A billion-dollar market with the lights off
Every other major sports league settled this question long ago. In the NFL, the NBA, and Major League Baseball, contract values are public. Players, agents, and front offices all negotiate against the same visible comparables, and that shared information is what makes the market a market rather than a series of private, lopsided conversations.
College sports now moves comparable money — through revenue sharing, collective deals, and direct agreements — but it moves that money in the dark. An athlete sits across from a coach or a collective and is handed a figure, with no independent way to know whether it’s fair, generous, or a fraction of what the market would bear. A program commits eight figures across a roster with no public benchmark to budget against. The people with the most information set the terms, and everyone else takes their word for it.
Information asymmetry isn’t a glitch in this system. It’s the default. For a market this large, we think that’s the wrong default.
What we do
The NIL Standard publishes an independent valuation for players across all of Power 4 football, and across Power 4, Big East, and select men’s basketball programs — with projections for the incoming recruits who will join them. The same valuation is calculated for everyone by the same rules: no favoritism, no thumb on the scale.
A valuation is an estimate of market value — think of it the way you’d think of a home’s estimated worth, not its closing price. It’s produced by a proprietary model, and we explain how that model works and what goes into it. What we don’t do is publish private contracts or claim to know the terms of any individual deal. And when a player or their representatives report a real, confirmed figure, it replaces our estimate — the reported number always wins over the model.
We hold one line above all others, so we’ll state it plainly.
We value. The only real deal figures here are the ones players report themselves, and we confirm those before they replace our estimate.
And where we can’t value a player with confidence, we show no number rather than a misleading one.
Who the standard serves
Athletes and the people who represent them
This is the heart of it. An 18-year-old and their family should not have to take any single party’s word for what they’re worth. An independent benchmark gives the least-informed side of the table something to stand on — the same kind of comparable data that agents and advisors in professional sports have relied on for decades. When both sides can see the market, the negotiation gets fairer. That’s the outcome we care about most.
Schools and collectives
The people building these rosters now operate under real budget constraints, allocating limited resources across dozens of players. General managers, cap strategists, and collectives need an outside reference point — a way to benchmark an offer, sanity-check an internal number, and understand how the rest of the market is valuing a position before committing to it. A transparent standard makes disciplined roster-building possible.
The public
Roster construction has become a budgeting exercise, and fans now follow it like one — debating whether a program found value in the portal, whether a recruiting class justifies its billing, how one team’s roster stacks up against a rival’s. The NIL Standard gives the public real figures to understand how the sport’s new economics actually work, so that conversation runs on data rather than speculation. Our aim is to make the system legible, not to reduce any individual athlete to a number.
How the standard gets better
A standard is only as valuable as it is accurate, and accuracy comes from engagement.
Athletes and their representatives can verify a listing and report real figures. The professionals who build rosters for a living compare notes with us and pressure-test our assumptions. Every reported figure and every well-argued challenge sharpens the model. We treat the methodology as something that earns trust over time — we refine it continuously and explain how it works, even though the model itself is ours to protect.
The clearest signal that this standard is needed is who shows up to improve it. When the people closest to the money — athletes, the agents who represent them, and the front offices spending it — choose to engage with the standard, that tells us two things: the transparency is wanted, and it’s worth getting right.
What we stand for
Independence
The NIL Standard is not affiliated with the NCAA, any conference, school, collective, or athlete. We do not hold a stake in the deals we value, and we never take one. The NIL Standard is self-funded and is not monetized: there is no paid product, subscription, advertising, or data licensing, and no outside investors or institutional backers. Independence is the entire reason a standard earns the right to be the standard.
Transparency
We explain how the model works and apply it consistently, and every valuation we publish can be challenged or corrected. The model itself is our own — but a number no one is allowed to question isn’t a benchmark, it’s just an assertion.
Respect
These valuations describe real people, most of them young, many of them navigating life-changing decisions for the first time. We hold ourselves to language and judgment that reflect that — and we make it easy for any athlete to update, dispute, or remove their listing.
The standard
The professional leagues all reached a point where one independent benchmark became the shared reference everyone could rely on — players, agents, and front offices alike. College athletics, now a market of the same scale, deserves the same. The NIL Standard is built to be that reference: the neutral, trusted standard every side of the table can point to with confidence.
What we measure
Our valuations estimate a player’s total annual market value in the post-House Settlement era, combining the NIL and revenue-share streams rather than splitting them. The numbers are model estimates, not reported deal data. When a deal is credibly reported by a major outlet with clear primary sourcing, we use the reported figure and cite the source. When a widely-repeated number doesn’t hold up against primary reporting, we revise it rather than anchor to the loudest figure.
Full methodology is published at /football/methodology and /basketball/methodology, including how we calibrate our model against market reference points.
How we operate
The NIL Standard is built by a small editorial team focused on methodology rigor and editorial restraint. We don’t claim insider access. We don’t publish unverified collective rumors. We keep our individual contributors out of the spotlight so the data and methodology stand on their own — the work is the credential.
Editorial standards
When we make editorial errors, we correct them publicly and update the source data. Our model is calibrated against the deals we can verify — through public reporting when available, and through direct submissions from players, agents, and collectives when those sources prefer privacy. When players or programs raise concerns about a published valuation, we engage through the channels published at /verify, and we honor reasonable opt-out requests on the same timeline.
Who reads The NIL Standard
Our valuations are followed across college football and men’s basketball — by coaching and personnel staff at Power 4 programs, by agents and collective operators, and by members of the media who cover the sport. That kind of audience holds our numbers to a high standard, which is exactly how we want it. Every figure is an independent estimate, not an official financial disclosure; we publish the methodology behind it, and when better information shows we’ve missed, we correct the record in public.
If you work for a program, represent a player, or run a collective — and you believe an estimate is off, or you want to share reported figures so a number reflects reality — we want to hear from you.
Get in touch
- press@thenilstandard.com
- Media inquiries, interviews, podcast bookings
- /verify
- Update your number, dispute it, add a deal, or take it off the site
- concerns@thenilstandard.com
- Player or program concerns with a published valuation