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. General managers surveyed by CBS Sports have said a single star quarterback can absorb roughly a fifth of a top program’s player budget — the position is scarce, it decides games, and it prices accordingly. A proven Power 4 starter generally lands somewhere in the $1.5M–$2.5M range this cycle, 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. 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 and a 2025 Heisman Trophy finalist who led all of FBS in completion percentage. His valuation is already public on our site. Here’s how the model arrives at it.

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.

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. Sayin is the unquestioned starter, so he’s valued as a full-time QB1, not a backup or part of a timeshare. He’s also still early in his college career, which means the model doesn’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 the model produces 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 does: it sits above our median for Power 4 starting quarterbacks, comfortably inside the range general managers and agents report for a proven 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 is 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’ve spent two years refining across every Power 4 roster.

See Sayin’s full valuation on his player page, and read more about how the model works in our methodology. Next up in the series: another position, broken down the same way.