The Most Valuable Quarterbacks in College Football, Ranked

Most quarterback NIL lists stop at ten names and never say what the eleventh is worth, let alone the hundredth. That makes them useless for the question people actually have, which is not "who is on top" but "what is a quarterback worth" — and the answer depends almost entirely on one thing nobody prices explicitly.

termiNIL models all 668 FBS quarterbacks on the same basis. This post gives the top of the market, then the part no one publishes: the shape of the curve underneath it, where the drop-offs are, and what a backup is worth.

The short version is that the depth chart, not the conference and not the follower count, is the single largest determinant of a quarterback's price.

Who are the most valuable college football quarterbacks in 2026?

The top three are effectively tied. Sayin at $6.24M and Manning at $6.21M sit half a percent apart, and Moore at $6.06M is inside 3% of both. Any ordering claim among them is noise.

The more useful signal is how quickly the list stops being about brand. Manning carries roughly 704,000 followers, the largest audience in the position by a wide margin, and he does not lead. Sayin does, with under a third of that following. Gunner Stockton and Darian Mensah are separated by $7,000 — a rounding error — despite very different profiles. Following is a multiplier in the valuation model, not the engine.

Where does the quarterback market fall off a cliff?

Sort every FBS quarterback by his spot on the depth chart and the curve becomes obvious.

Losing the job costs 44% of a quarterback's value, holding everything else constant — the QB1 median of $1.70M against $948K one line below. Put the other way, the median starter is worth about 80% more than the man behind him. No other position group has a step that large between adjacent depth slots, because no other position has only one job to lose.

This is also why the raw position median of $598K is misleading if you read it as "what a college quarterback is worth." That figure is the median of all 668, which means it lands almost exactly on the QB3 line. The median of the players who actually take snaps is nearly three times higher.

Quarterbacks are 668 of the 14,094 players termiNIL prices, under 5% of the population, and roughly a fifth of the $3.00B total market. The position's 90th percentile is $1.89M, its ceiling $6.24M.

What is a backup quarterback worth?

The top of the backup market breaks the pattern entirely, and every name in it is a freshman.

Russell at $2.49M is modeled above more than a hundred starting quarterbacks. That is not a claim about who is better right now; it is what the market pays to hold a high-end recruit in place for a year against the cost of him leaving. These are the least certain numbers in the position — the model is pricing expected future starts, not production it can observe — and they should be read that way.

What is the floor for a starting quarterback?

$537K. That is Middle Tennessee's Nicholas Vattiato, the lowest-valued QB1 in FBS, and the bottom of the starter range is tightly packed: Ball State's Kiael Kelly at $539K and Northern Illinois' Josh Holst at $543K sit within about 1% of him.

The floor matters more than it looks. It means a Group of Five starting job clears roughly $537K, while the median FBS starter is at $1.70M and the top of the market is at $6.24M — an 11.6x spread across players doing nominally the same job. Conference placement, not talent alone, accounts for most of it.

Every number here reprices as depth charts move and grades update. You can check any quarterback in the model directly, including the 644 not named above, in the termiNIL terminal — or start with the full top 25 across all positions, which is entirely quarterbacks for reasons this post explains.

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