Schools pay for football. Brands pay for fame.

For as long as there has been an NIL market, every number in it has been an estimate, a leak or a negotiating position — ours included. On Oct. 30, the College Sports Commission published something different: anonymized pay distributions drawn from the two systems it runs. CAPS, the College Athlete Payment System, records what schools pay athletes under revenue-sharing agreements. NIL Go records third-party NIL deals the commission has cleared.

No athlete, school or deal is named. What the CSC released are percentiles — the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th — broken out by sport, by football position, and by conference group. It splits Division I into the "A4" (the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC) and everyone else. That is enough to answer the questions that matter: How much of a roster gets paid? Who pays more, the school or the sponsor? And where does the money concentrate?

The short version: the school is now the main paymaster, and it pays for different things than brands do.

The school writes the bigger check

At every one of the eight core football positions in the A4, the median revenue-share payment to a paid player is 3.5 to 6.2 times the median third-party NIL total for a player with a cleared deal. For the typical Power conference player, the money the industry was named after is now the smaller stream.

Brands pay for fame. Schools pay for football.

The gap between the two streams isn't the same everywhere, and the pattern is the most revealing thing in the data. The school-to-sponsor ratio is smallest at quarterback (3.5×) and largest in the trenches — 6.2× for offensive linemen and 5.7× for defensive linemen.

The top of the market makes the point sharper. The 90th-percentile NIL total for an A4 quarterback is $996,049, 4.7 times the offensive line's $213,500. On the school side, the 90th-percentile quarterback figure of $1,611,000 is 3.1 times the offensive line's $512,000. Sponsors buy visibility, and visibility lives at quarterback. Schools are paying closer to what a player is worth to the depth chart.

Defensive linemen are the sport's most consistently paid position. Paid A4 defensive linemen have the highest median school payment of any position except quarterback ($150,000), the highest share of players paid (83%), and — counting every rostered lineman, paid or not — the highest median of any position at $105,000. Quarterbacks own the ceiling. Defensive linemen own the middle.

The quarterback market has a long tail

Among the 257 A4 quarterbacks being paid by their schools, the 10th percentile is $23,500, the median is $230,000, the 75th percentile is $675,000, and the 90th is $1,611,000. That's a 7× jump from the median to the 90th percentile — wider than at any other position. Another 110 rostered A4 quarterbacks receive nothing from the school, so across the full quarterback room the median is $75,000.

The 75/29 divide

The biggest line in the data isn't between positions. It's between conferences. Three in four A4 football players are on a school payroll. Outside the A4, fewer than one in three are, and the median across every rostered non-A4 player is $0 at every position.

Even at the top level, specialists are the exception: about half of A4 kickers (51%) and punters (50%) are paid, and just 38% of long snappers. Outside the A4, paid quarterbacks have a median of $31,000; the other core positions fall between $14,000 and $18,000.

The $1,500 floor

One number keeps showing up in the NIL tables: $1,500. It's the 10th percentile at seven of the eight core A4 positions. Outside the A4, the median NIL total sits between $1,500 and $1,570 at all 12 football position groups.

When thousands of players at hundreds of schools land on nearly the same figure, that doesn't look like a negotiated market. It's the pattern flat, roster-wide group-licensing payments would leave in the data — one check, the same size, to everyone who opts in. For many football players outside the A4, the typical "NIL deal" appears to be a group check, not an endorsement.

Basketball: four leagues, four payroll philosophies

Men's basketball is where conference behavior diverges most. The CSC breaks basketball out by conference, and the four A4 leagues have built very different payrolls.

The Big 12 spreads it out. It pays 79% of its roster, the highest share of any league, and also has the highest 90th percentile ($662,500). The ACC pays the most per player: its paid median of $225,000 leads all conferences. The SEC concentrates. It pays the smallest share of its roster (45%, or 114 of 253 players), so its median across all rostered players is $0 — but the SEC players who are paid have the highest floor of any league, with a 25th percentile of $117,500. The Big Ten sits between them.

In basketball the school-to-sponsor gap is even wider than in football. The median paid ACC player received $225,000 from his school; the median ACC player with a cleared NIL deal had $6,250 in contracted deals, a ratio of 36 to 1.

Everywhere else

Outside football and basketball, revenue sharing is mostly a token. Of 2,840 A4 women's outdoor track athletes, 290 (10%) received revenue share, with a median of $500. A4 baseball pays 29% of its roster (712 of 2,498), and its paid median of $12,000 is the highest of any sport outside football and basketball.

And here the pattern flips. In 19 of the 28 A4 sports outside football and basketball where the CSC publishes both medians, including men's golf, tennis, ice hockey and soccer, and women's soccer and outdoor track, the median NIL total for an athlete with a cleared deal is larger than the median school payment.

How to read these numbers

This is the best public data the sport has ever had, and it's easy to misuse. A few rules:

• Percentiles don't add. You can't add the 90th-percentile school payment to the 90th-percentile NIL total and call it what a top player makes. The highest-paid revenue-share players and the biggest NIL earners aren't necessarily the same people, and the two cohorts have different members.
• The cohorts differ. Revenue-share tables can include or exclude players paid $0. NIL tables include only athletes with at least one cleared deal. The two systems also tag positions differently: 430 A4 NIL athletes are listed as "position unspecified," against 162 in the revenue-share data.
• The windows differ. Football revenue share covers calendar 2026, including scheduled payments. Football NIL covers deals cleared Jan. 1–Sept. 30, 2026. Basketball revenue share runs July 1, 2025 to April 6, 2026.
• NIL figures are contract totals, not annual pay. The CSC reports the full contracted amount of each deal. A multi-year deal counts in full.
• Football incentives are counted as if earned. During the season, CAPS treats almost every contingent performance incentive as a scheduled payment, even if the benchmark hasn't been reached. The upper percentiles may run ahead of what's actually paid.
• Not everything is here. Scholarships, cost-of-attendance stipends and Alston payments are excluded. Blank cells are by design: the CSC publishes a percentile only when the cohort is large enough (100 athletes for the 90th and 10th, 40 for the 75th and 25th, 10 for the median).

Where TNS figures fit

The NIL Standard's player figures are an independent estimate of annualized NIL market value — not a reported deal, contract or payroll disclosure. The CSC data is different in kind: it shows what was actually paid and cleared, in aggregate, with no names attached. It doesn't tell anyone what a specific player is worth. It does give the whole market, us included, a public distribution to measure itself against. For how our figures are built, see our football methodology.