EPL Summer Updates: NEW Benchmarking Data, WAY more documents, GamePlace and more:

Good morning and thanks for spending part of your day with the Library Card.

We’ve been hard at work adding even more features and quality-of-life improvements to the Extra Points Library 2.0 over these last few months. If you haven’t logged in recently, let me show you what we’ve recently added:

Introducing: more expansive institutional benchmarking data

The bread and butter of EPL comes from the athletic department financial documents we obtain via thousands of open records requests. But FOIA isn’t the only source of important educational data, and we heard from our customers (particularly those that are university presidents, educational researchers or conference staffers) that they’d like a little more data on the schools themselves.

Now, when you go to an individual school page, before you see a summary of their MFRS reports and contracts on file, you’ll see a selection of institutional data from IPEDS (The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System):

So every D1 institution, even the private schools, will now include basic information on student demographics, university endowment, enrollment trends over the last nine years, and more. This data can also be querried using our Chatbot.

IPEDS is truly a massive database, and I don’t think we’ll ever include all of that data, but we’re open to other suggestions about data categories that would be useful for our readership. But now, you can pull basic information without every having to leave EPL.

We’ve also dramatically increased our document pool

As of this morning, we have over 14,000 total PDFs in the Extra Points Library. We add new documents to the Library almost every weekday, but some of the biggest recent areas of emphasis have included:

• Getting more current coach contracts for sports like baseball, softball, golf, flag football and tennis much faster than we normally do.

• Growing our depth of vendor contracts. We’ve recently focused on trying to fill gaps in our database for ticketing providers, video services (like HUDL or Catapult) and sport-specific equipment providers. I imagine we’ll continue to add more documents in insurance, tailgating, NIL consulting and food/beverage as well.

• Significantly improving our library of game contracts. We have over 3,000 game contracts in the Library, across football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, baseball, softball and women’s volleyball. Over the next month, we’ll add contracts for men’s and women’s soccer as well. If you don’t want to browse all of the game contracts, we have summaries and ranges for sport-specific game guarentee data as well:

  

Speaking of game contracts…have you heard about GamePlace?

It’s one thing to know how much it costs to “buy” a particular opponent in a certain sport…but we wanted to make EPL even more useful for athletic departments. So we recently launched GamePlace, a completely free service within EPL to help schools find out of conference opponents in every sport. Simply log in, post what type of game you’re looking for, and search the games posted. The system will also distribute your games to staffers at schools and conferences that you want to target.

Take a peak here.

What’s next on the agenda?

Our product roadmaps are written in pencil, not pen, but beyond the day-to-day work of requesting and uploading new contracts and budgets, here are some of the other elements we’re working on over the next few weeks:

• Improving our coverage for total salary listings. Not every athletic department employee is under a formal contract, after all. SIDs, athletic trainers, salespeople, sport administrators, and sometimes even head coaches all might work without contracts. We have a salary lookup tool for every job title in an athletic department ( to assist with benchmarking), but we don’t have the data for every D1 institution yet. We’ve recently started a new blitz to fill holes in our database, and have already added data from more than 15 new schools over the last two weeks (from schools like Nebraska, Sam Houston and Chicago State), with more to come.

  

• Deeper sport-specific analytics tools and sport-specific benchmarking reports. We hope to have our first one of these, a college softball report, ready in the next month or so, with other sports to come.

• Lastly, we’re hard at work pulling out structured contract data and deal terms from our trove of AD contracts, coaches contracts and vendor agreements. Stay tuned here for more details later this summer.

If you have a feature suggestion or have feedback about EPL, please send it along to [email protected].

And if you interested in a free trial of Library, just reply back to me and we’ll get you set up.

We hope to see you in the Library soon!