Methodology & Disclaimer

How your NIL Rating is calculated, and what it isn't.

Disclaimer: This is an estimated valuation for informational purposes only, based on self-reported data and a proprietary scoring model. This is NOT a guarantee of earnings, an offer of NIL compensation, or financial/legal advice. Breakout NIL is not an agent, advisor, or NIL collective.

The formula

Your NIL Rating is a 0-100 number built from four weighted sub-scores:

final_score = (performance × 0.34) + (social × 0.30) + (market × 0.21) + (virality × 0.15)

Performance Score — 34%

Your three key stats for your position and sport are compared against floor/average/elite benchmarks for a solid starter at that position (e.g. a quarterback's passing yards and touchdowns are judged against different bars than a linebacker's tackles, and a basketball point guard's assists are judged differently than a center's rebounds). Each stat is normalized to 0-100 and averaged.

Audience Score — 30%

A blend of your engagement rate (60% of this sub-score) and your total follower reach across Instagram, TikTok, and X (40%). Engagement is weighted higher because it's a stronger signal of a real, active audience than raw follower count. Follower reach is log-scaled, since growing from 10k to 100k followers matters far more than 1M to 1.1M. If you can't verify your engagement rate against real platform insights, it's counted at a modest discount — self-reported is still allowed, just trusted a little less than a checked number. Your engagement rate also only counts in proportion to how large your actual following is — a claimed rate against little to no audience isn't a measurable signal, so that contribution ramps in as your follower count does rather than applying at full strength from zero.

Brand Score — 21%

Based on your program's division and conference, a position-specific marketability multiplier (skill/ball-handling positions generally carry more brand value than others), and a class-year adjustment — upperclassmen with a proven track record score slightly higher than true freshmen with less of a body of work.

Virality Score — 15%

Approximates reach beyond your existing following: your follower growth over the last 30 days (self-reported — this is what catches a viral moment, like a breakout game or a title run, that a static follower count misses), and how much you show up in a live web/NIL search, as a rough proxy for name-recognition search volume. Both are real, current signals rather than a fixed claim — but they're also the two easiest inputs to game, so this sub-score carries the smallest weight of the four rather than driving the result.

Verified schools

When you type your school in the calculator, we check it against a real list of NCAA D1 football-affiliated institutions (Power 4, Group of Five, and FCS — 270+ programs). Match one and your division and conference auto-fill and lock, so nobody can pair a real school with a made-up division or conference — and you get a Verified School badge on your profile. Type something not on the list (a D2, D3, or NAIA program, or a handful of D1 basketball-only schools we haven't added yet) and the profile still saves — division and conference just stay self-reported and there's no badge, until we expand the list.

Division & conference tiers

Breakout NIL supports every program — D1 (Power 4 and Group of Five), FCS, D2, D3, and NAIA — rather than one conference. There are 100+ real conferences across those divisions, and pretending to have individually-tuned NIL market data for each one would be dishonest. Instead, the four Power 4 conferences (SEC, Big Ten, ACC, Big 12) get individually-tuned base scores since that market data is well-established; every other program's market base score comes from its division. You can still enter your real conference name for display — it just doesn't change the score unless it's one of the four Power 4 conferences.

Estimated NIL value

Your final score maps to a dollar range, not a single number, via a tiered lookup shaped like the real NIL market — most college athletes earn modest amounts, a smaller group of standout Power 4 starters earns a real living, and a smaller group still reaches six figures.

Real NIL money doesn't stop there, though — it has a second regime on top of the first. Below the very top, dollar value tracks "how good are you" (production, audience, program), which your NIL Rating already measures. But the handful of athletes the whole country has actually heard of get paid on a completely different scale, for reasons that aren't about a single season's stats — a legacy surname, a viral highlight, a title-run narrative. We can't measure fame directly, but we can measure its footprint: how often your name shows up in a live web/NIL search. Once that footprint crosses a real threshold (roughly double-digit genuine search results — a bio page and a few mentions doesn't come close), it scales your dollar estimate separately from and more steeply than your NIL Rating, up to 100× at the extreme end. Below that threshold, this does nothing — it's built to only touch the athletes who are verifiably, unambiguously a national story, not to quietly inflate everyone with a school bio page.

This isn't exact — On3's own NIL valuations, which we checked ours against, are themselves estimates, not disclosed contracts. But it's a real mechanism now, not a disclaimer: run the numbers for a Power 4 starter with a good-not-elite season and a nationally famous name, or a true freshman with a historically dominant season and a real viral moment, and the estimate lands in the same seven-figure neighborhood real reporting puts them in — not two orders of magnitude below it.

Self-reported, account-owned, and opt-in

Breakout NIL only generates a valuation when someone submits their own data through the calculator, and only after creating an account — every profile is tied to a real login, so nobody can submit or post as somebody else. We never scrape or generate valuations for real people who haven't used the app. Every submission defaults to private — your result only appears on the public rankings and school pages if you explicitly check the "list me on the public leaderboard" box during calculation. Accounts created with a .edu email address get a College Email Verified badge — that confirms the account signed up with a school email, not a full identity check.

The feed

Athletes with a public profile can post short updates to the feed — a place to advocate for yourself, share your score, and talk directly to brands. Posts are limited to 280 characters and rate limited to keep things from getting spammy. You can delete your own posts at any time, and report anyone else's. Reports are captured but there's no admin review queue yet — that's next. Be respectful; harassment or impersonation isn't something this tool is built to tolerate.

What's covered today

28 sports across men's and women's programs — from football and basketball down to sports that never get NIL attention, like wrestling, swimming, cross country, and rowing — open to any school in any division. The scoring model, database schema, and forms are all built generically — adding another sport is a matter of adding new position benchmarks in one config file, not rebuilding the app.