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

Last month, I wrote an entire newsletter laying out many of our plans for 2025. We added our first additional FT hire back in November (Steven Toroni, who is helping us with sales), and I mentioned that we planned to make additional FT hires in 2025.

Today, I’m excited to announce one of those new hires.

Please welcome Sam Weber to the Extra Points family! 

Sam will be working as our Vice President of Marketing at Extra Points. Prior to joining our team, Sam served as one of the earliest employees at NIL industry leader Opendorse. He brings a track record of building award-winning brands, executing best-in-class public relations plans, and leading marketing strategies that support business growth in the world of college sports. 

Sam will be helping our team by focusing on newsletter audience acquisition, content and PR strategy, and brand development. Essentially, he’s going to help Extra Points grow, tell our story to the world, and mature as a business. 

Sam is based in Lincoln, Nebraska. We now have employees sitting in Southern California, Nebraska, Chicago, and Maryland…so Extra Points is basically the Big Ten. Come sponsor us, Casey's Pizza.

He’ll also be helping us with Extra Points Library

We first announced EPL, a searchable database of athletic department contracts, budgets, and vendor agreements that we’ve obtained via open records, back in the Fall. Dennis and I (and others) have been in the lab nearly every day, trying to grow our document library, improve quality of life features, and make this as useful a tool as possible for athletic departments, industry leaders, academics and more. 

If you haven’t taken EPL for a spin recently, we’ve grown our document list to nearly 5,500 documents across D1, with more being added weekly. I imagine Sam’s deep knowledge of the college athletics industry, growing tech brands and storytelling will only make Library even better. 

You can check out what we’re building with EPL right here. 

So what’s next?

I’m flying to Nashville tomorrow morning for the NCAA Convention. Then I’m going to swing by to visit a few colleges (Belmont, UT Chattanooga, maybe others) and head to Atlanta for the National Championship Game and some other Sports Business-y meetings. I’ll be on the road for about a week. 

When I get back, beyond writing and reporting on my trip, we’ll be huddling up as a team to solidify our other big plans for the year.

And this is where you come in. We’d love your help in figuring out where want to go next.

One of our goals for this year is to find a few places to expand what we offer beyond the newsletter, What If book, and Athletic Director Simulator 4000. We’re considering getting into the events world, creating Special Reports, getting into original video, and perhaps taking another swing at the software space. And hey, maybe one of you has another idea we should consider as well.

I'm going to list a few potential ideas we’re considering. I’d love to know which of these sound like something you’d potentially be interested in. Please do not vote for more than three ideas. I know we won’t have the time or money to do ALL of this stuff, and we’re trying to get a better understanding of what our readers may be most interested in.

Those ideas include:

Please do not vote for more than three things. That will help us gather more useful data.

Thanks for your votes and feedback. We’re excited to have Sam, excited to cover this NCAA Convention, and excited to work on building new stuff that you’ll all enjoy.

I’ll see you in Nashville!