Can Big Data Analytics Bring Sanity Back to College Athletic Recruiting?

College athletic recruiting is the Wild West these days. From NIL money and the (wide) opening of the transfer portal, to conference realignment and now the end of the national letters of intent program, the process of matching millions of amateur athletes with 2,800 college sports programs has turned into a free-for-all. But that chaos signals an opportunity for one Austin, Texas tech entrepreneur who’s eager to leverage big data tech to level the playing field for college recruiters.

By his own admission, Brian Cruver is not a sports guy. His background is business tech, having founded two successful companies, including a robotic disinfection company called Xenex and an emergency alert communications company called Alert Media.

“I was kind of retired. I was kind of done,” Cruver says. “We had sold Alert Media a couple years back, and I just kind of got the itch again. And I’m like, what’s the next big problem to fix? At the same time my son was being recruited to play football.”

Like many parents of high school athletes, Cruver immersed himself into the college recruiting process with the hopes of matching his son with a good program and a good school. He explored online programs that purported to showcase high school players (their paying clients) to college recruiters, but found the process inefficient and expensive.

“All the ones we found are focused on the parents, and trying to get parents to pull out their credit cards. It’s almost predatory,” he says. “As parents, we didn’t figure out what we were supposed to be doing until it was over.”

Colleges recruit from a pool of about 10 million amateur athletes (Bilanol/Shutterstock)

The recruiting ordeal left an impression on Cruver and his Alert Media colleague, Brett Andrew, whose daughter was being recruited to play college volleyball. What they found was coaches are in a perpetual scramble to fill spots on their teams. That includes the best prospects coming out of high school as well as the college transfer portal.

Thanks to new NCAA rules put in place following the COVID pandemic, athletes no longer have to sit out a year after transferring to a new college. When combined with the new rules around Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) money, it essentially means that athletes are now free agents who can change schools every year based on who will pay them the most.

This week’s news about the end of the national letter of intent program just adds to the confusion, not to mention the ongoing reimagining of the old geographically based conference system into something…new. The whole recruiting system was (and still is) screaming for a fix

“Suddenly we know a lot about how college athletics recruiting works, and it’s a mess,” Cruver tells BigDATAwire. “It is absolute chaos. It’s the Wild West. There’s no process. The athletes hate it. The parents hate it. The high school coaches hate it. The college coaches hate it. Everybody hates it, but everybody just does it the way it’s done, which is no rhyme or reason.”

Scorability is bringing big data analytics and AI to college sports recruiting (Image courtesy Scorability)

Sensing opportunity, Cruver and Andrew co-founded a company last year called Scorability with the intent to help bring some order to the chaos by using big data, analytics, and AI to streamline the college recruiting process for college coaches and recruiters.

Coaches, the intended users of Scorability, are under immense pressure to find the best players for their teams. For the bigger sports, like football, coaches are travelling around the country with multiple phones, meeting athletes and their families.

“They’re trying to manage basically a pipeline of recruits through from offer to commitment to signature, and it’s impossible,” Cruver says. “They’re coaches but they’re raising money and recruiting and kissing babies and managing budgets and all these other things. They’re really not spending as much time as they need to with actually developing an athlete or prepping for a game. They are desperate for something that will improve their lives, their jobs.”

Scorability wants to improve coaches’ jobs by serving as the central clearinghouse for high quality data on college-bound high school athletes and existing college athletes. The company has also developed algorithms designed to find the best matches between athletes and the user’s college program.

It all starts with data, which Scorability gets “in every way imaginable,” Cruver says, including the Internet, high school and college programs, camps, coaches, and the athletes themselves.

Scorability also designed its own 16-part mentality and character assessment questionnaire that allow it to go beyond the initial stats and determine some of the intangibles that are important to success at the higher level, but which can be difficult to ascertain. A college program, such as the Division 3 college football team in Arkansas that is a Scorability client, now has a much easier–not to mention less expensive–path to determining which players will be the best fit for their program.

“We’re going to college coaches and saying, this is an overwhelming task,” Cruver says. “You have a list of say 900 linebackers. Instead of you trying to get to know 900 linebackers and their families and trying to visit 900 linebackers to figure out exactly how smart they are, how tall they are, what kind of character they have, just go to Scorability and we’ll show you 9,000 linebackers, but allow you to figure out through our algorithms, which 90 you’re supposed to be focusing on.”

The best football players in the country are more than likely to end up in one of the schools in the so-called Power Five conferences, or the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, and SEC. The rise of NIL money and the open transfer portal make that all but certain. But what about the other five conferences in Division 1 college football? What about the 33 conferences in women’s soccer? There is a long tail of athletes and programs, which is where Scorability intends to initially make its mark.

“For this D3 in Arkansas to get all the firsthand information for these 3,000 athletes would have cost them about $400,000 grand and would have taken about 2,700 hours,” Cruver says. “They don’t have four hundred grand, and they don’t have 2,700 hours. And we did it in a week.”

After developing its platform for a year, Scorability is now coming out of stealth. The company, which has raised $11 million, has more than 100,000 athletes in its system and a handful of paying customers. It intends to add support for the other major team college sports early next year, followed by the individual sports next fall.

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