Vanderbilt QB Mike Wright signs NIL deal with Recruiting Analytics

Vanderbilt quarterback Mike Wright ran the fastest verified max speed among college football quarterbacks this season, according to the sports tech and data company Recruiting Analytics. It’s fitting then that Recruiting Analytics recently announced an NIL deal with Wright.

In Vanderbilt’s Week 0 win over Hawaii, Wright reached 21.8 miles per hour on an 87-yard touchdown run down the sideline. He scored four total touchdowns with 163 rushing yards and 146 passing yards in the game. In a win the following week over Elon, Wright scored six total touchdowns.

“There’s no doubt about it that you know with Mike and Recruiting Analytics, we’re both synonymous with speed, so it’s a perfect and natural fit,” Recruiting Analytics co-founder and CEO Cory Yates said during a recent Zoom interview with On3.

Yates first met the Vanderbilt quarterback when the the Recruiting Analytics co-founder coached a seventh-grade all-star team in Atlanta, with Wright starting at quarterback. Yates had a firsthand view of Wright’s leadership traits and a family about which Yates said he couldn’t say enough good things.

“It makes a lot of sense given what we’re trying to do as a company to position ourselves for the future in some marketing initiatives that we have top of mind to align ourselves with elite athletes that have high character, like Mike,” Yates said.

Recruiting Analytics helps high school, college programs

Recruiting Analytics’ strategy is to try to deliver best-in-class “NFL-like metrics” to high school and college football programs. The company’s goal is to take the guesswork out of advanced scouting, such as projecting a player’s 40-yard dash time to his actual playing speed.

In addition to verifying top-end speed, another example of the application of Recruiting Analytics’ data is measuring an EDGE rusher’s ability to convert speed to power. Recruiting Analytics tracks players’ peak momentum force, which is measured in pounds.

Players are also ranked on a percentile scale against their peers.

“We’re helping these college football programs evaluate talent more accurately by analyzing video to assess and measure athleticism,” Yates said. “That’s the core of what we do.”

Recruiting Analytics collects in-game data for specific position groups. Quarterback, however, isn’t one of them.

“It only makes sense to partner and align ourselves with athletes such as Mike, who not only, again, are high-character individuals who happen to play football at a really high level, it allows us the opportunity to lean in to his brain power to better understand what goes into making an elite athlete at that position,” Yates said. “So what a great partnership that this makes for both Mike, as well as us, as we dive deeper into the traits that make up an elite quarterback.”

Yates described Recruiting Analytics’ NIL deal with Wright as the first of many. The company will announce more in the next few weeks.

Yates said Recruiting Analytics’ criteria for evaluating potential collegiate brand partners starts with an individual’s character. “We want to make sure that we protect our brand,” he said.

A player’s performance on the field isn’t the determining factor, Yates said, but it does matter.

“We want to make sure that we align ourselves with those athletes that, for us, when we look at their in-game athleticism score… we want to look for athletes that score high relative to our metrics,” Yates said. “Because we’ve done studies and research that says, ‘You know what, if an athlete has a high in-game athleticism score that the likelihood that they go on to have success at the collegiate level is pretty high and then it’s also an early indicator for going on to play on Sundays.'”