Taylorist or control-oriented (I won't just say "neoliberal" because it's such a hazy term) academic administrators do still have measures of "brilliance" which they use to grant tenure to a minority of workers. But these measures are of "research output": raw numbers, a journal and publisher tiering system, and citations. It's a broken approach which has rapidly corrupted academia.
"Brilliance" in terms of the epistemic impact of original thought is arguably non-representable let alone fully quantifiable. Meanwhile in the case of athletes there are few ways to gamify measures like "running very fast" except doping.
One of the great vices of the "control society" is its insistence that everything can be measured, or from another point of view, that nothing that cannot be measured truly "is".
