NIL Education and Information Center to create central NIL database

One of the biggest challenges in the first 13 months of the NCAA’s NIL era has been the lack of verifiable, industry-wide data. It’s an issue the NIL Education and Information Center, Inc., and Arizona State‘s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication will work to overcome through a central, anonymized database.

Former West Virginia quarterback and athletic director Oliver Luck and Bill Squadron, an assistant professor of sport management at Elon and the former president of Bloomberg Sports, incorporated the NIL Education and Information Center as a nonprofit corporation in September 2020.

“You see a lot of anecdotal information and individual headlines here or there about a supposed deal,” Squadron told On3. “I think there is really a need for a systematic, empirical, objective way to understand how the market is operating. That’s the goal of this initiative.”

Salesforce and Elon University are also participating in the initiative.

“Salesforce clearly has as strong a track record in safeguarding individual, confidential information as any entity on the planet, so I think they’re a great partner in that respect,” Squadron said.

NIL technology providers could participate

Squadron said he and Luck have had “very productive, positive conversations” with several major NIL technology providers and marketplaces, including Icon Source, INFLCR and Opendorse. The companies could potentially contribute anonymized NIL activity data.

“Everyone is supportive conceptually of the need to have a reliable and accurate picture of what’s happening in the market,” Squadron said. “We’re very optimistic that all the key platforms will participate. One thing we’ve heard consistently, really from everybody, is this will be a much more respected and critical environment if it’s transparent and people understand exactly how it’s working.”

INFLCR and Opendorse periodically release company-wide data, which helped to provide takeaways from the first 12 months of NIL activities. Individually, however, the two competitors each have data from a segment of the market. Individual universities, such as Ohio State and Kentucky, release general data about the number of NIL activities in which their athletes have engaged. A single school is obviously responsible for an even smaller slice of the overall pie compared to third-party providers that have contracts with numerous schools.

Benefits of a centralized database

There’s currently a push and pull between privacy and transparency in the NIL landscape. Alabama coach Nick Saban recently asked for more transparency while state and federal laws often protect details of NIL deals — sometimes from the NCAA.

In theory, a centralized, anonymized database would compile data from as many of these separate sources as possible. This could have numerous benefits for a variety of stakeholders. Athletes could achieve a better understanding of their market value by accessing the collective data from their peers.

Individual data would be protected.

“I think that the biggest thing, too, for us athletes is starting to create an open space of being able to share the different deals that we’ve done and being able to learn from each other,” Duke runner Emily Cole told On3 at the NIL Summit. “If you can find someone that has done other deals and ask them, and hopefully they’ll be vulnerable enough to be able to share that with you. That could be invaluable going into your negotiations with other companies, being like, ‘Look, they got this, so I’m not going to go any lower than this.'”

Cole later described the value of a centralized database.

“If you can put in all of your information, solo, and know that it’s protected but be able to see the congregate average of everyone else, that would be immense,” she said.

NIL Education and Information Center to provide transparency

A central database from the NIL Education and Information Center could also provide more high-level transparency, which is something for which some administrators and coaches have asked. Depending on the level of access to the database, stakeholders could better contextualize the market and where future NIL deals that are announced publicly fall in the landscape.

“The goal will be to provide both privacy for individual deals with accuracy for how the market is operating,” Squadron said. “What I mean by that, the idea will be to present it in a way that’s anonymized in aggregate but broken down by various categories so people can have an understanding of how it’s operating by a particular sport or by a particular conference.”

Squadron said the level of access and the particular data fields that will be available is still to be determined. The NIL Education and Information Center’s goal is to release its first report sometime in 2023.

NIL Education and Information Center finds new purpose

The NIL Education and Information Center, which has a listed address in downtown Indianapolis, Indiana, was a finalist when the NCAA was considering the use of a third-party administrator to act as a sort of NIL clearinghouse. Squadron said there were three or four finalists.

The NCAA didn’t go through with the idea. There were concerns about potential conflicts of interest at the time.

“The NCAA just made a determination for its own reasons to end that process,” Squadron said. “There is obviously a lot of thought about why they did that.”

With the database, the NIL Education and Information Center could provide a similar function to the proposed third-party administrator, although it won’t be directly tied to the NCAA or responsible for compliance aspects.

Squadron was hesitant to single out any particular benefit from NIL Education and Information Center’s database initiative, largely because it’s the first of its kind and there will be numerous benefits, many of which could be unforeseen.

“Typically, the things that you find are the things you least expect,” Squadron said. “It’s not something I would want to predict. I just think that people involved in policy roles, people involved in administrative and governance roles, all the stakeholders in this entire market are going to be interested to understand how the market’s operating and each of them may have a different, particular interest.”