College basketball coaches — who obsess about on-court rankings — have another score to worry about. But this one concerns activities away from the arena. Nielsen today unveiled the Nielsen Impact Score, or NIS, which is meant to gauge the marketing value of university athletic programs for individual players.

The score is meant to arm universities with data that will help them sell their schools to high school recruits. Athletes are placing new importance on how universities might help them win brand endorsement deals in the wake of new rules that allow them to profit off their name, image and likeness. The relaxed amateurism rules, which are known as NIL (name, image and likeness) and took effect in the summer, have added a new dynamic in the already hotly competitive recruiting battles to lure the nation’s top college football and basketball players. 

The new rules have also led to a cottage industry of ranking services that seek to provide brands with a look at which schools and players offer the best potential for endorsement deals. The player rankings, including one from sports betting site The Action Network, have focused on the social media followings of college stars.

Nielsen is attempting to leverage its TV measurement data along with other proprietary research tools. It says its university scores are based on the following factors:

• National exposure, which is based on TV ratings data.

• Local market impact, which analyses “how a program’s local market fanbase engages with its local marketing activations.”

• Social media engagement, which puts a value on a school’s social media audience using metrics such as followers and engagement rates.

Duke University’s men’s basketball program is the first school to sign up for the program, according to Nielsen. The company did not reveal how many other schools it has signed up, but a spokeswoman said it is in conversations with others. She did not reveal how much Nielsen is charging schools to participate. There are no current plans to publicly release the scores, according to the spokeswoman.

Nielsen plans to make the service available initially to nearly 100 NCAA Division I men’s college basketball programs, “with plans to roll out broader across more collegiate sports,” the company announced.

Schools are prohibited from brokering NIL deals on behalf of players. But that has not stopped universities from providing education and in some cases getting assistance from external agencies to help put them in the best possible position. The rules are murky because what schools can and cannot do depends on state laws.

“It’s not the schools that are really negotiating these deals, it’s the individual athletes and/or their representatives if they have one,” said Darren Heitner, an attorney and NIL expert who helped draft the state of Florida’s NIL legislation. Because of that, he questioned how influential Nielsen’s university rankings might be.

“I suppose you could use it to your advantage, but if am a brand I am much more interested in the followings, the engagement, the personality and the athletic prowess of the specific individual as opposed to necessarily the school.”

Still, he said the Nielsen data could be more useful to help lure teamwide deals, such as one Tivo recently inked with the Georgia Tech football team. The Tivo deal compensated individual players with a package that included Tivo-branded silk pajamas and a Tivo 4K streaming device.