NIL Player Value

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There has been a lot of talk about Jaden Rashada’s NIL deal that fell apart with Florida, but there’s really just one thing that concerns me about the entire saga: it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how to calculate NIL player value.

The reason I say that is no matter where you go, you can find players and analysts quick to give their opinion about whether Rashada was worth the reported $13.75 million deal. What you don’t find in all of that discussion is any sort of detailed analysis of what Rashada – or any other recruit – is actually worth.

And let’s be honest, Chris Doering’s take on paying players for what they’ve done for the program instead of recruits makes sense emotionally, but it doesn’t make sense economically or statistically. It’s really, really clear that elite recruiting leads to winning. Thus, elite recruits have value even if they never turn out. In fact, that may be the time when an elite recruit has maximum value, and so he should take advantage of it.

A program can spend its time being an old man yelling at the clouds about how players shouldn’t be paid until they’ve come on campus and performed, or it can embrace the way things work. Markets, albeit imperfect, have entered the world of college football. The question is no longer how much a player will get paid.

It’s making sure you have a strategy in place to ensure the greatest return on your investment.

Valuation Methodology

The first thing you have to determine when trying to decide what a player is worth is the methodology you’re going to use to determine that number.

For instance, how do you value different positions on the field? Do you have a way of quantifying the value brought from a QB versus a running back? Or do you just assume that a 5-star running back is worth the exact same as a 5-star QB? We all know qualitatively that the QB is more valuable. But how much more?

Additionally, I’ve beaten the drum that elite recruits (top-30) end up as NFL players and college football difference makers significantly more often than players ranked just slightly below. But if you have the opportunity to sign multiple players ranked 50th versus one player ranked 15th, how do you make that choice?

Next up is acknowledging that every program and/or collective has limits. You could just go blow recruits out of the water with enormous bids, but if you don’t have the funds to cover those bids, you’re in trouble. Likewise, if you never step up to the plate to make a serious bid, then you’re left out of the conversation altogether. How do you decide who to bid on, how to distribute your funds and at what point you walk away?

Finally, the last thing to consider is team chemistry. This is something that analytically-inclined folks like myself struggle to quantify, but that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. How would Florida’s roster have received a guy like Rashada making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month when a star running back or wide receiver is getting free pizza and a leased car?

All of these have to be taken into consideration in their totality when we’re talking about how to value players. There likely isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all solution for every program, but what I aim to do here is give guidelines on a general thought process that can lead to successfully evaluating each NIL opportunity.

Positional Adjustments

When we’re trying to determine the worth of a QB versus an edge rusher or a wide receiver versus a running back, fortunately we have a pretty good model to follow.

The NFL publishes its salary data and we can assume that it rewards its best players who have gone beyond their rookie contracts based on the market demand for their services. Certainly, the NFL is a capped league and the extremes might be a little bit more muted that a pure open market, but as a first approximation of player value, I think trusting NFL general managers is probably a good place to start.

This is the data heading into the 2022 season for the NFL’s top-10 paid players at each position. The absolute dollar numbers aren’t that important to me, but rather the ratios that clearly indicate excess value you get for players ranked highly at each individual position.

What I mean by excess value is that if the 15th ranked player in the country is a safety and you place his value at $1 million, a QB with the same ranking should be valued more than 2.5-times the safety. There are additional adjustments that need to be made to these numbers to truly make them completely relevant (for example, you only need one QB but would likely want 3-4 star wide receivers), but this shows that “they have three 5-stars” is a simplistic analysis when it comes to overall class value.

Where those 5-stars play and how much your collective had to pay them should be a major factor in whether you bring them in.

Top Recruiting Classes

Any methodology trying to determine what it takes to get a championship winning class needs to establish that top-5 classes are necessary to reach that level. Why? Well, in the playoff era, every single national champion (2014-2022) has come out of the top-5 recruiting programs over that timespan.

I use 247Sports’ rankings for these sorts of analyses because I have historical data that I’ve built with them over the past few years. They also use an algorithm that skews heavily towards the elite recruits for their point totals, which makes sense beyond just using average player ratings because those players consistently bring more on-field value.

As such, we can determine how much a player contributes to a top-5 recruiting class by understanding how many points they bring to a recruiting class and how many points are necessary to reach that top-5 threshold. Historically, that point total has been around 290 to get to that level.

So if the top player (in 2023, that was Texas’ Arch Manning) is valued at 29.95 points, just signing Manning takes you 10.3 percent of the way to a top-5 class. The value drops precipitously if we go to Texas’ sixth best recruit – safety Derek Williams – who is ranked 48th overall nationally but is valued at “only” 23.73 points, or 8.2 percent of the way to a top-5 class. And if we go to the last blue-chip player on Texas’ board – OT Trevor Goosby (410th nationally) – he’s valued at 3.24 points, or 1.1 percent of a top-5 class.

Because classes are limited to around 25 players per year, you can see the problem with filling out a class and only talking about blue-chip ratio. Goosby may turn out to be a great player, but 25 players of his ranking only gets you a quarter of the way to what is necessary to win a championship. You need 12 players of Williams’ ilk to get there. You “only” need 9 of Manning’s skill level to get there. Obviously, you can’t sign the number one player 9 times, but the point is that the elite recruits do the lion’s share of the work when compiling a top-5 class.

Because the data is out there about these players’ rankings and we know how much they contribute to a top class, we can develop an algorithm of our own to take positional and rankings value into account. Whether you like 247’s valuation or have some other proprietary valuation tool is really immaterial. You have to be able to place some sort of value on every individual player if you’re going to make decisions.

Player Valuation & Constraints

Now we get to the fun part.

If all you had to do was determine a player’s value and pay them that, NIL would be easy. Essentially, it would be the New York Yankees model back in the 1990s where the Yanks annually had a huge spending advantage on every other team in MLB.

In some ways, College Football may have that exact scenario. The Wisconsins and TCUs of the world may get into a battle over a recruit from time-to-time, but they’re going to be outgunned. But in the SEC, my expectation is that most of the big boys are going to have fairly equal NIL wallets. If you’re bidding on the same players, that means prices will rise until someone taps out.

There are somewhere around 30 5-star players every season. Let’s say we have 15 programs that are truly bidding for a top-5 class at any time, that means they should value those players similarly and are going to drive the price up if they each want more than two 5-stars.

Additionally, NIL is not going to be the most important part of the decision-making process for every player. Florida commit D.J. Lagway made it very clear that while he expects NIL dollars to come, he isn’t using that as a lever for making decision. That means traditional recruiting and relationship building will still have its place.

So how much money is chasing after these guys? Is it $20 million? $30 million? It’s a little bit unclear. What that means is we have to ground ourselves in the values we can get (the rumored Iamaleava deal at $8 million is a good place to start) and then adjust both positionally and rankings-wise to see what a “good” price would be for a given player.

This is why I say that the player valuation aspect of the Rashada NIL deal is what concerned me the most. You don’t need to be a math whizz to understand why Rashada (~50th ranked player nationally at the time of his flip to UF) getting $13+ million is a bad deal when Iamaleava (ranked 4th overall) is reportedly getting $8 million.

But you do need to understand how your organization values players to evaluate how bad of a deal it really was.

I’ve put together the above chart that details how I would value players given their recruiting rankings for a 4-year career. The chart is anchored on the deal in The Athletic as well as positional adjustments from how the NFL values those positions as discussed above. There are other adjustments I’ve made to try to tease some other variables out, but I’m not sure those make a huge difference for this particular exercise.

What we can see is that there is a huge separation between QBs and everyone else. That shouldn’t be a surprise given the value of the position. Other than specialists, everyone else is somewhere in the middle pretty tightly bunched together, crossing the million dollar threshold (for a career) somewhere around 0.98 in the 247Sports player rating. This year, that was the 42nd ranked player in the country (Kelby Collins, 0.9812, Florida commit).

When the player rating drops to 0.96 (Tony Rojas, 86th ranked player, 0.9605, Penn State commit), you’re down to an NIL valuation probably somewhere around $160,000. In many ways, I suspect this is why Napier was able to obtain a much higher average player rating than Dan Mullen. Relationships are going to be a lot more important once you drop down from a seven-figure valuation to a six-figure one and all accounts are Napier is really good at building those.

But if we get back to Rashada, his highest ever ranking was 43rd nationally on July 18, 2022 (0.9808). If you use the chart above to determine what his NIL deal should have been at the time, you arrive at a value of $2.5 million (again, for a 4-year career) even with the QB positional adjustment.

Certainly, there might be times a collective would decide to stretch for a player who is coveted or that the staff has a much more favorable evaluation on. But the reported $13.75 million dollar deal is a 550 percent overpay.

Takeaway

NIL is a tricky business and the landscape is going to be always changing.

Just this week the Florida legislature has changed the rules to allow coaches to help facilitate deals from associated collectives. Texas A&M’s booster club – the 12th Man Foundation – has decided to get into the NIL business to help facilitate deals. And perhaps most importantly, a hearing was held in Philadelphia for Johnson vs. NCAA that, given the tone of the hearing, suggests that NCAA players are going to be considered employees in the next year or two.

That’s why having people around the program who can help navigate a strategy to determine player valuations is so critical. As the structure of both NIL itself and the organizations tasked with executing deals changes, so will player value.

The Rashada situation gave Florida  black eye in a lot of ways, but the biggest was this: most of us who follow this stuff closely didn’t initially believe the reports of a $13 million deal for Rashada because it was so far out of bounds from what any sort of even simple player valuation model would suggest he should be worth.

That speaks to the lack of strategic vision I wrote about a few weeks ago, and makes me nervous that even if the program resolves all of its issues associated with NIL today, there won’t be the right strategy in place to adjust when NIL inevitably changes tomorrow.

Because make no mistake, the way players are compensated is going to change a lot over the next 5-10 years. It’s not a coincidence that after the courts put the NCAA on blast in NCAA vs. Alston that all of a sudden, the SEC welcomed Texas and Oklahoma and the Big Ten pillaged the Pac 12 for USC and UCLA.

It’s also not a coincidence that Nick Saban complained last offseason about Jimbo Fisher buying players. Saban didn’t do that to get under Fisher’s skin (though that was an entertaining side benefit). He did it to tell his donor base that the landscape of college football had changed and that he needed their help to fundraise. A year after Texas A&M signed eight 5-star players, Alabama just signed nine.

That is the goal for Florida. That’s going to require fundraising, relationship building between coaches and recruits, facilities improvements, support staff support, coordination with collectives and a commitment to making sure that the 2024 class – already way ahead of the past two classes – finishes up among the elite.

But all of that starts with understanding how to properly value players in the era of NIL.

Kaleb Boateng

Former Clemson and UF offensive lineman Kaleb Boateng died last week, reportedly via suicide.

We’ll never know exactly what led Boating to take his life. By all accounts he was a genuine person who made an impact on those he knew well. But the similarities between Boating’s story and one I read a few years ago about San Francisco Giant baseball player Drew Robinson has been echoing in my mind ever since I heard of Boateng’s passing.

During the COVID-19 shutdown, Robinson shot himself in the head and even though it blew out half of his face, it didn’t kill him. He wandered around his apartment trying to decide whether he wanted to finish the job or call for help. Nearly 20 hours later, he finally decided to call 911.

Cops broke down his door because they couldn’t believe someone would survive and that it must be a setup. As they were waiting for the ambulance to arrive, one of the cops asked: “Why’d you shoot yourself?” Drew replied: “because I hate myself.”

Every time I read that last line, it takes my breath away.

Robinson was a high-level athlete. He was someone who appeared to have it all yet was tormented inside. The self-doubt and anxiety that consumed him is palpable in the ESPN piece describing his ordeal. We often think those who are gifted are immune, but often they’re gifted because of the doubt that has been driving them for years.

When I was a student at UF, I came home from class one day to towels strewn all over the apartment covered in blood. My roommate and his truck were missing but I had no idea where he had gone. Maybe five minutes after I got home, I got a call that he had driven himself to the hospital because he had been cutting himself and the bleeding had gotten out of control.

At that moment, I froze.

I had no idea what to do. When his father called to see whether I knew why he would have been depressed, I had no idea what to say. I was filled with feelings of guilt so intense that I don’t know how to start to describe them. I mean, how could I not have seen that coming?

One of the things that would have really helped me in that moment is if I had been able to read Drew Robinson’s story. After his suicide attempt, he went back to his apartment and walked his family through the 20 hours after he shot himself. He then told them they could ask him anything. The two questions in the story are both comforting and heartbreaking.

What could I have done?

Nothing, it was my responsibility, not yours.

How come I didn’t know?

Because I was good at hiding my sadness.

He is correct. Folks who are hurting that badly have gotten to that place because they are good at hiding it. But that doesn’t make it any easier. The guilt rips at you in a way that makes you doubt everything about yourself and shakes the foundations of your very identity.

So I’m going to pray for Kaleb Boateng’s family; that they’d be surrounded by people who love them and loved Kaleb, that they would find great joy in the memories that they have of him and that they would stand firm in the realization that the stories of his life and the impact he had on others will carry on.

And I’m going to pray for Kaleb. That his soul is with God. That he knows how much those close to him cared about him. And that he is finally at peace.

RIP, Kaleb.

Editor’s note: If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.