The 25 Most Valuable College Football Players in 2026, by NIL Value

Every offseason produces a fresh round of NIL numbers pulled from message boards, agent leaks and rounded-up rumors. Almost none of them are comparable to each other, because almost none of them were produced the same way.

termiNIL prices all 14,094 scholarship players across all 138 FBS programs with a single model, which means the number next to a third-string guard at Kent State and the number next to Arch Manning were produced by the same arithmetic. That is the only way a ranking like this one means anything.

Who is the most valuable college football player right now?

Julian Sayin. The Ohio State sophomore carries an estimated $6.24 million valuation, edging Arch Manning by roughly $29,000 — a gap of less than half a percent, which is well inside the model's own error bars. Treat the top three as a tie.

Grade is termiNIL's 0–100 production grade, adjusted for strength of schedule.

Why is the entire top 25 quarterbacks?

Because the position is scarce in a way no other position is. There are 668 quarterbacks in the FBS player pool against 2,112 wide receivers, and only one of those quarterbacks can be on the field. Scarcity, on-field leverage and brand exposure all peak at the same spot on the depth chart, and the model multiplies rather than averages them.

The spread shows up cleanly in position medians:

The median quarterback is worth 2.8x the median edge rusher and 9.6x the median receiver. Wide receiver has the fattest tail of any non-QB group — its 90th percentile is $805K, higher than every position but quarterback — but its median collapses because the position pool is enormous and most of it is depth.

Who are the most valuable non-quarterbacks?

Ohio State's Jeremiah Smith, at $2.88 million — the only non-QB above $2.6M, and still less than half of Sayin.

Smith is the clearest case in the database of social reach doing real work: 1.51 million followers is roughly four times the next receiver on this list, and it is the difference between a $2.4M valuation and a $2.9M one.

Does social media following drive these numbers?

Less than people assume. It is a multiplier applied to a value built from position, role and production — not the foundation.

Sayin ranks first overall with roughly 225,000 followers. Manning ranks second with 705,000, more than three times as many. Jayden Maiava sits 17th at $4.25M with just 12,237 followers, and Walker Eget makes the top 25 with 3,773. A large audience widens the gap between two similar players; it does not manufacture a valuation for a player who is not starting.

How this compares to the rest of the market

The 25 names above are a rounding error against the whole board. The full FBS market prices at $3.00 billion across 14,094 players. The median player is worth $72,000. Only 501 players — 3.6% of the pool — clear $1 million.

Put differently: the top 100 players account for about 9.5% of all modeled NIL value in college football. The concentration is real, but it is nowhere near as extreme as the headline numbers suggest, because the tail of the market is 13,000 players deep.

How termiNIL builds these numbers

Every valuation is the product of six factors: a position base rate, a role multiplier from depth-chart position, a production grade adjusted for strength of schedule, a team multiplier reflecting program revenue and market, a market multiplier, and a social-reach multiplier. Nothing is hand-set, and nothing is copied from a reported deal.

The full method is documented in how NIL valuations are calculated.

Keep reading