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

Quick housekeeping note before the newsletter. I am hitting the road this month, and I want to talk to you! I will be at the NCAA Convention in Nashville from Jan 14-17. I’ll then drive down to Atlanta for the CFB National Title Game on Jan 20. Will I have credentials for the national championship game? Uh…ask me in three days. But I will be in Atlanta!

If you will be in either of those places, or perhaps somewhere on the way between Nashville and Atlanta, drop me an email, I’d love to catch up. Looks like I’m going to swing by Chattanooga, but will have time to visit other places too!

I understand that college football is not, in fact, played on spreadsheets. But spreadsheets can be very useful in understanding a team’s trajectory.

For most of my career, the reigning mathematical formula for understanding college football success potential was Bud Elliott’s Blue Chip Ratio. The BCR postulated that in order for a team to win a national title in the four-team playoff era, that team needed to sign more “Blue Chip”, or four and five-star recruits, than three-stars. Not only did every national champion in the four-team era have a BCR above 50%, but almost every playoff team did.

Recruiting rankings, as imperfect as they are at the individual level, remain quite predictive on the aggregate. And because those ratings, aggregated across a composite of recruiting services, can be drilled down to a number, it makes it easy for nerds like me to pull out the spreadsheets and models and try to look for inefficiencies.

Maybe experience and returning production in certain positions groups was more important than others. Maybe outstanding talent evaluators could turn high school tackles into tight ends, quarterbacks into defensive backs, or linebackers into running backs. Maybe elite strength and conditioning programs could help undersized three-stars develop the weight of a four-star, without losing speed and balance. Maybe there were other tweaks that could be made to help a team get as close to the magical BCR as possible, without simply signing 22 four-star kids a cycle. It happens!

The BCR model doesn’t fit as neatly in college basketball, where rosters are smaller and experience matters a great deal, but other top minds are already working on crafting similar models. We probably don’t have enough data to conclusively update the BCR in the transfer portal era (especially since we don’t know yet if Transfer Portal rankings are as predictive as high school ratings)…but I am confident that all the folks taking over these new GM roles, along with recruiting services, reporters, and fellow nerds who passed a few Python Code Academy lessons, will eventually figure out updated formulas and theorems.

Essentially, X amount of talent, distributed across Y position groups, plus Z mystery sauce (coaching, injury luck, strength of schedule, etc) = the minimum baseline for championship contention.

It’s the Z part of that equation that increasingly interests me. What’s the other stuff? Can it be quantified? How can teams that will always struggle to acquire heaps of elite talent still try to compete at an elite level?

I just finished a book that might have a few ideas

That I’ll tell you about in just a second, but first, a word from our sponsor:

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Last week, when replenishing my children’s supply of Big Nate comic books at the Chicago Public Library, I grabbed Sam Walker’s The Captain Class: The Hidden Force That Creates the World’s Greatest Teams.

Walker, who spend years at the Wall Street Journal, sought to figure out what the most successful team sport dynasties across multiple sports had in common. Was it elite coaching? The presence of one of the most physically dominant athletes of all time? The most financial resources? Something else?

His study found that a team can certainly win a championship thanks to any of those things. But the teams that stood out in history for their sustained, elite levels of success shared one particular trait...the uncommon leadership of team captains. He cited examples from the NFL to international rugby, the NHL to international handball, and others.

Quibbling over exactly how Walker defined which teams should be included in “Tier 1” sample size would make a fun debate over drinks sometime (the list did not include any Chicago Bulls teams or any college squads of any sport), but I’m less interested in trying to nail down exactly whether the modern Golden State Warriors are more or less dominant than the Soviet hockey team of the early 1980s than I am in how Walker defined the leadership qualities of a truly elite captain.

Some of those qualities might appear counter-intuitive

Walker argued that the captain of the elite team wasn’t always the best player on the team, and rarely would have been considered a historically elite talent. These captains were also rarely gregarious with the press or outwardly charismatic, and might occasionally engage in behavior that folks like us might consider antisocial, like playing to the very edge of what is allowed by the rules, chewing out teammates in public, and even in the case of former Soviet hockey player Valeri Vasiliev, threatening to throw a coach out of an airplane.

The guy that is known for the fiery locker room speeches, the demonstrative guy on the field, the best player on the squad…Walker argues that person may very well not be the actual engine of the team. One can act like Tim Duncan and still be the leader that transforms a team from great to elite.

In fact, take a minute, and think back to the folks you thought were the best leaders of any team you were a part of…athletic, organizational, or anything else. Were they always the best at their job, or who always acted like a Boy Scout Choir Boy? Were they the loudest, most charismatic or most demonstrative? Maybe sometimes…but probably not always, right? What did those people have in common?

I don’t have the perfect college sports answer that I can distill into a pithy slogan, formula, or paragraph

If I did, I’d get off this newsletter racket and pivot to the far more lucrative industry of writing superficial airport bookstore business books.

If anything, I feel less confident in writing about how to identify elite athlete leadership potential in college sports than I would elsewhere. I’m not a beat writer, and I’m not in anyone’s locker room or practice field on a regular basis. I’m convinced, not just from this book, but from my experience as a sportswriter, that true leadership and team culture comes from the stuff that I don’t get to see.

I can understand a lot about a college football team from what I can see on my television, read from recruiting rankings and analyze from efficiency-based stats. But I don’t see which players have emotional intelligence, which players set a practice standard and hold others accountable, and who knows how to elevate the play of those around them.

If anything, because of the increasingly transient nature of college sports rosters, and the young age of the athletes, I’d imagine that building a cohesive culture that can survive after a few special players graduate is even harder than ever. In the pros, grown adults typically stick around for multiple seasons, building chemistry and cohesion. That’s not the college sports reality anymore…or at least, most of them.

When I see coaches (current and retired) increasingly bemoan the current state of college athletics, I don’t think it is just because they’re upset that they cannot manager a program in the same top-down, tyrannical manner they might have earlier in their careers. I don’t think they’re just upset that some athletes might be making more money than they are, or that recruiting has become much harder. I’m sure all of that plays into it, of course.

But I also think coaches, more than economists, more than reporters, more than most other people, also understand (or at least should), how important player-driven leadership is. If they believe the changing economic and administrative nature of the sport makes it more difficult to build that culture, I’d understand why they’d be upset.

So what’s the TL;DR here?

I believe, dear reader, that it’s worth considering the following takeaways.

I’m interested in learning more about these principles in 2025. Very broadly, I want to better understand the ways that teams (and by extension, athletic departments) can improve in ways beyond simply by acquiring better on-paper talent via larger payrolls. I’m interested in this not because I think spending more money is morally bad, wrong or even ineffective…just that I know that for every Ohio State and Texas, there are a whole lot more programs that do not have the same resources and cannot approach success the same way.

Perhaps this book was a start. And hey, if nothing else, an afternoon reading more stories about Bill Russell and Buck Shelford is an afternoon well spent.