All sixteen Big 12 starting quarterbacks, scored on four published components: Performance at 35%, NIL Visibility at 20%, Social Power at 20%, Fan Demand at 25%.
In the SEC the column that decided the board was Fan Demand. In the Big Ten it was fame, because the fan column was nearly empty. The Big 12 is the emptiest of the three: eleven of these sixteen quarterbacks have a Fan Demand of exactly zero, and the whole column is worth 3.75 points.
So this conference is decided by one thing, and it is not football.
The board
| # | Quarterback | School | NIL Index | Perf | Vis | Social | Fan |
| 1 | DJ Lagway | Baylor | 56.0 | 52 | 94 | 76 | 15 |
| 2 | Devon Dampier | Utah | 50.7 | 55 | 83 | 75 | 0 |
| 3 | Avery Johnson | Kansas State | 49.0 | 58 | 73 | 71 | 0 |
| 4 | Noah Fifita | Arizona | 45.1 | 58 | 58 | 66 | 0 |
| 5 | Bear Bachmeier | BYU | 44.2 | 53 | 54 | 68 | 5 |
| 6 | Conner Weigman | Houston | 42.9 | 58 | 48 | 65 | 0 |
| 7 | Alonza Barnett III | UCF | 42.8 | 60 | 43 | 65 | 0 |
| 8 | Drew Mestemaker | Oklahoma State | 42.6 | 60 | 45 | 63 | 0 |
| 9 | Jaylen Raynor | Iowa State | 42.4 | 58 | 53 | 58 | 0 |
| 10 | JC French IV | Cincinnati | 39.8 | 58 | 40 | 52 | 5 |
| 11 | Julian Lewis | Colorado | 38.5 | 10 | 94 | 81 | 0 |
| 12 | Jaden Craig | TCU | 37.4 | 53 | 40 | 48 | 5 |
| 13 | Cutter Boley | Arizona State | 35.1 | 39 | 53 | 54 | 0 |
| 14 | Scotty Fox Jr. | West Virginia | 35.0 | 27 | 45 | 64 | 15 |
| 15 | Will Hammond | Texas Tech | 30.8 | 22 | 47 | 68 | 0 |
| 16 | Isaiah Marshall | Kansas | 25.8 | 13 | 43 | 63 | 0 |
Figures are live as of 2 September. The national quarterback board runs the same components across every conference.
| Component | Weight | What it measures |
| Performance | 35% | Stats, efficiency, team success |
| NIL Visibility | 20% | Estimated value, brands, exposure |
| Social Power | 20% | Followers, engagement, momentum |
| Fan Demand | 25% | RallyFuel searches, views, fuels |
1. Five quarterbacks, one football score, nine points apart
Five Big 12 starters have an identical Performance component of 58. Whatever the index thinks about how they played, it thinks the same thing about all five.
| Vis | Social | Fan | NIL Index | Board | |
| Avery Johnson | 73 | 71 | 0 | 49.0 | 3rd |
| Noah Fifita | 58 | 66 | 0 | 45.1 | 4th |
| Conner Weigman | 48 | 65 | 0 | 42.9 | 6th |
| Jaylen Raynor | 53 | 58 | 0 | 42.4 | 9th |
| JC French IV | 40 | 52 | 5 | 39.8 | 10th |
Nine point two points of separation across eight board positions, third to tenth. Four of the five have nothing at all in Fan Demand and the fifth has 5, so that column explains almost none of it.
Hold football still across five quarterbacks and the board still sorts them, using Visibility and Social Power alone.
2. The two poles
Drew Mestemaker threw for 4,379 yards and 34 touchdowns last season, first in the Big 12 in both and fourth in QBR. He has the joint-highest Performance component in the conference at 60.
Julian Lewis threw for 589 yards and four touchdowns, 26th in the conference in yardage and 33rd in QBR. His Performance component is 10, the lowest of the sixteen.
They are separated by 4.1 points.
| Mestemaker over Lewis | Raw | Weighted |
| Performance | +50 | +17.50 |
| NIL Visibility | -49 | -9.80 |
| Social Power | -18 | -3.60 |
| Fan Demand | 0 | 0.00 |
Seventeen and a half points of football, and Lewis takes back thirteen and a half of it without playing. Both have a Fan Demand of zero, so no fan on either side had any hand in it. Lewis’ Visibility of 94 ties DJ Lagway’s for the highest in the conference; only Dante Moore’s perfect 100 in the Big Ten is higher anywhere we track.
The quarterback who led the conference in passing is eighth. The one with 589 career yards is eleventh.
3. First place belongs to the eleventh-best Performance
DJ Lagway leads the Big 12 at 56.0. His Performance component of 52 ranks eleventh of sixteen.
He threw for 2,264 yards with 16 touchdowns and 14 interceptions, ranking 16th in the conference in yardage, 30th in QBR and 31st in interceptions thrown. Against Mestemaker he is 2.80 points of Performance behind and finishes 13.4 ahead.
| Lagway over Mestemaker | Raw | Weighted |
| Performance | -8 | -2.80 |
| NIL Visibility | +49 | +9.80 |
| Social Power | +13 | +2.60 |
| Fan Demand | +15 | +3.75 |
A Visibility of 94 and a Social Power of 76 are worth 12.40 between them. That is the conference.
Meanwhile the two quarterbacks with the highest Performance components in the Big 12, Mestemaker and Alonza Barnett III, finish eighth and seventh.
4. The column nobody is using
Across all sixteen, here is what each component is actually worth:
| Component | Range | Points of separation |
| Performance | 10 to 60 | 17.50 |
| NIL Visibility | 40 to 94 | 10.80 |
| Social Power | 48 to 81 | 6.60 |
| Fan Demand | 0 to 15 | 3.75 |
Eleven of the sixteen sit at zero. Three sit at 5. Two sit at 15, and neither of those two has been fueled by anybody.
That last column is weighted at a quarter of the score and it is separating almost nobody, because almost nobody has anything in it. In the SEC the same column spans 0 to 55 and is worth 12.50, and it decides that conference outright.
The difference between those two boards is not the formula. It is that SEC fans have shown up and Big 12 fans have not.
Three calls for 2026
Drew Mestemaker finishes top five. Currently 42.6, eighth. Projected above 47. Our August board called him the most underrated quarterback in college football at 41.6 and projected above 48. He has moved a point. The football case has never been the problem: a Visibility of 45 on the national leader in passing yards is the gap, and a first season in the Big 12 spotlight is the fastest way to close it.
DJ Lagway holds first. Currently 56.0. His 94 Visibility and 15 Fan Demand are both conference highs and neither depends on how Baylor plays. The only thing that unseats him is somebody out-throwing him by enough to overcome twelve points of audience, and nobody did that last year.
Julian Lewis climbs into the top five without needing to be good. Currently 38.5, eleventh. Projected above 45. He is already tied for the highest Visibility in the conference on 589 career passing yards. A Performance component of 10 has nowhere to go but up, and at a 35% weighting even modest production moves him several places.
We will grade all three in December.
A note on how these move
Most of these numbers are preseason. TCU has played, so Jaden Craig’s Performance of 53 reflects a single 175-yard game on 29 August rather than a full season, while Mestemaker’s 60 reflects 4,379 yards across 2025. Those two things are not the same measurement, and more of this conference crosses over every week.
Treat it as a snapshot. Production changes slowly. Attention does not.
Learn more about the NIL landscape
What a valuation actually measures is not what this index measures. Across the Big 12, the column that measures passing separates these quarterbacks by 17.50 points, and the two men who top it finish seventh and eighth. Visibility separates them by 10.80, and the two men who top that finish first and eleventh.
Fan Demand separates them by 3.75, because eleven of sixteen have nothing in it. That column is weighted at a quarter of the score and it is the only one on this board a reader can move directly. Sixteen fans have out-fueled entire fanbases.
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