🏅An important update on the future of NIL Wire

Hey friends, this is Matt Brown. I’m the founder and Editor in Chief of Extra Points, the sister publication of NIL Wire.

In case you haven’t seen the news yet, Kyle Rowland, our previous lead writer for NIL Wire, just accepted a job as the new Football Sports Information Director for the University of Toledo. While I’m sorry to see Kyle go, I’m thrilled that he got this opportunity. He’s going to do an excellent job for Toledo, just like he did here, at the Toledo Blade, and elsewhere in his career. Check out Kyle’s good-bye message below.

When we hired Kyle, our original plan was to run NIL Wire as a completely separate newsletter from Extra Points, giving it the freedom to carve out a different editorial voice. But plans change! Now that we’ve had several months to look at the data and listen to reader feedback, we'd like to try a different approach.

We are going to merge NIL Wire with Extra Points, creating one big publication that will cover the off-the-field stories in the college sports industry.

You probably have some questions. Hopefully, I have some answers!

Why we’re doing this:

Over the last several months, we’ve learned that the editorial vision for NIL Wire and Extra Points had much more in common than we originally thought. Both publications were covering stories about how athletic departments and athletes generate revenue, find potential deals, and how outside forces shape those markets.

Rather than duplicating those efforts, we believe that combining the publications will make it easier for readers to find our best stories and for our company to build infrastructure (social media, games, research, new products, etc.) to support our entire audience.

What you can expect, as a reader:

Extra Points currently publishes four days a week, usually Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Two of those newsletters are completely free, and two are behind a subscription paywall ($9/mo).

Extra Points is similar to NIL Wire, in that it covers “off-the-field stories that shape college athletics”, stories that will regularly intersect with NIL and athlete compensation. Unlike NIL Wire, EP historically is more centered around original reporting and analysis, rather than curated aggregation.

We’ll be making our Friday publications specifically NIL and athlete compensation-centric, so if you subscribed to NIL Wire because you care about getting news and analysis about NIL…you’ll absolutely be getting that with Extra Points. But EP will also cover other stories in college sports, from conference realignment, to academic research, budget analysis, and much more.

Extra Points also has a games section. The newsletter has three games that can be played for free. We have NIL Agency Tycoon 95 (a game where you run an NIL agency), Concessions Stand Simulator, and Who’s That Football Team (a daily trivia game). We also have a fourth game (Athletic Director Simulator 4000), which is behind our subscription paywall.

Extra Points also runs a huge database of athletic department financial data, coach contracts, vendor deals, and more, called the Extra Points Library. While this tool is mostly built for athletic departments, researchers, agents and other industry professionals, data and reporting from this tool regularly appear in Extra Points.

So if you do absolutely nothing, you’ll simply start getting the free edition of Extra Points sent to your inbox, a newsletter that will cover the same issues you’ve been reading about in NIL Wire, but from a different, and often deeper, perspective.

So what happens next? What do I need to do as an NIL Wire reader?

We’ll begin this process today. Premium NIL Wire subscribers will be grandfathered into premium Extra Points subscriptions at the same price. That way, you won’t be charged a second time to access any of this content. If you want to cancel, simply reply to any email and we’ll take care of it for you.

Free NIL Wire subscribers will be migrated over to the Extra Points mailing list. You’ll get your first (free) Extra Points newsletter this Friday.

If you don’t want to be moved over to the Extra Points mailing list, that’s okay! If you unsubscribe from NIL Wire by Wednesday, April 29th, you won’t be migrated over. And of course, you can cancel your account at any time.

We will also begin the process of migrating the archives of this website to Extra Points.

If you have questions, I’m happy to answer them!

I get that this can be a big change! If you want to talk about your account, the publication, or anything else I can help you with, drop me a line at [email protected].

Thanks for your support of NIL Wire. I look forward to continuing to serve you over at Extra Points

-Matt Brown

Extra Points

As I step away from my role at NIL Wire, I’d like to share a message for all of those who made this brief yet rewarding journey possible. 

To our readers: thank you for your time, your attention and your trust. In a world saturated with information, you chose to engage with our work, to read, question, share and sometimes challenge what we published. That kind of engagement is never something to take for granted. Whether you visited once a week or multiple times a day, your presence gave purpose to every story, every late-night edit and every attempt to tell a story that mattered. You helped shape NIL Wire into a conversation.

To my colleagues and leadership: I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to be part of this organization. Your support, collaboration and belief in the mission created an environment where ideas could grow and voices could develop. I’ve learned a great deal here—not just about the industry, but about teamwork, adaptability, and the importance of thoughtful storytelling. Those lessons will stay with me long after I move on.

Leaving is never simple, especially when it involves people and work you care about. But I do so with a sense of gratitude rather than regret. I’m proud of what we built together and excited to see what’s next at NIL Wire and Extra Points. 

I’m looking forward to the next chapter at the University of Toledo with the confidence that comes from having been part of something worthwhile. Thank you to everyone who read, supported, collaborated and contributed along the way. 

— Kyle