How Much Does the Average College Football Player Make From NIL?

Search "average NIL value college football player" and most answers throw out one number, usually a mean pulled from a small sample of stars. termiNIL's model prices all 14,068 FBS players it tracks, and the two honest answers to "what's average" — the mean and the median — are $224K and $103K. They're more than double apart, and the gap itself is the real story.

Most of the confusion here isn't about the underlying data. It's about which "average" gets reported. A mean gets skewed by a small number of very large numbers; a median doesn't. NIL value happens to be one of the more skewed distributions in college sports, which makes the choice between the two unusually consequential.

How much does the average college football player make from NIL?

As of the 2026-09-28 model snapshot, termiNIL prices 14,068 FBS players at a combined $3.16B. Divide that total by the player count and the mean comes out to $224K. That's the number most people mean when they ask "what's the average."

But half of all tracked players are valued below $103K — the market-wide median. That's the number that actually describes a typical player. The $121K gap between the two isn't noise; it's a direct signal of how concentrated NIL value is at the top of the market.

Why is the mean NIL value so much higher than the median?

Because a relatively small group of players carries a disproportionate share of total value. termiNIL currently models 471 players — 3.35% of the full pool — above $1 million. The top 100 players alone, out of more than 14,000, account for 9.1% of the entire $3.16B market.

That concentration is exactly what inflates a mean. Take a market where most entries cluster in the low six figures and a small top tier sits in the millions, and the average gets dragged toward the top tier even though it describes almost no one. The mean is 2.18 times the median here — meaning the commonly cited "average" overstates a typical player's value by well over double.

Which positions pull the average up?

Position matters as much as ranking does. Quarterback carries by far the highest position-level median and mean, and that alone does a lot to pull the market-wide mean above the market-wide median.

Quarterback's $602K median is more than 5.8 times the $103K market-wide median — no other position comes close. Wide receiver shows the widest internal skew of any position: its $309K mean runs 2.56 times its own $121K median — an even wider gap than the market-wide 2.18x split between mean and median — a sign that a handful of highly valued receivers are doing the same work to that position's average that the top 100 players do to the whole market. At the other end, long snapper's mean sits just 1.02 times its median — a position with almost no top-end concentration to distort the picture.

What does a "typical" NIL value actually look like?

If you're trying to benchmark one player's number, the median for their position is a far more honest anchor than any market-wide mean. A $103K market-wide median or a $224K market-wide mean tells you almost nothing about a specific tight end or cornerback; the position table above does. A wide receiver priced at $150K, for instance, is already above his position's $121K median even though he's nowhere near the $309K position mean — because that mean is being pulled up by a small group of highly graded pass catchers, not by receivers generally.

This is also why termiNIL publishes a per-player confidence tier alongside every valuation, covered in the full methodology. A number that far outpaces its own position median is worth checking for context — often it belongs to a graded, high-snap starter, not a typical case. The same concentration dynamic that separates quarterback from every other position also explains the quarterback NIL premium in more depth.

Check where any specific player or position lands against these medians in the termiNIL terminal.

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