NIL Money Map — where college sports money comes from

Where the money comes from

Ranked hometowns for the players currently shown on the map — the sport, conference and school filters above apply here too.

Rank by

Place size

Min. players

State

Length

How this works

This map traces the money in modern college sports — revenue-sharing payments plus name/image/likeness (NIL) deals — back to the hometown of every player who earns it. It answers a question nobody had mapped: when a booster or a TV contract pays a college athlete, where in America does that income actually come from?

Read every number as “income earned by players from this place,” not “money that went to this place.” The dollars are legally the player's. We place them at the town the player calls home to show where college-sports income originates — often small, lower-income towns that a raw dollar map would hide.

Where the numbers come from

College NIL/rev-share pay is mostly private, so almost every figure here is an estimate. We build each player's number with a “most-documented-wins” waterfall, and label which tier every player fell into:

Reported A figure publicly reported for that specific player (e.g. a known contract). Highest confidence — used as-is.

On3 That player's published On3 NIL valuation — the public standard, itself a model, and only the top ~100 players nationally are public.

est Everyone else: an archetype estimate from the player's position and role (starter / rotation / depth) — or, if higher, his recruiting profile (ESPN star rating and rank, worth most in his first year), calibrated so each school's roster sums to that school's pay budget.

The last step is the important one. We anchor each school to an estimated annual pay budget, subtract the reported and On3 players, and distribute the remainder across the rest of the roster by role and recruiting pedigree. That makes town and county totals trustworthy even when any single unranked player is off — the errors are bounded by the school's budget rather than free-floating.

Built to under-count, not over-count

Every estimate is a range (low–mid–high); the map shows the mid.

A $100,000 floor: players estimated below it are dropped from the cards and from town totals. Real money is missed, but nothing is inflated.

Unranked estimates are capped near the lowest On3-ranked value (~$1M), rising to $1.5M at the biggest-budget programs and higher at premium positions (2× for QB, 1.5× for OL and edge), which do pay starters above that — ESPN's August 2026 survey of GMs and agents puts the average Power 4 starting quarterback above $2M. Money the cap trims goes to the same school's backups instead. Elite recruits can exceed it, up to the going rate for their ranking.

Our football total sits deliberately below Opendorse's reported ~$1.9B P4 market.

Data sources

Rosters & hometowns — ESPN's roster API, reconciled against Ourlads depth charts (the membership authority that tracks transfer-portal moves within days).

Player valuations — On3's public NIL rankings.

Role / depth — projected depth charts (Ourlads), with class seniority only as a tie-break.

Recruiting — ESPN recruiting rankings (ESPN 300 and every P4 school's signing classes, 2022–2026), priced from reported freshman deals and ESPN's 2026 position-cost reporting.

Football pay budgets — The Athletic's September 2026 estimates for all 68 Power 4 schools and Notre Dame. Position rates — an ESPN GM position-cost survey.

Local income — U.S. Census American Community Survey (5-year) household income, by place and county.

Reading “% of local income”

This view compares a town's traced athlete earnings against the entire annual household income of everyone who lives there. It's the map's “aha”: big metros shrink and small towns light up, because a few million dollars is a rounding error in a city and a fifth of the economy in a town of a few hundred. Census income is itself an estimate with a wide margin of error in very small places, so we suppress the per-household and %-of-income figures for towns under 40 households.

What we're less sure about

Within-conference budget spreads are judgment — only the conference averages are sourced. This is where most of the dollars ride.

Hometowns can be mislabeled for prep-school transfers (ESPN sometimes lists the academy town); we correct these case by case, not exhaustively.

The 20% leak discount is a judgment call — leaked deals probably overstate what comparable unreported players make, so the recruit pay curve (built from leaked freshman deals) is cut 20% before it's applied to anyone without a report. Reported figures themselves, On3, and the GM starter-rate survey are used as-is.

Reported figures are volatile — star deals swing by millions across a single off-season.

Men's basketball currently rides on a 2025-26 roster snapshot (no transfer-authoritative source exists for it yet). Because money is placed at the transfer-invariant hometown, town totals hold up, but a few marquee freshmen are missing until the fall roster refresh — an under-count, never a misattribution.

Coverage

2026 season, Power-4 football (plus Notre Dame) and high-major men's basketball (the five power conferences plus perennial top-25 independents). More sports and seasons are planned.

Independent project, not affiliated with any school, conference, the NCAA, On3, ESPN, or Opendorse. Figures are estimates for illustration and discussion, not reported salaries; don't treat any individual number as fact. Sources are ranked and documented in the project's SOURCES.md.