Welcome to the first day of the new era of college sports, where all kinds of money questions still loom.

Take football, for example. What will it take to sign and pay a top Power Four quarterback? How much will a quality offensive lineman run you? How about a star wide receiver?

And the ultimate question: What will it take to build and pay a roster capable of contending for a national championship?

“The answer is, if anybody knows that or could tell you that, they’re not being honest,” Alabama AD Greg Byrne told AL.com.

Starting today, colleges can pay athletes directly through revenue sharing. That’s because of a settlement in a massive lawsuit, known as House v. NCAA.

“Obviously you’re going to have to be competitive in the revenue-sharing world that we’re in,” Byrne said, “but there’s a strong desire across the board to make the agreed-upon House settlement work. The people who are saying it won’t work or saying that they know it won’t work almost all have ulterior motives and interests that benefit them for it not to work.”

Will it take $15 million for a championship roster? $20 million? Or even $30 million plus?

It depends on whom you ask. And it’s complicated.

One thing is certain: Alabama will have about $18 million to spend in revenue-sharing dollars this year, but that includes athletes across all sports. Schools are allowed to share up to $20.5 million and decide how they distribute it, but every SEC program has committed $2.5 million to adding scholarships, Byrne told CTSN. As for the remaining $18 million, Byrne has said football and men’s basketball will receive the highest percentage of that revenue share. The rest of the revenue-sharing money will be distributed among the other four ticketed sports: Softball, baseball, women’s basketball and gymnastics. UA has not specified exact amounts.

How much did players cost before July 1, 2025?

Before trying to determine where the market could go from this day forward, it’s important to first understand where it has been before July 1.

AL.com polled six people across college football who’ve written and/or reviewed player contracts in the past year, both from the school perspective and the player perspective. We heard a wide range of responses, but some trends emerged. Here are some of the takeaways:

1. The highest-paid quarterbacks in the Power Four received deals of at least $1 million, and sometimes more. That was undisputed among those surveyed.  
2. Quarterbacks were usually the highest-earners, but they weren’t the only ones capable of reaching seven-figure deals.
3. Another high-earning position: Offensive tackle. The market’s been hot. The highest-paid blockers in the Power Four have been paid in the high six-figure range and some even $1 million-plus.
4. Some of the other highest-paid positions: Cornerback, wide receiver, edge defender and interior defensive linemen.
5. Wide receiver had the most variety in answers among those surveyed, ranging anywhere from low-to-mid six figures to $1 million or more in pay. Part of that could be because of superstar receivers who have national marketability skewing that data, such as Ohio State’s Jeremiah Smith or Alabama’s Ryan Williams. Real NIL money for big-name, well-known receivers could have boosted the overall number for their pay compared to those talented receivers who don’t have big NIL deals.

It’s important to note what happened in the past may not be a forecast for the future. Methods to pay players prior to July 1 won’t necessarily work moving forward. The pay structure is expected to change. As part of the settlement, a clearinghouse run by accounting giant Deloitte was created to review third-party deals.

What happened in the past six months specifically isn’t likely to be repeated.

“This year, some kids in the spring cycle got a little overpaid,” said Chase Moss, a player agent at First Class Prospects. “None of the teams knew what was going to happen with the rev share and the collectives. They just tried to dump as much of the collective money out as fast as they could before the rev share happened.”

Darren Heitner, an NIL attorney who’s reviewed more than 100 college athlete contracts this year, said he noticed many collectives frontloaded payments that were otherwise promised after June 30. That way, those deals wouldn’t have to be submitted to NIL Go, the name for the clearinghouse that is now inspecting deals based on fair-market value.

Say a player had been offered a $750,000 deal to sign with a team for the 2025 football season. Frontloading his deal meant he could have been paid some if not all $750,000 before July 1. That way, the collective/school wouldn’t have to worry about the deal getting cleared. Front-loading has also inflated numbers because not all deals are for 12 months. Some extend past that.

This practice of frontloading may have skewed the numbers for now.

As for what numbers will become, no one knows with certainty. It changes every cycle. That’s the case for the NFL and it will be the case in college football.

“There really is no true market,” one college football personnel director outside of the SEC told AL.com. “The market is determined by how desperate somebody is to gain a position or to beat somebody out in recruiting. In the December portal cycle, a good wide receiver, you might have said we can get a good enough wide receiver for $350,000. When it comes to the spring portal window and what you thought you had gotten in December is not what you thought you got, when the numbers are limited, when the pool is small, a kid can negotiate for a higher price than what he may have gone for in December.”

If the House settlement works

In the previous era, a collective’s ability to raise the money and/or secure deals was the only real cap stopping you from building a $30-plus-million roster.

With all the challenges the NCAA faced and lost in court in recent years, there were essentially no rules because the governing body couldn’t enforce them. In 2021, the NCAA allowed athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness, but it quickly turned into above board pay-for-play with no limits.

It won’t work that way anymore, if the House settlement works how it’s written.

If the House settlement parameters hold up how they’re intended, strategic cap management will be needed to construct a roster capable of competing at high levels. Think something along the lines of how NFL teams manage the cap. If you sign a few players for big money, you might have to get creative at other positions and find more hidden gems.

Under the House settlement, there will be two main ways to pay players:

1. Sharing revenue within the cap. $20.5 million to start, but really $18 million with the cost of adding scholarships.
2. Real name, image and likeness deals, not pay-for-play. These are supposed to be submitted to the clearinghouse for approval.

So, what will be the split between the two?

“Most of it for me I’ve seen is rev share,” said Jackson Zager, a player agent at JTM Sports. “Then if there needs to be a cherry on top, they’re like, ‘We can give him $75,000 in NIL here.’”

There are exceptions. A player who’s more marketable nationally could have a school help arrange more third-party deals so the player doesn’t need as big of a slice of the revenue-sharing pie. But many, if not most, aren’t in that boat. Revenue sharing will likely provide a bigger source of income for players between the two.

That’s how it is in the NFL, too. Nineteen of the top 20 highest-paid players earned more from their salary/bonus than their endorsements in 2024, per Sportico. The only exception: Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. His salary was $17 million with $30 million in endorsements. (His licensing income increased 177% last year after he started dating Taylor Swift).

Everyone else in the NFL makes considerably more in salary/bonus than endorsements. And those endorsement deals don’t get above $14 million for players not named Kelce or Patrick Mahomes. In fact, 14 of the top 20 highest-paid players in the NFL last season each made less than $10 million in endorsements. For example, Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa made $43.1 million in salary/bonus last year with $3 million in endorsements.

And these are the biggest stars in the most-watched league. Most college athletes aren’t making that kind of money in marketing or licensing deals.

To further illustrate this: Maybe a college program designates, for example, somewhere between $13 million and $15 million in revenue sharing for football. To reach a $30-million price tag for a roster, that would take at least $15 million in name, image and likeness deals.

“Let’s say you have some star athletes who have authentic NIL values over seven figures; that I believe to be true,” said Jay Ezelle, an attorney in Birmingham whose firm works with more than a dozen universities. “If you have two of them on one team, you’re approaching $2-4 million in authentic value for those two players. The number of teams that would have two stars on that level, you can count on one hand.”

That’s far from $15 million in real NIL, considering many players are more likely to sign authentic NIL agreements in the thousands, not millions.

Which is why some in the business are skeptical of roster numbers climbing far past $20 million for a calendar year if/when the effects of frontloading wear off. Sure, Ohio State had a roster this past season of “around $20 million,” Buckeyes AD Ross Bjork told Yahoo! Sports last year. But that was in a different era.

This is all contingent on the House settlement working as intended, though.

The major uncertainty that looms

The clearinghouse has its doubters. That’s why there’s a big piece of uncertainty as to what it will cost for a high-level football roster.

The College Sports Commission, the organization founded to oversee the new system, requires players to report third-party NIL deals of $600 or more to the clearinghouse “to determine whether third-party NIL deals are made with the purpose of using a student-athlete’s NIL for a valid business purpose and do not exceed a reasonable range of compensation.”

Questions remain, however, about the effectiveness of the clearinghouse.

How will a reasonable range of compensation be defined? What is fair–market value? What can, and will, be enforced?

Heitner said there are “a lot of issues at play.”

“You wrestle with 1. Whether players will actually submit all these third-party deals to the clearinghouse,” Heitner said, “and 2. Whether deals will be classified outside the scope of NIL so as not to have to submit them. And 3. Whether they can be brokered and entered into between players and third parties that are not considered associated individuals or associated entities so as not to fall within the guise of being reviewed for fair market value.”

Deals started to be submitted in June once the settlement was approved, but there’s still not enough data as to how the clearinghouse will operate. Specifically, what it will and will not allow. That information will in large part determine how much money can be spent on a roster, barring legal challenges.

Until then, what a championship-quality roster will cost is anyone’s guess.

Educated opinions can at least put you in the realm of reality, even if that’s far, far away from the fantasy land of certainty.

Nick Kelly is an Alabama beat writer for AL.com and the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on X and Instagram.