Scouts from 15 NFL teams are expected in Husky Stadium on Saturday to watch a bevy of high-round prospects in action as top-ranked Ohio State faces undefeated Washington. But the participating teams have more in common with their NFL counterparts than future draft selections. In the revenue-sharing era, college programs are modeling their salary structure on the professional approach — all the way down to positional priorities and dollar percentages.
“We’ve put together our own data analytics and our own programming, trying to determine what is the trend of the 32 NFL teams,” Washington coach Jedd Fisch told the Hotline recently.
“How do those teams pay their players? What percentage do they invest in each position group? And then who do we feel we’re most similar to?”
The Huskies are hardly alone in leaning into the NFL model to inform decisions on roster construction. In fact, most schools are borrowing from the pros in some fashion.
North Carolina has billed itself as the NFL’s 33rd team after hiring ex-Patriots coach Bill Belichick and general manager Michael Lombardi, a former NFL executive.
This summer, Missouri hired Gaurav Verma, a former salary cap specialist for the Broncos, as director of football strategy and finance.
Florida general manager Nick Polk spent decades with the Falcons, specializing in salary cap management and contract negotiations.
Everyone is leaning into the NFL, but each school crafts the process to best suit its needs.
For Fisch, the process began by identifying which teams are most similar to the Huskies in playing style and roster construction. Although he declined to make specific comparisons — “If you do that, people know what you’re paying your players” — it’s reasonable to conclude he drew heavily on his own NFL experiences and relationships.
Fisch worked for seven teams, including the Patriots during Belichick’s tenure, and his college roommate (at Florida) was Howie Roseman, the Eagles’ general manager.
“The Eagles might invest X amount of dollars in their cornerbacks and X in their quarterback and X at the receiver position and not invest as much in other spots, where the Rams might do the opposite or the Patriots might do the opposite,” Fisch explained.
“I try to evaluate our team and look at what we are this year, where do I think our strengths are, where do I think our weaknesses are, and where do I want to make the investments. And then I find what teams are most comparable and try to run some formulas that give me a percentage to make decisions off of.”
A strategy that makes perfect sense today would have seemed like crazy talk from a college coach just a few years ago. But the sport moved to the professional model on July 1, when the settlement terms of the House v. NCAA lawsuit created a revenue-sharing arrangement.
For the 2025-26 competition year, each school can share a maximum of $20.5 million with its athletes. In the Big Ten, the allocation is roughly $15 million to football players. But that doesn’t include third-party NIL opportunities, which allow schools to exceed the revenue-sharing cap established by House. (Third-party NIL deals of at least $600 must be approved by a clearinghouse.)
All told, many football programs in the Power Four conferences have payrolls exceeding $20 million this season. Some are closer to $30 million.
Of course, that’s a fraction of the NFL salary cap, which is approximately $280 million.
“We have some people in the building who are very Excel-literate, so we can overlay what each pro team is doing with their cap allocation,” said Matt Doherty, UW’s senior director of player personnel.
“But it’s all done to scale — it’s automatically drawn to scale. And we’re paying especially close attention to teams that are running similar offenses.”
The Huskies don’t follow the Excel spreadsheet down to the dollar, however.
“It’s more of a guideline,” Doherty added. “There’s an educational component to it. How do you replace players? Do you replace players? How do you assess value? Why do teams spend the way they do? The Eagles had a revolving door at running back. How were they able to afford the best back in the game (Saquon Barkley)?
“If you evaluate well, you’re able to orchestrate the economics of talent acquisition.”
The process is both art and science at the NFL level, even for the teams that rely most heavily on analytics. It’s much more the former for college programs, in large part because of the messy market that defined the 2024-25 recruiting cycle and transfer class.
Once the schools realized revenue sharing likely would become the law of the land on July 1, they rushed to beat the cap by pouring unchecked NIL dollars into player acquisitions. That sent valuations into the stratosphere on the transfer market last winter and spring.
“The wide receiver market was ridiculous,” said Doherty, who hopes the House settlement and NIL oversight will add efficiency to the talent acquisition cycle in 2025-26.
“Hopefully, the circumstances won’t be as pronounced. NIL isn’t going away, but it would be nice to have a modicum of stability and not be guessing as frequently.”
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One component to the process, Doherty added, is beyond dispute: Talent evaluation matters more now than ever before.
It matters more because wasted dollars lead directly to flawed rosters and because it’s always cheaper to retain talent than to acquire it. For all the focus on transfers, shrewd recruiting at the high school level is imperative.
“That’s the model the pros use,” Doherty said. “The best teams draft well.”
They draft well, they restock well, they allocate well — the most successful NFL franchises possess an identifiable strategy. You can spot an Eagles free agent or a Ravens draft class from miles away.
By the time the early signing period begins and the transfer portal opens this winter, Fisch will have an exponentially better feel for dollar allocation than he did last winter, when NIL dollars were inflating the market and his roster had been in place for a mere nine months.
“Now that I have a good idea of who I think we can be, I see how we’re recruiting, I see what recruiting wars we’re winning and what recruiting wars we’re not winning, what we need to get done, what our position groups look like — now I can make decisions,” he said.
“I can say, ‘Alright, this is the data I need to determine that we’re going to invest X percentage in our defensive backs for the next three years and X percentage in our running backs.
“Moving forward, my goal would be to take the formula and try to create the team around the formula, rather than the formula around the team.”
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