B2B SaaS · Closed Beta
NILmetrics — institutional-grade valuation for college athlete NIL
The first independent platform that standardizes valuation for college athlete NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) deals — a composite score combining athletic performance, social reach, and market comparables. Think Zestimate, but for NIL.
- Co-Founder & CTO
- Co-founded with Eugene Harris
- Next.js 16 + Postgres + Vercel
- Closed beta with select partners
Overview
NILmetrics is the first independent valuation platform built for the NIL era. Following the NCAA's July 2021 policy change, the college athletics market expanded overnight — with no standardized way to measure athlete value. NILmetrics brings structure, transparency, and consistency to a market that has been operating on intuition and incomplete data.
- Composite score from verifiable inputs: performance, social influence, and market value — not sentiment or crowd-sourced guesses
- ~10,000+ Division I basketball athletes continuously scored across 32 conferences (men's and women's)
- Daily recalculation as new game results, social activity, and verified deals flow in
- Conference- and position-adjusted so comparisons stay fair across sports and programs
Problem
NIL has been live since 2021, but the market still operates without an institutional-grade benchmark. Valuations are inconsistent, fragmented, and largely opaque — and the people making real financial decisions don't have the data they need.
No standard
- Every collective uses its own framework
- Brands rely on follower counts and gut feel
- Agents negotiate without comparable deal benchmarks
Fragmented data
- Performance stats live in one place
- Social metrics live in another
- Deal data is mostly private and unverified
High stakes
- NIL pools and deals are multi-million dollar decisions
- Mispriced offers cost programs and brands real money
- The market moves in real time; valuation should too
The NILmetrics Score
A 0–100 composite score, recalculated daily from three weighted factors. Every input is verifiable, every comparison is normalized, and every score rolls up to a tier the buyer can act on.
| Factor | What it captures |
|---|---|
| Performance Index (40%) | On-field and on-court production, advanced metrics, impact on winning, recent trend, awards and honors — normalized by conference and position |
| Social Influence (30%) | Cross-platform reach, engagement quality, audience demographics, and brand-safety alignment |
| Market Value (30%) | Verified deal data, peer comparables, 12-month earning forecasts, and observable brand demand |
Tier rollups
Elite (90–100)
National-brand-tier athletes with broad reach and verified market demand.
High & Rising (60–89)
Strong programs and breakout talent — where most deal flow happens.
Mid & Base (0–59)
Local and regional opportunities — where collectives and small brands find value.
Buyers & use cases
NILmetrics serves the four stakeholders moving real money in NIL — each with a different reason to need a standardized score.
Collectives & donors
- Allocate the NIL pool across a roster with defensible numbers
- Justify offers to boosters with standardized benchmarks
- Spot rising athletes before the market reprices them
Brands & sponsors
- Evaluate local and national partnership ROI
- Find brand-safe matches with the right audience
- Benchmark deal sizes against peer transactions
Agents
- Negotiate with a defensible market value
- Track client momentum and adjust positioning
- Build deal books with comparables
Coaches & programs
- Roster and budget planning grounded in market reality
- Identify portal targets whose value matches the program's strategy
- Defend retention budgets with concrete numbers
Architecture
A modern Next.js + Postgres stack designed for a small founding team to ship and operate quickly without sacrificing the rigor a B2B SaaS for institutional buyers demands.
Stack choices
- Next.js 16 App Router (Turbopack): marketing site, authenticated dashboard, and admin tools all in one codebase with server components for direct database reads
- Auth.js v5 + JWT sessions: Credentials provider with role-aware sessions for admin, partner, and read-only roles
- PostgreSQL + Drizzle ORM: type-safe schema and queries; compound primary keys on sports tables so men's and women's programs never collide
- Tailwind CSS v4 + shadcn/ui: consistent design system across the marketing surface and the dashboard
- Vercel hosting: zero-config Next.js deploys, preview URLs for every PR, per-request CSP nonces for inline JSON-LD
Data pipeline
The score is only as good as the data behind it. NILmetrics runs three coordinated ingestion modes plus scheduled scoring jobs on GitHub Actions — admin tooling can dispatch backfills via authenticated workflow dispatch, so the team can recover from any data source outage without manual intervention.
| Job | What it does |
|---|---|
| Quick sync (daily) | Pull new games and box scores; recompute scores and dollar projections for affected athletes |
| Full sync (weekly) | Re-validate conferences, teams, and rosters; refresh entities not synced in the last seven days |
| Override sync (manual) | Destructive re-ingest with a windowed look-back, dispatched from the admin panel when source data shifts |
| News discovery (manual) | Surface relevant news articles via RSS pipelines for the editorial and partnerships team |
My role
As Co-Founder & CTO, I own the end-to-end technical platform — scoring engine, ingestion, marketing surface, dashboard, admin tooling, and infrastructure — while Eugene Harris (CEO) drives vision, strategy, and the market relationships that pull it all forward.
- Architected the scoring engine and ingestion pipeline
- Built the marketing surface (hero, live ticker, methodology, market movers, pricing)
- Built the authenticated dashboard and admin tooling
- Designed the data model that keeps men's and women's programs cleanly separated
- Implemented Auth.js v5 with role-aware sessions
- Wired up GitHub Actions for daily/weekly/manual ingestion and scoring
- Built the marketing-copy CMS so the team can iterate copy without redeploys
- Set up CSP, structured data (JSON-LD), and the SEO baseline
Outcomes
Delivered capabilities
- Composite NILmetrics Score with public methodology
- Conference- and position-adjusted normalization
- Tiered rollups (Elite / High / Rising / Mid / Base)
- Live athlete ticker and market-movers surface on the marketing site
- Authenticated dashboard with role-aware access
- Admin tooling with authenticated workflow dispatch
- Daily / weekly / manual ingestion modes on GitHub Actions
- Marketing-copy CMS with database-backed overrides
Building something at the intersection of data and a fast-moving market?
NILmetrics is what happens when a brand-new market needs infrastructure to grow up. If you're building a valuation, scoring, or marketplace platform and want to compare notes, let's talk.