Introducing: Extra Points 2.0

Good morning friends,

Thanks so much to everybody who reached out and offered to beta test the our newest version of the Extra Points Library. Thanks to your help, we’re finally ready to move this project from beta to reality.

Today, Extra Points Library 2.0 is live!

If you’re an existing customer, you don’t need to do anything to migrate your account. All you need to do is login using your previous credentials at library.extrapointsmb.com.

What are some of the biggest changes in Library 2.0?

There’s a lot, but I’ll try to hit some of the highlights.

First, check out your new, personalized “Home” page:

Users are able to designate a D1 or D2 school as “their” school (which you can change any time via your preferences). When you log in, you’ll see topline data from that school, whether we’ve added any new documents for that institution, plus any specific documents you’ve bookmarked or saved.

You’ll also be able to opt-in to email alerts for new document types, as well as ask me to file FOIAs on your behalf.

We wanted to make your initial Library experience less chaotic than just “here’s every single document we have”, and we’ve tried to extend that personalization throughout your experience. “Your school” will be the default option when you go to look up finances, vendor contracts, or sport-specific analytics.

Speaking of whiich,

Introducing: Sport-Specific Analytics

I’ve teased this a few times on social media, but now, for the first time, users can run reports on how various budget information correlates (or doesn’t) with on-field success.

We currently have data for Football, Men’s Basketball, Women’s Basketball, Women’s Volleyball, Baseball, Softball, Field Hockey, Men’s Soccer, Women’s Soccer, Men’s Lacrosse, Women’s Lacrosse and Water Polo. Our goal is to add functionality for Men’s and Women’s Hockey very soon, as well as other sports.

Within the analytics page, you can run different types of statistical models, and chart how various MFRS line items line up with RPI ranking, NET, postseason appearances, and other metrics.

“Your” school is also highlighted in Orange, so you can easily find your program amid the sea of dots.

We’re excited to continue to develop this area of Library, as we get access to more datasets. But there’s already enough here to help anybody with benchmarking, research, and more!

You can also do this with Learfield Directors Cup data. That’s under Finances—Directors Cup:

Speaking of finances, data comparison has never been more powerful or flexible

One thing we wanted to do in Library is make it easier to compare data across institutions. Now, users can create their own custom benchmarking reports. Just go to Finances—>Benchmark

The computer will try to build a benchmark table for you, based on conference affiliation, budget ranges and sport sponsorship. But with a few clicks, you can add or remove whoever you want.

Useful if you’re a conference office looking at inviting new members, for schools wanting to see how they stack up against aspirational peers, a reporter or researcher doing data analysis, and much more.

Need help finding something? Ask our Chatbot!

I’m not about to have AI start writing my newsletters or doing my interviews. But when it comes to navigating a database with over 11,000 documents, we thought a chatbot could be useful.

Right on your homepage, feel free to ask the bot about specific documents, to run comparisons and analysis for you, create new tables, and more.

introducing: Game Contracts

We had some game contract data in Extra Points Library 1.0, but our data organization system didn’t make it easy to tag multiple schools, and extracting the useful information was a challenge.

Now, we’ve added support to make it easy to quickly not only read the entire game contract, but get the year, sport, participating teams, and the game guarantee.

Just click on a contract you want to inspect, and you can see the relevant info right above the actual PDF:

And finally, the day to day experience is much, MUCH better

I was using EPL 1.0 just about every day for work, either to add documents, or use information for my own reporting. It’s a wonderful tool, but even I could see that searching documents could be slow and cumbersome. The database could be finicky, and comparing data across charts wasn’t always easy to do.

We tore down our database infrastructure down to the studs and rebuilt how every component of EPL talks to each other. If nothing else, I think you’ll find that searching, downloading and comparing information now is much, much faster and more intuitive.

You’ll be able to see what documents are contract amendments, vs original longform contracts. You can run searches quickly, without browser lags, and without having to constantly re-enter your search terms.

So what’s next?

I’d encourage all of you to play around with the tool a bit, and to share any feedback (good or bad) that you see, especially if you haven’t logged in recently. Our current plan is to make a big public announcement to the whole world on Monday. We wanted to make sure all of you knew about these changes first.

While our plans are written in pencil, not pen, I’m happy to share our rough product timeline for future updates:

• Dramatically increase our data set for game contracts. We’re currently adding contracts for football (FBS and FCS), men’s and women’s basketball, baseball, softball and volleyball. If there’s user demand, we’ll expand to other sports. We want to get to a point where users can search average (and range) of game guarantees across particular sports/conferences, and potentially improve their scheduling processes.

• Improve our data hygiene. There are over 11,000 PDFs in the Extra Points Library right now, uploaded at various stages between 2023-and today. Some of those documents are missing data fields (such as head coach vs assistant coach labeling), and a handful were incorrectly tagged at some point. We haven’t had time to go back and make sure everything is filed correctly until very recently. We’ve already fixed hundreds of documents, and will be doing that more over the coming two months.

• Extract salary information from AD and coach contracts for improved searchability. I’ve spent the majority of our time working on data analysis of MFRS reports, both because our customers are very interested in that data, and because those PDFs are standardized, so it is relatively easy to convert them from PDFs into CSVs we can manipulate. It’s harder to do this (accurately, anyway) with coach contracts. But we’ve making great strides and expect to have product updates on this feature soon.

• Build budget access options. At $300/month or $3,000 a year, I’m confident Extra Points Library is still the cheapest college sports financial database product on the market. But I also understand that $300 may be too much for somebody who just needs one thing. We’re prototyping tools that will allow users to purchase individual reports for one-time, much smaller, fee. So if you’re a college baseball coach and only care about baseball data indexed around your conference peers, we’re building a system to more affordably allow you to do that.

There’s plenty more new features added to Library 2.0 that I can’t get to in one newsletter. I’ll just say that we’ve spent a lot of time on this project over the last few months, and I’m personally very excited about it. I hope it’s useful, and that you enjoy using your upgraded EPL database!

If you have comments, questions, suggestions, etc. please, send ‘em my way at [email protected]. If not, enjoy, and I’ll see you around the internet!