About

Greg Chick, PhD

Researcher, data analyst, and founder of NILnomics — the research, analytics, and consulting platform that follows the money in college sports.

Why I started NILnomics

I spent a decade studying college sports finances at a moment of unprecedented upheaval. NIL rights. Unlimited transfers. Conference realignment. The House settlement. Revenue sharing. Evolving eligibility rules. Each of these changes, on its own, would be a seismic shift for any industry. College athletics absorbed them all at once — and very few people had the tools to explain what was actually happening financially.

I was building those tools throughout my PhD. By the time I graduated, I had assembled a knowledge base, a set of analytical skills, and a proprietary data infrastructure that put me in a position no one else in this space occupies. I'm not a former coach offering opinions. I'm not a lawyer reading contracts. I'm a researcher who spent ten years building the datasets and methods to answer the financial questions that matter — and publishing what I find, whether or not it fits a convenient narrative.

NILnomics is the platform where that work lives. Every issue, every dataset, every visualization is built on a decade of preparation.

Career timeline

The dissertation

My dissertation examined whether NCAA Cost-of-Attendance stipend changes caused measurable effects on institutional COA inflation at Group of Five schools and student loan debt burdens at Power Five schools — using modern causal inference methods designed for staggered policy adoption.

The finding was null — and that matters more than a positive result would have. This was among the first rigorous empirical tests of the financial warnings that the NCAA and opponents of student compensation had been making for years. Their predictions were not supported by the data. I didn’t go looking for a finding that confirmed a preferred conclusion, and I didn’t walk away from a result because it wasn’t dramatic. Publishing null findings — and having the intellectual honesty to challenge an entrenched argument with evidence — is exactly what distinguishes serious research from advocacy dressed up as analysis. That’s the standard I hold NILnomics to.

Want to work together?

Consulting, research partnerships, speaking, and media inquiries.