Uncollaborated Attention

Texas and Michigan meet in the Citrus Bowl on New Year's Eve.

Two blue bloods.

Two programs built to move the needle.

Two fanbases already locked in.

But before kickoff, the real story is what’s already happened.

Over the last 30 days on Instagram, Texas generated $1.1M in Earned Media Value. Michigan? Just under $700K.

On paper, those numbers look like a win.

But they also reveal a constraint.

Most of that value came with minimal athlete participation. Attention was captured, but a layer of market value was left untapped.

This is the gap NIL programs still struggle to quantify: how much value sits at the institutional level, and how much more could be unlocked by integrating athletes.

Neither program needed athlete participation to generate this value. That shows how much NIL upside is still unclaimed.

Program-level EMV shows what’s possible. Athlete-level EMV shows what’s missing.

The delta is the opportunity.

Texas: $1.1M in Attention That Escaped the Building

Texas posted 106 times from @texasfootball and drove $523K in EMV on their own.

But the real story is what happened after those posts went live.

• NFL teams picked them up.

• Broadcast partners reshared them.

• Bowl accounts, league pages, random football media—everyone was reposting Texas moments.

That second wave? Another $600K in value.

No paid boost. No creator blitz. Just organic redistribution doing the work.

Texas doesn't just make content. They make content other people want to repost.

Michigan: $698K Built on Structure, Not Spectacle

Michigan put up 114 posts. Generated $698K total, with $474K coming directly from @umichfootball.

The breakdown:

• 7.8M views

• 1.25M engagements

• $6,122 per post on average

Michigan's approach is tighter. More institutional. Attention starts at the official account and moves outward in controlled waves.

It's not flashy. But it's reliable. And heading into a bowl game, that consistency counts.

The One Player Post That Actually Moved

Across both programs over 30 days, there was one meaningful player collaboration.

Michael Taaffe.
One post.
$37,960 in EMV.

That's it. No coordinated NIL rollout. No multi-post campaign. Just one guy, one moment, nearly $40K in value.

Which tells you everything about the gap between what's happening and what's possible.

When a player’s voice meets program momentum, value spikes; right now, that layer is dormant.

AVI is built to show teams which athletes create that spike, where it comes from (owned or third-party), and when it happens. Player integration becomes a repeatable system, not a one-off exception.

The Bowl Game Subtext

Michigan and Texas are already elite at generating attention.

They're doing it almost entirely without their rosters.

This isn’t a flex. It’s the reality. And it’s the missed opportunity. Both programs are leaving a massive collaboration upside on the table.

If institution-led content alone can pull seven figures in attention on Instagram, imagine what happens when players become part of the system—not just the exceptions.

The programs that figure out how to activate rosters intentionally won't just win the Citrus Bowl.

They'll own the attention economy that follows.

And that's where real pricing power lives.

Ready to make 2026 your best year yet?

What teams don’t measure, they don’t fix.

AVI provides the infrastructure to measure, benchmark, and operationalize moments like the best at scale:

Keep doing great things,

Athletiverse

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