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

Quick housekeeping note: This will be the last Extra Points newsletter of the week, as everybody prepares for Thanksgiving and holiday-related travel. We will return to a four-day-a-week publishing schedule next week.

Nobody wants to drop any more huge reported stories right before a holiday weekend, right? So now is a perfect time for another READER MAILBAG.

I take reader questions on a rolling basis, via Twitter, Bluesky, Email, or Instagram. When the mailbag fills up, (or when I’m in a bind and need to smash the ol’ emergency content button), I do a mailbag!

Let’s start with this fun question from reader Joshua:

That’s a good question!

There’s nothing in the NCAA handbook or bylaws anywhere, that I’m aware of, that would prevent this sort of thing from happening. But even beyond the fan reaction, and strength of schedule concerns, there’s another good reason this almost never happens…money.

Every FBS team, from the largest schools playing in front of 100,000+ seat stadiums, to the Hawaiis and Akrons of the world, depends on home games to generate meaningful revenue for their department and to satisfy conference television deal inventory requirements. Schools earn revenue from ticket sales, premium seating, parking spaces, concessions, etc.

If you can’t generate enough revenue from your TV contract or your 85,000 seat stadium, most schools schedule “buy” games to fill out their schedule…one-off road trips against larger programs that pay a game guarantee. A G5 school playing a P4 opponent could expect to earn north of $1.5 million to play in one of those games.

So Kent State deciding to hypothetically play a road game at Youngstown State would mean not just giving up a valuable home date, but playing a road games against an opponent that couldn’t possibly afford an equivalent guarantee payout. It would be financially irresponsible to play that game, no matter how much money Kent State could hypothetically save on hotels and airfare.

The only way it works, as best as I can tell, would be for an FCS team to offer up a massive check and a promise to play multiple road games at a G5, in order to make it work. I can’t see why a broadcaster pay increased fees to make that happen (a G5/FCS matchup is probably still bound for ESPN+), so you’d need donors or private companies to do it…and if they have $1.4 million to spare, I imagine there are better ways to spend it than trying to lure Bowling Green to play a road game at an MVFC school.

I don’t want to say it’s impossible. But I’m struggling to think of a plausible scenario where the math maths on both sides.

Speaking of FCS schedule questions, reader Jorge asks,

So I don’t think an FCS bowl game would be prohibited by NCAA bylaw or anything. After all, the Celebration Bowl exists outside the FCS Playoff Structure, and bowl games exist in D-II and D-III for non-playoff participants. Perhaps you’ve heard of one of those bowl games? It was called the Extra Points Bowl, and it was played last Saturday.

The problem with hypothetical FCS bowl games is a similar problem to why there aren’t more D-II and D-III games. Money.

The dirty little secret is that most December FBS bowl games aren’t making big money from ticket sales. Schools often can’t sell out their own ticket allotments, and in the Portal era, the “importance” of many of these games has cratered.

But that’s okay! Because these games serve another critically important purpose. Affordable live broadcast inventory during the Holiday season. And even if there’s only 14,000 folks watching the game in person, Americans love to watch bowl games on TV.

To make an FCS Bowl work, the event would need a significant investment from a broadcast partner (probably ESPN) to cover the operating expenses and fund the team payouts, and it would need a venue that wasn’t already booked or oversaturated with December.

The Celebration Bowl is a little different, because that game has the cultural cachet to sell 40,000+ tickets every season. Stony Brook and Duquesne aren’t pulling that kind of crowd.

But the Extra Points bowl didn’t have a massive broadcast contract. It wasn’t on linear TV at all! How were we able to pull that off?

By dramatically shrinking our expenses. Both teams invited to the Extra Points bowl were within a three-hour drive of the stadium, as it the case for most D-III bowl games. The teams, as I understand it, only stayed in a hotel for one night. We didn’t pay out a cash prize to the participating teams, didn’t spend five-figures on bowl gift bags, and had only one night of non-game programming. Most D-III games are honestly even more austere events.

That’s not a critique, by the way, just a reality. It costs more money to put on the New Mexico Bowl than it does to put on the Culver’s Bowl.

If somebody is willing to front enough cash, I think you could pull off an FCS bowl game or two for playoff-snubs. But I’m not certain the sponsors would make their money back in the short-term.

QUICK HALFTIME BREAK FOR A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSORS…ME.

Reader Earl asks,

This is going to shock many of my readers, but I must tell the truth. I was not a college athlete.

In high school, I played baseball (horribly), soccer (marginally less horribly), and swam (also pretty bad at this too). Even though I loved sports, I was much more involved with music than I was actually competing. I was a band nerd.

I’ve written about all kinds of sports since starting Extra Points, from swimming to baseball, hockey to volleyball, ultimate Frisbee to flag football, and more. I’m currently working on a story about collegiate wrestling, and I imagine I’ll write about a few new sports in 2025.

Gonna try skiing for the first time over Christmas. If I die, well, I had a good run.

Reader Shane asks,

I think it’s going to be a while.

The biggest obstacle is probably the calendar at the moment. The College Football Playoff already expanded, meaning that a team could potentially have to play 12 regular season games, a conference championship game, and potentially four more playoff games. That’s 17 football games! And moving forward, schools will have to do that with smaller rosters than before, thanks to the 105-man roster limit via the House settlement.

Even if college football power brokers decided that quality-of-play and athlete-welfare be damned, we’re expanding this thing….when do you play the 13th game? Do you start the season even earlier in August, well before school starts and when many schools will struggle to sell out their stadiums? Do you try to push the season deeper into the winter, when broadcast windows are tighter and when many stadiums aren’t well-equipped to handle the elements? Who is asking for this? It doesn’t appear to be the broadcast networks.

More likely, I imagine, is that the College Football Playoff eventually expands to 14 or 16 teams, both to increase the value of the contract, and to potentially placate Big Ten and SEC leaders who might consider bolting from the entire enterprise.

Okay, last question,

Reader Batt Mrown, who totally isn’t a plant, asks,

DO I EVER:

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, everybody. I’ll see you in your inbox in a few days!