Ohio State NIL Roster Value: College Football's #2 Roster

Ohio State enters the week ranked #2 in the country and priced almost the same way by termiNIL: $49.56 million in modeled NIL roster value, the second-highest total in college football. The gap to the top spot is thinner than the gap to third — Oregon leads by 2.31%, while Ohio State clears Texas by 1.22%.

Most "richest roster" lists stop at the total. The more useful question for a roster this deep is where the money actually sits — and at Ohio State, it isn't stacked on the quarterback room the way the national market says it should be.

How much is Ohio State's NIL roster worth in 2026?

$49.56 million, as of September 24, 2026, spread across 111 scholarship players who average $446K each. That's the second-highest roster value of any of the 138 programs in termiNIL's model — 2.31% behind Oregon ($50.71M) and 1.22% ahead of Texas ($48.96M).

Sayin is worth 7.2 times as much as tenth-ranked Luke Fahey, and his $6.24 million is more than double the next-highest Buckeye, wide receiver Jeremiah Smith at $2.89 million. After that, the roster's value spreads across three wide receivers, two cornerbacks and two edge rushers before it thins out — a wider distribution than a roster leaning on one star.

Which position group is worth the most on Ohio State's roster?

This is the roster's most counterintuitive number. Wide receiver, not quarterback, is Ohio State's most valuable position group by share of roster value — 22.0% to quarterback's 21.4%, a narrow edge for the receivers.

That split cuts against the national grain. Across termiNIL's full 14,376-player market, the median quarterback ($588K) is worth 5.3 times the median wide receiver ($110K) — yet nationally the wide receiver position still holds slightly more total value than quarterback ($619.7M vs $594.6M), because more than three times as many receivers get priced (2,055 vs 684). Ohio State's roster mirrors that market-wide shape at the team level: a three-deep receiver room (Smith at $2.89M, Inniss at $1.95M, McCuin at $1.63M) edges out a quarterback room carrying one enormous number in Sayin and a steep drop after him.

Why isn't Ohio State's most-followed player its most valuable one?

Jeremiah Smith carries 1.6 million followers — about seven times Julian Sayin's 228K — and is the most socially prominent player on the roster by a wide margin. He's still valued at less than half of Sayin's number. That gap is a clean illustration of how much more the model weighs performance grade and position premium than audience size; both players carry an A+ grade, so the difference comes down almost entirely to Sayin's quarterback premium. For more on how big a role followers actually play, see termiNIL's explainer on social following and NIL value.

How does Ohio State compare to the rest of college football?

The average FBS roster is worth $23.0 million. Ohio State's is worth 2.16 times that, and its $446K average per player is 2.02 times the $221K mean across the sport's 14,376 tracked players. Ohio State's $49.56M also represents 1.56% of the entire $3.17B national NIL market on its own.

What isn't in this number?

termiNIL's plausibility audit holds four Ohio State valuations out of the ranked tables above — Tavien St. Clair, Chris Henry, Khary Wilder and Bo Jackson, all priced in seven figures without enough grade or snap data yet to support those numbers. All four are excluded from the leaderboards until the model has more to work with, but their dollars are still counted in the $49.56M roster total — that figure, like every team total on termiNIL, includes every scholarship player regardless of ranking eligibility.

Ohio State's full roster, position by position, is browsable in the termiNIL terminal. For how the Buckeyes stack up against the rest of the sport, see Oregon's NIL roster value and how NIL valuations are calculated.

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