The time has come to play a college basketball game in a church. Or maybe a factory

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Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

A quick housekeeping reminder: 

We will hold Office Hours, a Zoom call conversation with me and the Extra Points Community, this Wednesday, December 18, at 6 PM CST.

We’ll have an RSVP link at the bottom of this newsletter, along with the next two newsletters. I’ve got a few stories and notes I’m happy to discuss, but Office Hours is about your questions, so we’ll chat about what you want to chat about!

We will also shift into a holiday schedule next week. I’m taking off for Utah Thursday night, and will be out in the mountains with family for a little over a week, with limited access to email. We will resume a regular posting schedule after the holidays.

Back at the Extra Points Bowl, I remember chatting with a few conference executives and industry people after the game. At the moment, everybody agreed the event was a major success, not just because it was a great football game featuring talented teams, but because of the venue.

The Hall of Fame Stadium created a very different experience than most D-III athletes were used to. It was much larger, had professional stadium amenities, big ol’ scoreboards, and oh yeah, was right next to the actual dang Pro Football Hall of Fame, which the players got to tour the day before.

It got all of us thinking…there are other D-III bowl games, sure, but where else could you potentially hold an event like the Extra Points Bowl? What other venues could offer a unique experience, sat in the right geographic footprints, and could be affordable and available?

The problem is…there just aren’t that many football stadiums that fit that description. Most of the 20,000ish seat football stadiums out there are, you know, being actively used by another college football team, or aren’t in the right locations, or are too decrepit. It’s not that you can’t play a college football game in a unique setting (like, say, Bristol Speedway), but it’s much harder to pull off.

But what about other sports?

And in a world where basically every single athletic department, from the P4 to D-III, is looking to find new ways to create new revenue streams, build attractive broadcasting inventory and add value to the student experience, everybody should also be thinking about unique locations for one-off events.

I want Extra Points to be in the Solutions Business, not just the Hold Up A Microphone While Other People Complain Business, so in that spirit, I have pulled together a list of unique venues for future sporting events. Please feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.

I understand that having a gym in your church is not a phenomenon unique to the Latter-Day Saint experience, but I would respectfully submit that having a gym in your church is central to the American Latter-Day Saint experience. If you grew up Mormon, or around Mormons, and you liked basketball even a little bit, you probably hooped in the church gym.

The larger LDS meetinghouses, called Stake Centers, usually have full basketball courts with hardwood and scoreboards and the markings in mostly the right places. But in smaller church buildings, like the ones I attended most of my life, the courts are typically much smaller, and for reasons known but to God and some bureaucrats in Salt Lake City, they’re carpeted.

Now, would I take great pleasure in watching a college basketball game crammed into the perpetually stained carpeted Cultural Hall somewhere in rural Ohio? Yes, of course I would. But that wasn’t safe for us idiot teenage boys, and it wouldn’t be safe for elite athletes who actually know how to play basketball.

But playing a game on an actual church basketball court, with hardwood and everything, could serve as an homage to the courts where local members of a community learned to play. It’s a reminder that you don’t need 9,000 seats and a jumbotron to have great competition. You can just set up some chairs for family members (metal folding chairs, of course. IYKYK), throw in a TV camera, and invite Utah Valley to play Utah Tech or something.

Would it take a lot of work to convince some skeptical suits in the Church Education System to throw open a meetinghouse to secular basketball competition? Yeah, probably. Would you need to restrict the event to low-major programs who won’t miss out on quite as much home-game ticket revenue? Yeah, probably. Would you need to tie the event to some local charitable cause? Yeah, probably.

But do I unironically think playing a game in a church would be a cool event that could be deeply meaningful for the right program and community? I do.

I’ve got a few more ideas. But first, a word from our sponsors:

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I am a son of the Midwest, and was naturally trying to think of locations in my old stomping grounds. It isn’t practical to play a basketball game in a cornfield. There isn’t enough room to play in a Casey’s General Store. You might be able to pull it off in a Fleet Farm, but who wants to move all the stuff out of the way?

But you know what we do have in the Midwest? Besides a gazillion high school basketball gyms in Indiana that could seat 10,000 people? FACTORIES.

Would there potentially be significant liability and safety concerns, that would need to be assuaged? Yes, of course. You probably couldn’t pull this off in like, the Owens Corning Super Itchy Insulation Factory, or like, Michigan Rusty Nail and Spikes, LLC. But somewhere, I think you could find the right marriage of location and venue to pull it off.

In fact, let me volunteer a facility not far from where I grew up, a place that I absolutely promise you all is a real building and not a Photoshop.