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. My Tuesday is looking pretty booked at the moment, but I do have plenty of time on Wednesday and Thursday to chat, and if you’ll be in the neighborhood, I’d love to say hello!

I will also be in Atlanta from the 18-20 for the National Title Game and other various Serious Professional Industry meetings. For reasons I don’t understand or agree with, it appears I won’t be able to get a credential for the game. But that’s okay! Maybe I can scalp a ticket.

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.

On Wednesday night, Ross Dellenger of Yahoo! Sports dropped a bomb right before the NCAA Convention. According to his reporting, the P4 conferences are working on a proposal that would shift even more power to the major conferences over rules, policy changes…and perhaps most importantly, the championship events themselves.

Via the story:

I understand why a fan, or even somebody tied to a mid-major athletic department, would read this story and assume that this is just another step towards the P4 eventually completely breaking away from the rest of the NCAA. After all, the one thing that most folks in the college sports industry agree that the NCAA does really well is run the championship events.

If the P4 get even more say over how everything is run, and get to run the events, and, presumable, have even more influence over who gets to participate…well, what else is there to take or fight over?

According to the story, if that’s the immediate plan from the P4, they aren’t admitting to it:

I plan to talk about this proposal, as well as the myriad other governance reform plans floating around the industry, at next week’s NCAA Convention. If ADs, conference leaders, industry lawyers or anybody else wants to talk about it, my phone number and email are not hard to find.

But based on what I’ve heard and read so far, I actually believe the P4 commissioners. I legitimately don’t think they want to break away from the rest of college sports right this second…or in the very immediate future.

That’s because I still believe that sticking together is still in the self-interest of the most powerful leagues

Do you know what one of the biggest benefits of a big ol’ DI is for the biggest conferences? Shared legal liability!

The big talking point at NACDA when NCAA President Charlie Baker and others discussed the proposed settlement to House was this settlement would “bind” all of D1 membership together. While I disagreed with the idea that slapping some band-aids on House would grant labor and legal peace to NCAA membership, to the best of my current knowledge, there is something to the idea that the settlement does sort of stick everybody together for a little while.

If you blow up the NCAA and set off to do a new thing with 70ish of the biggest schools, you can’t ask (for force lol) Southern Utah, Central Arkansas or Vermont to help pay your legal bills. You have to deal with your own insurance, your own antitrust exposure, and your own political risks. That gets expensive, quick.

Plus, despite various consulting reports out there that insinuate that the biggest schools would earn more money from a basketball tournament that gets rid of those pesky low-major Cinderellas, the P4 suits, as a group, aren’t so craven and cynical that they want to nuke a beloved American institution.

A world where every P4 school has to cough up $20 million in revenue sharing, plus whatever they gotta pay for GMs, new lawyers, and suites of fancy new “front office and NIL” software solutions or whatever is a world where every P4 school is terrified about revenue. If they can find a way to share less of it with Wright State and UTRGV, they’re going to do it.

That might mean they have to hide behind emphuasims like “evolving college sports landscape” or whatever, but as best as I can tell, that’s what this is fundimentally about. Maximing postseason event revenues for the biggest brands.

Now, how likely is this particular proposal will pass? As of this second, I don’t know. I don’t know exactly what a “New Governance Model” from whatever NCAA working group will look like either. I hope to learn more next week, ideally with microphones on and notebooks out…but at hotel bars with recorders put away if necisarry.

Could a split happen someday in the future? Sure. A lot of things could happen. At some point, it may very well be in everyone’s best interest to send Ohio State and Texas and USC and Alabama to a Super League in Dubai and let everybody else play something else.

But I don’t think that world is today. If you want to panic about something, I don’t suggest this. Lord knows there are other things worth panicking over.

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Here’s what else we wrote this week!

I also added more updates to our Extra Points Library. Our database now has nearly 5,500 documents, including itemized athletic department budgets, shoe deals, head and assistant coach contracts, vendor agreements, and much, much more. We want this tool to help everybody get the best data possible to make the most informed decisions, and we’re updating it every week.

You can give it a spin here. And if we don’t have what you’re looking for, drop me a line. Chances are, we have the requests outstanding as we speak.

I can afford to pay $265.50 in fees for the Kennesaw State football resumes, or to travel to Nashville for four days, or drive to the College Football National Title Game, and spend hours and hours writing, reading, reporting and researching…because of your support.

We love our ad partners, but this ship still runs on subscription revenue. If you like what we’re doing, a premium subsription gives you every newsletter we write, and Athletic Director Simulator 4000, and I’ll even mail you some stickers, since my re-order just came in last night.

Look, you can probably expense your Extra Points subscription. Your boss will say it’s a professional development expense. Today is the day to stop putting it off and upgrade.

Thanks for reading, everybody. I’ll see you next week.