That's Not Actually a List of NIL's Top Earners
Stop the Madness 🤪
I can’t take it anymore . Hahaha. And now I’m feeling forced to write about something that I don’t even care about - the size of student-athletes’ NIL deals.
But I must, because I can’t let us continue a false and inaccurate dialogue about NIL - whether in the media or at the water cooler - as if it’s the truth.
Ok, here it is…
The definition of “valuation” is an estimation of something's worth, usually carried out by a professional appraiser.
An NIL valuation does not mean what a student-athlete has made on NIL deals. It’s an estimate of what they could make.
Actual Value Data Does Not Exist
The gold standard in professional appraisals in NIL is On3.com. Their valuation, as well as other third parties, does not equal the sum total sum of an individual student-athlete’s NIL transactions.
If it did, that would be something called “actual value.” Actual value is defined as the real worth of something, based on the amount of money someone paid for it on an open and fair market.
So we need to stop publishing (or misrepresenting) lists like, “Top NIL earners in NCAA,” in Yahoo!Sports just a few days ago. (I don’t know the journalist and I’m not picking on him. This was just the most recent article I saw - but I see 3-5 of these every week.)
We do not have evidence or data that this list is of the top earners. Some athletes on this list have been known to turn down deals. Others have done deals whose compensation total we don’t know.
We have very little actual value data for individual student-athletes. So we can’t publish an accurate list of top earners even if we wanted to.
Why We Don’t Have Deal Data
While some state laws and university policies require student-athletes to submit their deal info to their school, most school officials say (off the record) that they think they are collecting info on less than half of the deals being done by their athletes.
Universities are not required to publish the info they collect or share it with the public.
NIL marketplaces like Opendorse collect aggregate data, not individual deal data. (And even if they did, why would that be any of our business?)
There is no other third party collecting individual deal data.
And finally, athletes (and their agents) don’t have a requirement to release the information and brands with athlete marketing experience never do.
So the next time you read a headline about what a student-athlete (or list of student-athletes) has made, double check to see if what you are being fed is a valuation or an actual value of an NIL transaction.
Bill Carter is an NIL Consultant, Educator, and Speaker. He is a NIL Columnist for Sports Business Journal and teaches NIL in College Sports at the University of Vermont’s Grossman School of Business. Click here to read about Bill’s NIL Consulting and NIL Education for sports organizations, universities, and brands.