How We Compute NIL Spend

What “NIL Spending” Means Here

NIL spending on The Sideline is the estimated total annual dollars flowing to athletes at a Division I program from three buckets:

1. Revenue-sharing payments: direct payments from the school to athletes under the House v. NCAA settlement framework, capped at $20.5M per school in the 2025–26 athletic year.
2. Collective budgets:donor- and booster-funded payments that flow through the program's affiliated NIL collective(s).
3. Third-party deals: verified brand, endorsement, and personal-services contracts signed by athletes at the program.

It does not include scholarship value, cost-of-attendance stipends, or general athletic department revenue. We measure money that goes to athletes for NIL, nothing else.

Where the Numbers Come From

Every figure on the tracker is built from named, public reporting. Never proprietary scrapers or algorithmic guesses. We pull from:

• •On3 NIL Valuation
• •247Sports NIL
• •Front Office Sports
• •The Athletic
• •CBS Sports NIL coverage
• •ESPN
• •Sportico (Sports Valuations)
• •Yahoo Sports (Ross Dellenger)
• •Public state NIL disclosure filings

Each program-level figure is cross-referenced against at least two independent published reportsbefore being added. Discrepancies are flagged in the “source notes” field on each school's profile page.

Update Cadence

• Continuously: new deals are added as named reporters publish them.
• Daily: transfer-portal NIL signings are reconciled with the portal tracker.
• Major refresh: once per portal window (December and April) and once mid-summer when collective budgets are reported.
• Versioning: every figure carries a “last verified” date visible on the school profile page.

Per-Player Allocation

The NIL market is power-law: a small number of publicly reported deals account for most of the dollars, and the long tail makes hundreds to low thousands of dollars per year. We model that directly in two layers:

1. Reported-player database: a hand-built list of ~965 athletes compiled from thousands of public reports (beat writers, recruiting media, collective announcements, athletic-department statements, transfer-portal coverage). When a roster player matches, the reported value is shown exactly. No model is applied. This database refreshes as new reporting lands.
2. Tier-based estimator: every other roster player is bucketed by ESPN roster depth into one of five tiers (star, starter, rotation, depth, walk-on), each with hard absolute USD ranges per sport. A football “walk-on” tier maxes at $500 regardless of school. No uncovered estimate ever exceeds $95K. Values above that require direct public reporting before they appear on the site.
3. The school's NIL scale shifts the tier band 0.15× to 1.5×. Texas-tier programs reach the high end of each tier; low-majors are pulled toward the floor. A player can never escape their tier.
4. After the reported values are subtracted from the school's sport pool, the residual pool further scales uncovered players. A school that has spent most of its pool on confirmed deals shows lower estimates for the rest; a school with lots of unspent room shows a modest bump (capped at 1.6×).
5. Position, class year, and jersey number nudge the estimate ±25% within the tier.
6. Every estimated value is rendered as a tier range, not a single number, so the page never reads as a precise dollar figure.

Trade-off: the tier estimator deliberately under-estimates uncovered stars (5-star freshmen who haven't shown up in public reporting yet). That is a better failure mode than over-estimating deep-roster walk-ons. When we spot a missing star, we add the player once direct public reporting supports the value.

Limitations & Known Gaps

We are honest about what the data is and is not:

• NIL contracts are not publicly filed. Even the best public reporting is an estimate, so we report ranges and use the midpoint when sourced ranges agree.
• Collective budgets fluctuate. A program with a strong fundraising fall may have a higher mid-season number than the public budget suggests.
• Service academies (Army, Navy, Air Force) do not participate in NIL by federal law; they are tracked at $0 with that note.
• Ivy League schools do not offer revenue sharing but their athletes do third-party NIL. Those programs are tracked under third-party deals only.

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