Charity Bowl Update: We're Gonna Win

An urgent update on the most important and biggest annual charity drive of the year: Eastern Michigan needs your help.

AND GO SHARKS!!!!!!

The Every Day Should Be Saturday Charity Bowl, aka the Charitibundi Bowl, has been one of the most under-discussed charity drives in the nation. Football bloggers who once raised some thousands of dollars 20 years ago for their very first charity drive to help tornado victims have now, regularly, raised over a million dollars in support of refugee resettlement and their living assistance.

New American Pathways, the Atlanta-based organization that receives this help from thousands of donors across the country world. Via Pathways’ 2025 impact report, the organization helped over 15,000 new Americans with anything and anything. Need help filling out an application for a green card? Need to get somebody a job and interview-ready? Need to get kids enrolled in school? Need to get registered to vote? Pathways is there for all that.

Watching the work of this charity drive become a national, cultural device for actual, factual, legitimate good in this country has been really amazing to witness. It’s one thing to be fans of Spencer Hall, Holly Anderson, Ryan Nanni, and Jason Kirk’s work on the Fullcast and at Vox Media websites before, famously, they were no longer with Vox Media.

Did you hear that? Just now, every EDSBS reader just said their personal favorite “too niche” joke to themselves.

No, this charity drive doesn’t get major corporate sponsorships. No, the legacy media and yuppy newspapers don’t usually care to cover this real, beautiful thing Americans get to grab onto and cherish year after year. But it does raise a million dollars. Not every year, but it did in 2024 with $1,171,087 raised. Last year, new record set: $1,370,251!

This year’s Charity Bowl began Monday.

By Wednesday evening, a sum of one million dollars was thrown into the hat.

As of this writing, and still with a day (plus a weekend) to go, this year’s Charity Bowl has raised $1,117,740 from 3,702 total donors! That’s a lot of cheese!

Here’s how the bowl works. It starts and ends with a closed circle of love and hate. You love helping others. You also love being the leader of great and amazing change that this country and our world requires. You also hate your rival. Put those two together in the form of, say, a meaningful score.

My very first donation to this bowl drive came in 2019. It wasn’t much, but it’s also in-line with what the majority of donors throw in $29.23, plus processing fees. At that point, Eastern Michigan had come off a 7-6 season that included a loss at Western Michigan. With that in mind, I looked back to the last time EMU had won in Kalamazoo. At that time, it 2012 was still the last EMU at WMU win, and that game was a doozie. It included quarterback-turned-wide receiver Alex Gillett getting a clutch receiving score in the second score. Anyways, I just took the final score from that game, 29-23, into the donation amount.

Pretty simple, right?

But you can get creative with your donations. You can even self-loathe if dunking on a rival school isn’t what you want to honor. On Wednesday’s episode of the Fullcast, the group said that a UMass donor gave money for each loss the program has ever had. If that donor gave one dollar for each loss, that’s $661 before processing fees!

How much has EMU contributed?

Thanks to the moneycannon.org tool, we can see that EMU’s currently 6th in the MAC with $704 donated. Miami’s ahead of the rest of the conference by a lot with $3,214 donated, followed by WMU ($2,498), Buffalo ($1,808), Bowling Green ($1,427), and UMass ($963) all in the league’s top five.

A screenshot of the current MAC standings:

Overall, Michigan is the gold standard for this charity drive. Michigan fans have a lot of money and the attitudes to want to be dominant in this event.

Right now, Michigan sits atop the CharitiBundi Bowl leaderboard with $239,320 donated.

But not too far behind Michigan is maybe a sleeping giant? That’s right, Protect Trans Kids University is right there with $170,520 donated, the only other school in the country to have six digits worth of donations contributed.

Your current top 10:

This year, I’ve decided to make a $44.14 donation in honor of Noah Kim’s 4,414 total college passing yards as he enters his seventh year of ball (second at EMU). After processing fees, that ended up being $45.31.

And, like last year, I’m going to make a second donation later. But it’ll be reserved for PTKU support, sort of like last year.

TAKE ALL OF THIS AS A CALL-TO-ACTION: Get creative and make a donation! Brag about your donation online! Brag about your donation to your family! Beat the smoke out of Central! Let’s get EMU (and PTKU) as high up on this leaderboard as we possibly can. Remember: there literally is no such thing as an amount “too small.”