Hey everyone. Quick update. I was featured on the latest episode of uNILateral Decision:
You can click on the tweet above or go straight to Youtube if you want to watch it.
Now onto this week’s issue.
Every athletic department in the country now employs people whose job is to make its athletes visible. Creative studios, content teams, photographers embedded at practice, graphics packages built for a phone screen rather than a scoreboard. The pitch to recruits is explicit: come here and we will build your brand.
I wanted to know what that produces.
For this issue I worked with Student Athlete Score (SAS), which built one of the first platforms tracking NIL and social media performance across college athletics — brand deals, follower growth, engagement, and audience demographics, down to the individual player. Multimedia rights holders and scouting organizations already use it to evaluate athlete value. They gave me database access and walked me through the tooling.
Just to be clear - I was given full access to their database and maintain complete editorial independence on the analysis you have in front of you. It is a unique and powerful dataset that, combined with my institutional financial data, provides a perspective on college football you won’t see anywhere else.
The goal of this analysis is to understand the relationship between the size and strength of players' online personas and the financial machine behind each team. I went in with a naive sense of what the data would say — in 2026 we all think we know how this works. I also wanted to know what a player's social media record actually tells us about his position in the college football hierarchy.
Let's see if I hit the mark.