NCAA’s ‘NIL Assist’ provides transparency — and raises concerns

The NCAA launched NIL Assist a few weeks ago. Ben Portnoy here at SBJ wrote an excellent piece on the effort. While I’m underwhelmed with NIL Assist’s NIL education portal, I think the service provider registry and disclosure elements will prove valuable. 

Because NIL compensation data has been lacking until now, I’m most interested in the platform’s Data Dashboard — an app that allows users to find the average and median NIL earnings by transaction type (social media, appearances, etc.), subdivision (FBS, FCS, etc.), sport, and athletic position. The platform does not allow users to sort by gender, which I can only assume was intentional — more on that in a minute.

By making the Data Dashboard public, the NCAA has increased transparency into the NIL deal landscape. Spend a few minutes on the platform and you are likely to rethink some of your beliefs about the size and distribution of NIL deals.