| Victoria Jackson
At a surface glance, U.S. college sports just might be one of the most insular institutions in the world. We do things our own way here; the football we care most about is played with our hands, and the sports programs offered by universities have long had all the markings of the professional sports organized elsewhere yet we had until only very recently declared them amateur.
This provincialism also helps explain why people outside the U.S. for so long have expressed shock when learning about the realities of big-time college sports in the United States. For anyone with American college sports expertise traveling outside the U.S., explaining the peculiarities of this system has long been quite the party trick.
All of this is to say that people outside the U.S. who have an interest in learning about American college sports need a good guide to navigating the system’s complexities and contradictions. There’s no one better than Matt Brown, publisher of the Extra Points newsletter.
Extra Points puts the college in college sports coverage. The newsletter’s M.O. is to always be mindful of the higher education context explaining the quirks and perks of organizing elite sports as an entertainment product within universities. Maybe it’s because Matt has familial ties to Brazil; maybe it’s because he was raised by a parent who worked in higher education. Extra Points grounds its reporting and perspectives in the global and educational contexts too often missing.
Matt also brings other things regularly absent from sports reporting: humor, and humanity. His stories show that he cares about people; and what becomes clear as well is that people care about him and want to support his work. The newsletter is also awfully darn creative. Recently, playing off some parties’ interest in expanding the College Football Playoff to 24 teams, Matt wrote a clever piece showing who those 24 teams would be… in 1905, the year of the NCAA’s founding, as well as 1990, 1968, 1946, and even 1869, the year of the first intercollegiate football game. (Spoiler alert, the 1869 bracket is simply Princeton and Rutgers repeated 12 times each.)
What the piece does indirectly is also provide what can be read as an optimistic history lesson: Yes, the Ivies once were powerhouse programs in college football. So were the military academies, and even the University of Chicago. They aren’t now, and that’s ok. (At least, I can assume that this is all very well and fine with the Ivies, military academies, and Chicago.) It’s also a good reminder that the institution of college sports, including college football, has a history that includes change over time, and that all the sports pundits’ and American politicians’ anxieties and fears about their perception that college sports are on the precipice of ruin just might be detached from reality. Matt Brown delivers these lessons with joy and grace.