Austin Tech Company Gets Traction with its Ability to Track Athletes’ NIL Activity

As students return to college campuses this month, athletic departments are confronting a growing compliance challenge: keeping track of athletes’ name, image and likeness activity beyond the department’s direct control.

Compliance administrators must determine whether athletes are fulfilling contractual obligations, properly reporting NIL activity and engaging with brands, agents and other third parties in ways that could affect their eligibility.

That challenge has created an opening for D1 Approved, an Austin-based technology company founded by former University of Texas basketball player and entrepreneur Ian Mooney. The company monitors NIL activity across college athletics and provides athletic departments with data designed to identify potential compliance issues and provide broader intelligence about the NIL marketplace.

“It’s a dynamic platform, one that is already saving our athletic department a lot of time, and potential headaches,” said Amy Folan, Vice President and Director of Athletics at Central Michigan University (CMU).

Aside from CMU, Tarleton State University is an official customer, while “three Power Four schools are in beta testing mode,” according to Mooney. “We are in various talks with a half-dozen other Power Fours.”

To learn from Mooney, whose athletic claim-to-fame was guarding future NBA Hall-of-Famer Kevin Durant in practice for two years, we sat down with him for the following interview.

Hackney: What problem are athletic departments trying to solve today?

Mooney: It’s a broad question, but at the end of the day, winning is still the number one objective. What’s changed is that the variables required to build a championship team are harder to control and more expensive than ever.

The rules are in constant motion. Eligibility standards, transfer rules, and NIL guidelines seem to evolve almost weekly. NIL is an unbelievable opportunity for athletes, but it brings real complexity for the institution.

Schools now have to manage two things at once: what they control, which is revenue share, and what they don’t, which is every partner, brand, and collective engaging with their athletes. Managing that second category is where most departments are stretched.

Hackney: Why has monitoring become more important than ever?

Mooney: Because the risk lives in what you don’t know. Athletes can be doing things with brands, agents, and partners outside the athletic department that the school has no visibility into. And at the end of the day, the athletic department and compliance office are still the ones responsible for making sure those athletes are eligible and can compete.

The hardest part is the unknowns and the uncontrollables. It’s nearly impossible to manually track 300-plus athletes across every social platform when any one of them could be working with any brand, any partner, or an agent acting on their behalf. There are simply too many moving pieces.

So from a pure operational standpoint, the goal is to take that burden off the department and automate it, so compliance has a real process for catching activity early instead of hoping nothing slips through.

Hackney: Where do you see the biggest information gaps for athletic departments?

Mooney: It’s a tough question because every school operates so differently. But I think there are really two gaps.

The first is the information flowing to the athlete. Everyone forgets that at the end of the day, these are young people. College is about growth and development, and the upside of NIL is that they’re getting a taste of what it looks like to be a professional. The downside is they’re now thinking about taxes, agents, and a governing body reviewing their commercial activity through NIL Go, and it’s not always clear where their information is coming from. That creates a gap between the athlete, the third parties around them, and the school.

The second is the information the department itself was never built to handle. A few years ago, athletic directors didn’t have to think about fair market value, engagement rate, or reach, and how those things affect sponsored content and what an athlete’s deal should be worth. That’s an entirely new body of commercial knowledge, and it’s arriving fast.

So it’s a mix. There’s the information you don’t know, and then there’s a flood of new information coming in on the commercial side that departments are still learning how to use.

Hackney: How has the intelligence athletic departments need changed over the last few years?

Mooney: The lens has widened. In the first couple of years of NIL, everything was inward-facing: what is my department doing, and how are we executing?

Now athletic departments are using data to see how they stack up against their peers and to have more confidence that when they invest in an athlete, the valuation behind it is accurate. That’s harder than it sounds. NIL valuations have no single source of truth, the inputs are a mix of public and private data, and the numbers move constantly. As third-party NIL becomes a bigger share of the picture, reliable intelligence on that activity goes from nice-to-have to essential.

Hackney: What role should technology play in compliance?

Mooney: When you mention a new tool to anyone in compliance, you can almost see the look of doubt. They’re already managing platforms from the NCAA, the CSC, and their own campus. The last thing they need is another login.

So the bar for technology in this space is high, and it should be. It needs to be automated, and it needs to deliver real value by shrinking the unknowns and the workload. Compliance won’t adopt a tool because it’s interesting. They’ll adopt it because it solves real problems they can’t solve on their own at scale, makes their lives significantly easier, and creates value for the whole athletic department.

Hackney: As schools rely more heavily on athlete data, what privacy or ethical issues should they consider?

Mooney: It’s a great question and a tricky one. The biggest issue with athlete data is age. Once you move beyond pure performance data into recruiting and social activity, you’re often dealing with individuals who are still minors, and that raises legitimate concerns about what should be collected at all.

Beyond that, a significant amount of this data is already public. So the real questions become how long it’s being stored and what it’s being used for. Schools should be able to answer both clearly, and the answer should always come back to protecting the athlete’s eligibility and helping them make better decisions, not collecting data for its own sake.

Hackney: How can athletic departments prepare for continued regulatory change?

Mooney: The one certainty is that the rules will keep changing. NIL has already shown that every new framework creates unintended consequences.

Rather than building systems around today’s regulations, institutions should invest in infrastructure that adapts as the rules change. Accurate data is the foundation. It reduces compliance risk and helps identify new opportunities, regardless of how the regulatory landscape develops.

Hackney: Looking ahead three to five years, what will distinguish the most successful athletic departments?

Mooney: The most successful athletic departments will always be the ones that have built a real culture and can recruit and retain great kids. That’s the core, and it hasn’t changed. Coaches, player development, support staff, and the resources around the athlete all stack up into that.

The question is what role data and technology play in getting there. Honestly, it’s a small piece of the whole. But it’s a piece that’s growing, and it’s one that’s become much harder to ignore. The departments that have reliable data and competitive intelligence will make better decisions about where to invest, walk into negotiations and recruiting conversations with more confidence, and be ready when the rules change again. The more information you have, the better positioned you are. That readiness is what separates the programs that are shaping the next phase of NIL from the ones reacting to it.