there!

A few other announcements and notes….

And here’s my last note. We’re so lucky to have enjoyed the support needed to expand our team. We’ve needed an outside sales support role for years, because I simply do not have the time to be a good writer, reporter and salesguy, so we just weren’t doing a good enough job at growing revenue.

While revenue from Library is growing, our business still overwhelmingly relies on reader subscription revenue. That revenue allows us to do things like fly to Utah for a few days to report on non-LDS BYU fans, or so I can fly with the Hawaii football team to Fresno State. It lets me pay thousands of dollars a year in open records fees. It lets us pay Hector Diaz, our kick-ass social media and graphic design guru. It lets me pay for freelance submissions. It lets us sponsor a D-III football game.

I know all of you have a lot of options to spend your hard-earned money on things to read. I want you to know that your decision to support Extra Points with a subscription means everything to us, and lets us keep doing what we’re doing.

We want to hire more people in 2025, and not just because I’m like two bad open rate days away from a tiny nervous breakdown. We want to make new products, make new kinds of content, and tell stories that are impactful for fans, athletic administrators, industry leaders, students, and other groups. We eventually want to be able to do that and be less reliant on reader subscriptions.

But we’re not there yet. If you enjoy Extra Points and support our mission of independent sportswriting in the college sports industry, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. You get four newsletters a week and, ADS4000, for just nine bucks a month.

Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you in your inbox next week.