The most common adjective associated with the College Sports Commission is "useless," but on Friday the CSC did something very useful.
For the uninitiated, the CSC was established in 2025 to be the clearinghouse that approves all NIL payments to athletes -- aka, the so-called "guardrails" that coaches and ADs spent years praying for. And, once it got up and running, those same coaches, ADs and GMs instantly started complaining that the CSC either took too long to approve the deals they'd negotiated for their players or didn't approve them at all.
College sports, baby.
Anyway, on Friday the CSC released its compensation report for all athletes. Naturally, we're going to focus on football here.
The vast majority of the focus is on the tippy-top of the industry, but the first thing that jumps out at you is that, with more than 12,000 scholarship players in FBS, a sizable chunk are not getting paid. For instance, per numbers provided by the CSC, there are 257 Power 4 quarterbacks participating in revenue share and another 110 rostered QBs who do not see rev-share distributions. The split is even starker below the P4: 256 receiving rev-share, 573 who do not. For the purposes of this exercise, we're using the numbers from the sample of players who are getting paid, and leaving out players who do not get paid.
Another note: the CSC data differentiates between only between the Power 4 ("Autonomy 4," as they call it) and non-P4. Therefore, my assumption is that group includes the Group of 6 and FCS. Hopefully one day we'll get conference-by-conference (or even school-by-school) data.
Finally, as we all know there are two buckets in which players get paid: rev-share directly from the school and third-party NIL. The CSC provided tables for each, but we have combined both rev-share and NIL into one, final number. Think of it as your roster building cheat sheet. The first number, "High End," represents what 90th percentile earners make, and the median is the 50th percentile. At the P4 level, rev-share accounts for between 30 and 40 percent of a 90th percentile player's total paycheck, and between 10 and 20 percent of a median earner's total compensation.
| Position | P4 High End | P4 Median | Non-P4 High End | Non-P4 Median |
| QB | $2.607 million | $296,000 | $282,000 | $33,000 |
| RB | $596,000 | $135,000 | $108,000 | $18,000 |
| WR | $702,000 | $141,000 | $105,000 | $17,000 |
| TE | $459,000 | $113,000 | $69,000 | $16,000 |
| OL | $726,000 | $155,000 | $115,000 | $19,000 |
| DL | $742,000 | $177,000 | $106,000 | $20,000 |
| LB | $654,000 | $135,000 | $104,000 | $19,000 |
| DB | $616,000 | $140,000 | $92,000 | $17,000 |
| K/P | N/A | ~$57,000 | N/A | ~$12,000 |
(All numbers rounded to the nearest thousand.)
As always, stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.