A hockey player posts an Instagram Story wearing Bauer skates. They tag Bauer.

Maybe they’re sponsored. Maybe they got the skates for free. Maybe they bought the skates themselves and they’re hoping someone at Bauer notices.

Now there’s software designed to identify potential NIL activity in athletes’ public social media posts, without waiting for athletes to report their own deals. Colleges are starting to adopt it.

What Central Michigan just signed up for

On October 14, Central Michigan University announced a deal with a company called D1 Approved. The company watches what a school’s athletes post in public on social media. When a post shows brand activity, the software saves it and brings it to the attention of the school’s compliance office, the people whose job is making sure athletes follow the rules.

Central Michigan is one of D1 Approved’s founding partners, and the company says other Division I schools are using the platform too, including programs in Power Four conferences. For hockey readers, one clarification: Central Michigan doesn’t have an NCAA Division I hockey program. Its hockey team competes in the ACHA. But it’s worth considering what this type of technology could mean for NCAA hockey, where equipment appears in players’ posts constantly, often without a formal sponsorship agreement.

Why now? College athletes can now earn money from their name, image and likeness, known as NIL. Schools can also pay athletes directly. Under the current Division I reporting rules, third-party deals worth $600 or more have to be reported through a system called NIL Go, and smaller deals with the same company count too if they add up to $600 or more.

The problem is scale. The staff keeping track of all this are often responsible for 350 to 600 athletes at once. Checking every athlete’s posts by hand was never realistic.

Schools aren’t starting from zero here. Many already pay for software where athletes report their own deals, or where a deal done through the school’s official marketplace gets recorded on its own. What’s different about this one is that it doesn’t wait to be told. It goes and looks at the posts itself. The company markets the platform to athletic departments, and the same kind of intelligence to brands and agencies.

The part that isn’t about rules

The compliance side is only half of what the company sells.

It also tracks which brands are showing up in college athletes’ posts everywhere, not just at one school. Which types of companies are active around college athletes. Which schools show a lot of this activity, and which show very little.

Then it sells that view to schools as a way to find sponsors.

Picture it through a college hockey program. Information like this could show which equipment, nutrition and recovery brands keep appearing in players’ posts across different schools and conferences, and whether a program’s own players appear in that picture at all. That doesn’t prove those companies have paid deals with anyone. A brand appearing in a post doesn’t mean the company knows about the post, approved the association, or has any relationship with the athlete. But it does give the school a starting point for researching potential sponsors. Instead of guessing who to approach, the school can investigate brands already appearing in college athletes’ content.

Brands and agencies are pitched the same kind of information, to help them decide where to spend their money.

Central Michigan’s athletic director, Amy Folan, described it in practical terms. Staying competitive, she said, starts with data: knowing where your school stands compared to other schools, and which brands are already spending money on college athletes.

What does the data actually tell you?

D1 Approved says its platform classifies posts, identifies brands and categories, and archives the content for compliance purposes.

Identifying a brand in a post doesn’t necessarily establish the commercial relationship behind it.

A player tagging Bauer could be sponsored. They could have received free equipment. Or they could have bought the skates themselves and simply like them. Those three situations can look nearly identical on social media, but they represent very different relationships. And depending on the arrangement, even free equipment could be considered NIL compensation.

I couldn’t find a public explanation of how the platform distinguishes paid partnerships from gifted products or organic mentions, or how those classifications get verified. That doesn’t mean the company can’t do it. It means the method isn’t public, and I’d want to understand it before relying on the data for commercial decisions.

The company’s website uses terms like Commercial Posts, Percent Monetizing and Active Brands. They’re interesting metrics. The publicly available information doesn’t fully explain the methodology behind them.

What agents and players should be asking if their school uses one of these tools:

• How does the platform distinguish paid partnerships from gifted products or organic mentions?
• What does it actually mean when an athlete or brand is classified as commercially active?
• How are classifications verified, and can athletes or compliance teams correct them?
• How accurate does the information need to be before it’s used for compliance decisions or commercial prospecting?

The standard matters because the two uses aren’t the same. For a compliance office, a possible undisclosed partnership is enough to justify a closer look. That’s the job. For an agent, a brand or a school making a commercial decision, the bar is different. You need to know what the data represents, and how reliably it was classified, before acting on it, whether that’s sponsorship prospecting or evaluating an athlete’s marketability. Identifying a potential partnership isn’t the same as confirming one.

There’s another limit worth keeping in mind. If a deal never appears in a public post, monitoring can’t see it at all. This covers what athletes post. It doesn’t cover everything athletes sign.

So when the software flags a post, someone still has to ask what the relationship actually is. For an agent, that means a normal post from their player can now lead to questions from the school, and the player needs to be able to explain what the relationship actually is. For a school working from the activity data, a brand showing up is a reason to make a call. It isn’t proof of what that brand spends, or what it would pay you.

Central Michigan is using this technology to support NIL compliance and identify new commercial opportunities. A potential partnership is useful information for a compliance team deciding what to investigate. That same information isn’t necessarily enough for an agent, brand or athletic department making a commercial decision. The data might be the same, but the decisions being made with it are very different. And that’s where understanding its limitations matters.

Related reading: I’ve covered the athlete-facing side of this technology on Player Partnerships, including how NCAA schools are beginning to monitor NIL activity and why tagging a hockey brand doesn’t mean an athlete is sponsored.

Source: D1 Approved and Central Michigan University Partnership Announcement, October 14, 2026.