How We Value a College Quarterback

The most expensive position in the sport

The quarterback is the most valuable position in college football, and the market treats it that way. CBS Sports has compared the top of the quarterback market to the NFL, where top quarterbacks take around 20% of a team’s cap, though some general managers question committing that share of a budget to one player. The position is scarce, it decides games, and it prices accordingly. A quality starter generally cost somewhere in the $1.5M–$2.5M range in the 2025–26 winter transfer window, with the elite tier reaching far higher.

Those are estimated market values — drawn from reporting by CBS Sports, ESPN, and The Athletic — not salaries, and not figures we set. For the full position-by-position map, see our guide on what every position costs in college football, which carries the August 2026 re-survey. This piece goes one level deeper: how a market reality like that becomes a specific number for a specific player.

One quarterback, start to finish

Take Julian Sayin — Ohio State’s starting quarterback when we published this in June 2026, and a 2025 Heisman Trophy finalist who led all of FBS in completion percentage. This walkthrough is a snapshot as of June 2026; his current valuation is on his player page. Here’s how the model arrived at the June figure.

We don’t start with an opinion about a player and reverse-engineer a number to match. We start with the inputs and let the model do the work. A handful of factors carry most of the weight:

The position itself. Quarterback carries the highest baseline value of any position, before a single snap is played. That isn’t a judgment about any one player — it’s the scarcity and the game-deciding impact of the position.

On-field production. This is the largest individual lever, and it has to be earned on the field. Sayin’s 2025 season is elite by any measure: 3,610 passing yards, 32 touchdowns against 8 interceptions, 9.2 yards per attempt, and a 77.0% completion rate that led the country and ranks among the most accurate seasons in FBS history. Every one of those figures is public and verifiable — ESPN, Sports-Reference, and Ohio State’s own statistics. Production like that pushes a valuation up; a replacement-level or unproven starter doesn’t get the same credit. Production here means the most recent completed season. Production during a season is priced at the revaluation before the winter transfer portal, not week to week.

Program and market. Where a player suits up matters. A starter at a top-tier program plays in front of a larger audience, with more media exposure and a deeper market around him than a starter at a smaller school. Ohio State sits at the top of that tier. How much weight that carries is our assessment — the inputs behind it (program, conference, role) are public; the weighting is ours.

Role and experience. In June 2026 Sayin was Ohio State’s clear starter, so the model valued him as a full-time QB1, not a backup or part of a timeshare. He was also still early in his college career, which means the model didn’t yet apply the premium a proven, multi-year veteran earns. That’s deliberate — we don’t pay forward for experience a player hasn’t logged.

Audience. A player’s public following adds a measured amount on top of the on-field value. It’s a real signal of marketability, but a modest one next to production and platform — and it never drives the number on its own.

Where the number lands

Put those together and, as of June 2026, the model produced a valuation of about $2.4 million for Sayin. The useful test isn’t whether that number feels right — it’s whether it holds up against the people writing the actual checks. It did: it sat above our median for Power 4 starting quarterbacks, inside the range general managers and agents reported for a quality starter, and below the elite ceiling. The figure wasn’t chosen to land there. It was built from public inputs and landed there on its own.

Check our work

That’s the point of an independent valuation: you should be able to interrogate the inputs. Sayin’s production is in the box scores. His role at the time was on the depth chart. His program isn’t in dispute. If you think the valuation is wrong, the honest question is which input you’d change — because the inputs are public, and the weighting is the part we keep refining across every Power 4 roster.

See Sayin’s current valuation on his player page, and read more about how the model works in our methodology.