What a Year of NIL Data Taught Us About the Market

Trends from Jan 6 to Jan 11 based on commitments, average impact, and incoming FMV

Over the past year, the NIL ecosystem has grown louder, faster, and more expensive. Deal velocity increased. Headlines multiplied. Budgets expanded.

What didn't increase at the same rate was clarity.

At DSA, we spent the last year doing something intentionally unsexy: watching how the market actually behaves over time, instead of reacting to individual deals or viral moments. We recently crossed a meaningful threshold—9,000+ player-level NIL observations across multiple cycles—which allowed us to pressure-test assumptions we originally made when the NIL market was still immature.

What we learned surprised us. And it materially changed how we think about value.

This post summarizes those learnings without exposing proprietary methodology and explains how the NIL market has evolved in practice.

1. The NIL Market Is Far More QB-Centric Than Expected

From the outside, NIL looks diversified. Big deals appear across positions. Skill players dominate social feeds. Defensive stars trend during playoff runs.

But when you aggregate the data over time, a clear pattern emerges:

The NIL market is overwhelmingly anchored to quarterbacks.

When normalized to a quarterback baseline:

• Most non-QB positions cluster tightly between 25 to 35 percent of QB value
• Very few positions consistently break out of that range
• Even elite on-field impact does not overcome positional gravity

This doesn't mean other positions aren't important.
It means importance and monetization are not the same thing.

2. Defensive Impact Matters on the Field, Less So in the Market

One of our largest year-over-year adjustments came on the defensive side of the ball.

Early assumptions, shared by many football people, implicitly treated elite EDGE, CB, LB, and interior defenders as near-QB equivalents in value. From a football standpoint, that belief is defensible.

From a market standpoint, it is not.

Across thousands of observations:

• Defensive positions consistently monetize at significantly lower multiples than intuition suggests
• Even top-tier defenders rarely approach QB-adjacent value bands
• The gap is structural, not anecdotal

The market isn't saying defense doesn't matter.
It's saying defense doesn't drive NIL demand the same way offense does.

3. Offense Compressed More Than Anticipated

Another surprise was how tightly packed offensive non-QB positions became once enough data accumulated.

Wide receivers, offensive linemen, running backs, and tight ends all converged into a relatively narrow band. The market clearly differentiates QB versus non-QB, but it is far less precise within that second tier.

The implication is important:

Chasing positional narratives inside the same tier often leads to overpaying.

When everything clusters, allocation discipline matters more than positional hype.

4. NIL Rewards Visibility Faster Than It Rewards Impact

This is where many NIL conversations break down.

NIL is not a pure performance market. It never was. It is a market for attention, timing, and leverage—layered on top of football performance.

Over time, we consistently observed:

• Visibility-driven pricing moves faster than impact-driven pricing
• Market corrections lag on-field reality
• Noise persists longer than expected

This isn't a criticism of NIL.
It's a description of how markets work.

5. The Biggest Mistakes Are Overpays, Not Misses

One of the most actionable learnings from year-over-year analysis:

Most teams don't fail because they miss great players.
They fail because they overpay the wrong tier.

True high-impact players are relatively identifiable. The real risk lives in the middle—where market hype, positional bias, and incomplete information collide.

That's where budgets quietly erode.

6. Why We Changed Our Approach—and Why That Matters

A year ago, the safest modeling choice was to lean on football intuition. Data was sparse. Market behavior was unstable. Using domain knowledge helped avoid obvious errors.

Today, that tradeoff has flipped.

With enough observations across cycles, market behavior itself becomes the signal.

So while our core evaluation logic did not change, our understanding of how impact monetizes by position did. That evolution wasn't philosophical. It was empirical.

Good models don't cling to first assumptions.
They update when reality provides enough evidence.

7. The Bigger Takeaway

The NIL market is not irrational.
It's just optimized for a different objective than most people assume.

Speed increased.
Visibility increased.
But value still concentrates.

Teams that succeed long-term will be the ones that:

• Separate impact from hype
• Treat NIL as a market, not a scoreboard
• Focus on allocation discipline, not just acquisition

That gap—between what feels important and what actually gets paid—is where real advantage lives.

Closing Thought

Markets punish intuition.
They reward clarity.

The NIL era is no different.

And the longer you observe it without reacting to every headline, the clearer its rules become.

We're still early—but not as early as we were last year.