🎉Extra Points acquires NIL Wire

Good morning! Allow me to introduce myself.

My name is Matt Brown, and I’m the founder and publisher of Extra Points, a newsletter that covers business, policy and off-the-field stories in the college sports industry. I started Extra Points after I got laid off from SB Nation back in 2020. I wanted to cover the types of stories in college sports that were important but weren’t ever going to get a zillion pageviews. That bet has paid off in a big way.

I’m reaching out because we have some exciting news. We have just agreed to purchase and take over NIL Wire. 

I’m very thankful for the leadership of NIL Wire’s founders, Collin, Cole and Justin. They’ve built something unique and cool in the newsletter world, and we’ll be happy to root for them in their other newsletter projects. 

In the immediate short term, don’t expect too much change. NIL Wire will continue to publish three days a week. We’ll use a variety of freelancers from our professional network to keep things going for a few weeks. 

And because this is new management, we are lifting the paywall for this month. All NIL Wire stories in July will be free for everybody to read, so we get a chance to properly introduce ourselves. For those on premium plans, we’ll pause invoicing during the month of July.

In the next four to six weeks, we will make a few changes. Our plan is to give NIL Wire a new name, logo, URL and brand, to better reflect it being a part of the Extra Points family. We’re also in the process of hiring a new, full-time writer to manage the newsletter. 

We also want to expand NIL Wire’s coverage. This is a crazy time in college athletics, as institutions begin to directly pay athletes. This development is also forcing changes in how athletic departments are funded, the kinds of businesses that get involved in the college sports industry, and what everybody does with that money. While we want to cover NIL, we want to really cover money in college sports more broadly. 

Extra Points will continue to operate as a separate publication. EP publishes four days a week, (two free, two premium). 

With the acquisition, the Extra Points family will manage newsletters with more than 75,000 combined subscribers, making it one of the largest audiences of college sports fans and professionals on the internet. 

We’ll be spending the next few weeks finishing the transition process and making some tweaks behind the scenes before we unveil a full rebrand. But in the meantime, feel free to visit us at www.extrapointsmb.com. We’re also happy to offer a 25% discount for premium subscriptions to Extra Points, if you’d like to give the experience there a shot.

I’ll serve as the editor-in-chief of our combined publications, and while you’ll occasionally see my byline around here, I expect to spend the majority of my time and focus on Extra Points. But I’d love to hear from you, to better understand what you love about NIL Wire and what changes you might like to see. Feel free to drop me a line at [email protected]. 

Thanks for reading. We’re thrilled to be here and can’t wait to help make this publication even better.

Matt Brown

Founder and EIC, Extra Points