Northwestern’s Off-The-Field Innovation to Win On-The-Field

“Dropback allowed us to customize our valuation process with the power of real data and help Northwestern Football upgrade their roster as a result,” said Schmidt.

Featured in D1.Ticker on January 30, 2025

Embracing the new revenue sharing era, Northwestern via TrueNU partnered with Dropback—the industry’s 1st pro-grade, custom front office toolkit—to maximize retention, compete in the portal, and construct their roster against budget.

Looking to evolve their off-season processes beyond paper & spreadsheets for the new era of college sports—and looking for solutions beyond the cookie-cutter options of today—Jacob Schmidt, Executive Director of Northwestern’s Official NIL Collective (TrueNU), found Dropback.

“We’re thrilled to support our student-athletes and programs thanks to our incredible donors & community partners—we felt it was our responsibility to maximize this impact for Northwestern Athletics by leveraging that support wisely,” said Schmidt.

“No GM vendors had what we were looking for: Bespoke, data-driven, custom to a program’s values and culture...”

After their 1st Dropback demo, Luke Walerius (Northwestern Football GM), was hooked. “We’ve studied how the pros manage their cap to optimize spend, maximize talent, and determine what a true market value is relative to their specific organization. We’ve been pitched by all the other companies, but finally with Dropback, we found what we were looking for.”

Dropback is the 1st pro-grade, custom, private “General Manager” tech tool on the market to value athletes, optimize spend, and maximize the off-the-field competitive edge: your athlete compensation budgets (Rev-Share, NIL, Scholarships, Alston, etc.).

With a growing budget, and clear off-season priorities, Walerius adopted Dropback for Front Office to translate their athlete evaluations into roster valuations ($)—managing their roster financially to secure top talent while optimizing usage of their budget.

“In a Post-House era, strategic spending is the newest collegiate competitive edge,” says Luke Bogus, CEO of Dropback. “Deriving an athlete’s value based on their Athletic Reputation and Skill—as NCAA NIL Bylaws allow [link]—finally empowers teams to spend smart. For the first time, GMs can go beyond ‘following the market’ (FMV), but instead outsmart the market with their own custom, data-driven athlete valuation processes.”

Northwestern leveraged Dropback to build-their-own financial models to codify their position-specific values—across athletic skill, culture, academics, and other factors—and generate bespoke valuations ($) for their active & prospective talent based on these custom models. “Dropback allowed us to customize our valuation process with the power of real data and help Northwestern Football upgrade their roster as a result,” said Schmidt.

Schmidt and Walerius used the power of Dropback to…

  • Define data-driven cap rules & strategies… Beyond position room allocations & slot value definitions, Dropback’s Valuation Modeler enables GMs to build custom, defensible athlete valuation formulas via program-specific data, metrics, baselines, and weights.
  • Auto-fill data from PFF and existing tools… Automatically apply your valuation formulas to your active roster—and 60,000+ portal profiles—thanks to Dropback’s 10+ data integrations from services like PFF to auto-calculate your valuation models.
  • Dynamically compare athletes and build rosters… The ultimate GM Big Board—with drag-and-drop depth charts, pin & compare profiles, custom reporting, unlimited versions…. and so much more.

“PFF integration is a gamechanger, too,” said Walerius. Dropback integrates with tools teams already use, and is the only GM tool on the market to integrate with Pro Football Focus (PFF)—the #1 data service trusted by every FBS team—as well as 10+ integrations to help GMs leverage their existing processes, tools, and data to face their newest challenge: roster cap management (link).

And the off-season results speak for itself: conference-leading retention, and the acquisition of one of the top-available QBs in the country, all while staying in-budget.

And the off-season results speak for itself: conference-leading retention, and the acquisition of one of the top-available QBs in the country, all while staying in-budget.

“Northwestern is clearly all-in with its intention to dominate in the new era: world-class facilities (link), and now pro-grade software,” said Nick Siscoe, CTO of Dropback. “Post-House, the success of a program on the field will hinge on its athlete acquisition strategy off the field. We’re thrilled with Dropback’s growth and expanding partnerships; we’ve become a competitive edge in this new era of college sports.”

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Innovative collegiate teams know that, the next competitive arms race is intelligence and analytics to spend smart—and today’s half-built, basic “GM tools” won’t weld the competitive edge top teams deserve.

That’s where Dropback’s pro-grade, private, custom revenue sharing strategy infrastructure is different. Dropback’s Front Office toolkit is easy to adopt modularly, across any sport.

Dropback for Front Office, actually built for GMs… Transform athlete evaluations into roster valuations ($) through build-your-own, data-driven formulas for effective and defensible valuations—all in one, private, pro-grade system.

  • Custom Cap Rules: Click-and-drag to create your position-specific value ‘formulas’—based on your team’s scheme, culture, and priorities.
  • Data Integrations: Auto-fill the data of your formulas—metrics, grades, and more—with any of our 10+ integrations, like PFF.
  • Play Moneyball: Auto-apply your formulas to 60,000+ high school & portal athletes to maximize talent & optimize spend.
  • Construct Your Roster: Real-time depth & budget edits, unlimited versions, advanced permissions management, and so much more…

Dropback for Back Office, saving ADs time and money… Increase savings and automate busy work by managing budgets, contracts, and 1099 payroll in one place.

  • Monitor Cash Flow: Distribute capital across any sport, with custom rules and unlimited custom budget pools. Oversee financial obligations to project spend and alert on trends.
  • Auto-Generate Contracts: Generate contracts automatically, auto-filling your custom with athlete-specific terms and budget allocations.
  • One-Click Payroll: Automate pay schedule creation directly from contracts, and same-day direct deposit to any account—with no % fees, and “wallet” agnostic.
  • 100% Private: Unlike the other guys, Dropback will never share your data with your competitors for “FMV algorithms”. Teams fully own their data, only on Dropback.

Founded by former engineers at Microsoft & Hudl, Dropback graduated Y Combinator, the world’s top software startup program (link), as their first collegiate sportstech investment. Plus, with Dropback’s latest $1.6M funding round—led by Silicon Valley’s top VC firms (link)—the industry is taking notice…

Interested in a 1:1 demo with the Founding Team? Connect here.

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