RANCHO PALOS VERDES, Calif. — Not long ago, the college football world clutched its pearls over Ohio State's $20 million roster. That was 2024. That number won the national championship. It also, almost immediately, became irrelevant.
Heading into 2026, $20 million is considered the minimum cost of doing business in the Big Ten. Few programs in the 18-team conference aren't spending at that level — and those that aren't are projected to finish in the bottom tier of the standings. The new frontier, the number that's making athletic directors fidget in their chairs at this week's spring meetings, is somewhere north of $50 million for a single football season. And according to those same athletic directors, it isn't stopping there.
"Nothing would surprise me at this point," Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz told ESPN. He said it with the exhausted resignation of a man who has watched the sport he built his career in transform into something he barely recognizes.
Neither the College Sports Commission nor institutional belt-tightening are expected to keep football rosters from climbing into the $80 to $90 million range within two years. Men's basketball rosters are already rocketing past $20 million. NCAA
The word "unsustainable" has become the season's defining buzzword, dropped by everyone from conference commissioners to cable analysts. Washington AD Pat Chun, Michigan State AD J Batt, Colorado coach Deion Sanders, Charles Barkley, Ted Cruz, and Nick Saban have all used it in recent months. It has the feel of a chorus without a conductor — everyone singing the same note, nobody doing anything about it.
Lane Kiffin's LSU program is Exhibit A. The Tigers have already topped $40 million in NIL spending to build their 2026 roster, making them the most frequently cited top spender when On3 spoke with 14 Power Four general managers. They landed quarterback Sam Leavitt — whose deal is believed to be in the $5 million range — along with 40 new players via the transfer portal.
The most complete public picture of what schools are actually spending lives at The Sideline's NIL Tracker — https://thesideline.co/nil-tracker — which estimates NIL budgets for all Division I programs. Texas leads at $72 million, followed by Ohio State at $68 million and Texas A&M at $67 million , with the full top 100 highest-paid college athletes listed alongside school-by-school breakdowns.
Meanwhile, programs that were considered big spenders just two years ago are already falling behind. Alabama is sitting around the $15 million mark for 2026 — a number that would have turned heads in 2024 but now looks modest against what Texas, Ohio State, Texas Tech, and Miami are reportedly spending.
The $20.5 million revenue-sharing cap agreed to as part of the House v. NCAA settlement was supposed to be an upper limit. It has instead become a baseline — a floor that schools immediately began building on top of with NIL deals, collectives, and creative accounting. Nearly all of it flows to football and men's basketball, leaving Olympic sports programs across the country to wonder what their future looks like.
At the individual level, the numbers are just as staggering. Arch Manning carries the highest NIL valuation of any college athlete in any sport heading into 2026 at $5.4 million, a portfolio that includes Red Bull, EA Sports, Raising Cane's, Warby Parker, and as of March 2026, a deal with Google Gemini.
The Big Ten meetings this week are supposed to be about strategy and alignment. Instead the dominant conversation is the same one that's been dominating college athletics for two years: at what point does the math stop working? Nobody here has a clean answer. What they have are bigger numbers, shinier facilities, and a creeping sense that the sport is in a race it cannot win against itself.
The trophy cases, for now, keep filling up. The bills keep arriving right behind them.
→ Track every school's estimated NIL budget: https://thesideline.co/nil-tracker