NIL Collectives Generate Mid-Major Hoops Success

After a month of college basketball, schools with NIL collectives show signs of success

Lately, NIL collectives have received a large share of media coverage, polarizing college sports fans over the ethics and sustainability of such institutions. Put simply, a NIL collective acts as the proxy payroll for student-athletes participating in revenue athletics ie. football and men’s basketball.

While student-athletes are not able to directly receive compensation for their athletic prowess from schools, the reversal of the NCAA’s moratorium on student-athletes ability to monetize publicity rights in 2021 opened the door for third-parties to engage in endorsement deals with players.

NIL collectives act as shell corporations to funnel money from boosters to student-athletes in a manner compliant with state NIL legislation and NCAA guidelines. These companies solicit funding from boosters with aspirations of improving their university's athletic programs and use these funds to pay athletes in endorsement deals to promote the NIL collective, predominately via social media posts.

The ability to pay student-athletes through collectives has been a powerful recruiting tool for many universities to attract players from high school and transfers from other collegiate programs.

Without taking a stance on the ethics, utility, or sustainability of NIL collectives, this article aims to take an objective look into the impact of NIL collectives on men’s basketball (CBB) team success.

As NCAA men’s basketball nears the end of non-conference play, enough on-court data has been compiled to rank team performance with considerable accuracy. This research will utilize KenPom ranking data through December 11, 2023.

As an effort of my research, and some very helpful databases, I have tallied 215 Division-I schools with NIL collectives. This equates to 59.4% of all schools supporting Division-I men’s basketball programs.

While all High-Major schools have been quick to implement NIL collectives, Mid-Majors - schools not in the ACC, Big 10, Big 12, PAC 12, SEC, Big East, or named Gonzaga - have not shared the same eagerness across the board to partake in the collective mania. 

High-major programs account for 80 of the 362 (22%) teams in Division-I basketball and, on average, outperform those from the smaller and less funded Mid-Major conferences. With High-Major programs factored out of the collective count, it can be seen that only 47.8% of Mid-Major programs have established NIL collectives.

Every school in the top 50 of KenPom rankings has the support of a NIL collective’s services. It is important to note that of these top 50 programs, only five are Mid-Majors. The highest-ranked school without a collective is Princeton, at 53.

Schools in the top 100 of KenPom rankings without NIL collectives include: Princeton (53), Louisiana Tech (89), and Akron (100).

Of the top 100 ranked programs, only three schools do not have a NIL collective; as a percentage, 97% of CBB teams in the top 100 have collectives. Seventy teams in the top 100 are High-Major programs; the percentage of institutions with NIL collectives in the top 100 shifts to 90% when looking only at Mid-Major programs.

When looking at the next tier of programs, there is a substantial drop-off in NIL collectives. Twenty-one schools ranked between 100 and 181 do not have collectives. While stopping at 181 may seem like an arbitrary cutoff, this limit was used as there are 362 Division-I programs supporting men’s basketball. Thus, teams ranked in the top 181 represent the teams competing in the top half of the sport.

Schools between 101 and 181 of KenPom rankings without NIL collectives: Kent State (103), Yale (112), South Dakota State (113), Missouri State (117), Cornell (118), Long Beach State University (122), Samford (130), Vermont (136), U-Mass Lowell (138), Furman (139), Oakland (140), Winthrop (143), Belmont (145), Western Carolina (146), Portland State (147), Morehead State (156), Lipscomb (158), Harvard (160), UT Arlington (163), Radford (164), Air Force (169; NIL not permitted for service academy athletes), and Eastern Washington (180).

Of all CBB teams ranked between 100 and 181, 74.1% have NIL collectives. Mid-Majors account for 75 teams ranked between 100 and 181, leading to a 72% rate of Mid-Majors with collectives in this ranking range. 

Mid-Major programs in the top 100 have a rate of NIL collectives that is 18% higher than those in the 100 to 181 ranked range.  

Data: *Updated 12/12/23

Teams ranked in the top 50 with collectives: 100%

All teams ranked in the top 100 with collectives: 97%

Mid-Majors ranked in the top 100 with collectives: 90%

All teams ranked between 100-181 with collectives: 74.1%

Mid Majors ranked between 100 -181 with collectives: 72%

All teams in the top half of CBB ( Top 181) with collectives: 87.3%

Mid-Majors in the top half of CBB (Top 181) with collectives: 77.9%

Schools in the bottom half of CBB rankings (rank 181-362) with collectives: 31.5%

The implementation of NIL collectives has been universally accepted by High-Major programs.  While more research is needed, differences in total collective funding may factor into discrepancies in team success between High-Major peers; however, the mere presence of collectives represents a much more interesting phenomenon for Mid-Major institutions. The 47.8% of Mid-Major schools that have embraced collectives achieve team success disproportionately higher than those without collectives.

Does the data show a strong indication that schools with more robust NIL offerings have fared better this season than their peers who have not implemented NIL collectives? Yes, emphatically, yes! However, correlation does not imply causation. 

Many variables exist outside of NIL collective offerings that impact a team's success: Coaching, historic team success, conference strength, team seniority, and luck all contribute to the potential of teams. It is plausible that the successful programs with NIL collectives would have succeeded even without collectives based upon the aggregate of the aforementioned factors. It is also plausible that, in general, successful teams warrant the creation of NIL collectives, and programs that lack the potential to achieve success do not bother with the effort required to start such an endeavor.

Overall, the shocking discrepancy between schools in the top half of rankings with collectives (87.3%) and those ranked in the bottom half with collectives (31.5%) indicates positive externalities of collectives on team performance. 

For Mid-Major programs, the data is clear; reluctance to facilitate NIL collectives puts teams at a disadvantage. At every increasing level of success, an increase in collective frequency is noticed. While Mid-Major programs without collectives have still been able to achieve rankings in the top 100, programs at the highest level have all embraced this new recruiting tool.