How the Index Works

Sources, attribution, and what the metrics mean

Sports Index is built like an index provider: published constituents, a consistent pipeline, and inspectable output. This page explains each stage.

1. Sources

Coverage is ingested from curated source sets, starting with the Sports Index National Sources — official national college-football media organizations (no individual personalities or analysts). Local (per-school) and conference source sets follow the same model. The live list, with per-source post counts and coverage spans, is public at sportsindex.io/sources.

2. Indexing

Every story and post from a tracked source becomes an indexed item: headline, link, excerpt, source, platform, and timestamp. The full corpus is browsable in the Newsroom.

3. Attribution

Each indexed item runs through an attribution engine that links it to the athletes and programs it covers, using context-aware matching across 6,000+ tracked Power 4 athletes — names, handles, schools, positions, and program references. Attribution is algorithmic with precision-first guardrails (reviewed regularly), and it powers everything downstream: coverage counts, most-covered rankings, per-athlete news feeds, and story selection.

Attribution can contain errors — same-name collisions are the hard case. Items with questionable attribution are reviewed and corrected; if you spot one, contact us.

4. Metrics & rankings

From the attributed corpus plus social and statistical data, Sports Index computes:

• Coverage volume — attributed mentions per athlete/program over time
• Following & growth — Instagram and X follower levels and deltas, snapshotted over time
• On-field statistics — season and game-level stat lines
• Trending & most-covered rankings — movement across all of the above

Methodologies, source sets, and weightings evolve; material changes are reflected on this page and on the Sources page.

5. The AI newsroom

Each day, an AI editorial pass selects the biggest storylines from the last ~36 hours of indexed coverage and writes ranked articles only from the sources it cites — citations are enforced structurally, so no source means no claim. Articles are labeled as AI-generated and link every claim back to the underlying coverage. Read them at sportsindex.io/content.

What the metrics are not

Sports Index metrics are informational. They are not financial, betting, or recruiting advice, and they are not statements of an athlete’s monetary value.