NTangible Scores Athletes' Nerves From 0 to 1000. It Says 750 Predicts Division I

By Grace Kim

A startup called NTangible says a score above 750 on its psychological assessment makes an athlete twice as likely to commit to a Division I school. That's the pitch, the number, and the whole business in one line.

NTangible's product, the Clutch Factor assessment, scores athletes from 0 to 1000 on how likely they are to perform under pressure. Co-founder and CEO Dan Connerty — a professional baseball player turned sports-tech entrepreneur — built it with psychologist Dr. Ed Levine, a professor emeritus at the University of South Florida.

"We really wanted to hyper focus on this idea of clutch performance," Connerty told TechCrunch. "Cognitive [science] itself is just this black box that nobody's wanted to touch, because nobody's had the ability to measure it accurately prior."

How does the test work?

The assessment draws on the Thematic Aperception Test, a psychological exam where people describe ambiguous photos — what's happening, who they are in the scene, what happens next.

"There's no right or wrong answers," Connerty said. "The key words that you use, the way in which you use those words, and the semantic phrasing associated with it get scored against the neurolinguistic scoring guide that psychologists created, and it shoots out your clutch factor score."

The takeaway: word choice gets converted into a single number, and that number gets sold into recruiting.

Where does the score carry weight?

Connerty sees the score as currency in college sports' current money rush.

"This number can be heavily used in rankings, leaderboards, recruiting conversations, NIL conversations, and scholarship conversations, especially in the crazy wild west that is collegiate sports right now, where we're writing $4 million checks to quarterbacks," he said.

That $4 million quarterback line isn't throwaway. It frames why a psychological score could become a standard input in recruiting decisions. In plain words: if programs are writing multi-million-dollar checks, they'll pay for any signal that reduces the risk.

Can the test be gamed?

Maybe. A TechCrunch reporter took the quiz twice. Answering honestly, they scored 584 — below average. Answering the second time as they imagined a level-headed top recruit would, they scored 802.

That's a 218-point gap between honesty and performance, which is the kind of spread a recruiter might notice.

Connerty's counterweight is training. He argues "clutch" is a trainable skill, and while NTangible isn't positioning itself as a training platform, he worked with former MLB sports psychologist Howie Schwartz to build a list of exercises athletes can use to strengthen their mental game.

How big is the market?

The company now supports testing for nine sports, beyond Connerty's baseball roots. He also wants to take the concept corporate: an assessment called NTerpret asks respondents how they respond to coaching and feedback, giving management data on how an employee processes instructions.

The business model appears to be B2B — selling to sports organizations and companies directly rather than individual athletes.

NTangible is scheduled to detail its strategy on stage Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt, where it sits among the top 20 companies competing for Startup Battlefield's grand prize. The event runs Tuesday through Thursday, October 13 to 15, in downtown San Francisco.

The so-what: if the score survives scrutiny, a 0-to-1000 clutch metric could sit next to sprint speed and throwing velocity on every recruiting board — and, eventually, in HR files.