Indiana won every game it played and the voters have it sixth. This board has it first.

Preseason polls measure what 29 voters expect to happen. The Football NIL Index measures something they cannot: which programs carry the market power that now decides who stays on a roster once the transfer portal opens.

Run the AP preseason top 25 through it and the order changes. Indiana is first. The voters have the defending national champions sixth.

The board

Every score is out of 100. Iowa, 22nd in the AP poll, is unrated this week while its profile completes.

Georgia and BYU are level at 22.3, and Penn State and Texas Tech are a tenth apart. Both pairs are ties rather than orderings.

Three ways to be worth something

The programs at the top of this board did not get there the same way, and that is the point of measuring four things instead of one.

Indiana wins on football. A performance score of 37 is the highest in the field by eight points; nothing else in the AP top 25 has cleared 29. The Hoosiers went 16-0 behind a quarterback who threw 41 touchdowns against 6 interceptions at a 182.9 rating — the best efficiency in the country, on a roster with no player leading a single national statistical category. That is precisely what the component is built to reward: results and efficiency rather than raw volume.

Oregon wins on reach. Visibility 43 and social power 47 are the best figures anywhere on this board, by a distance, with performance at 29. Between them those two columns approximate what the glossary calls a personal brand — a decade of investment, converted into a number.

Ohio State wins on the platform. Performance 26 sits below Texas, Georgia and Miami. What separates the Buckeyes is Fan Demand, where they lead the field by a factor of five. Ohio State also tops the Fan Power leaderboard at 557, with 131 fans active on its football page against Texas’s 35 and Texas A&M’s 9. The column built from our own data is the column Ohio State wins, and it is why the AP’s No. 1 is still third here rather than tenth.

Three programs, three arguments, three points between them.

How the Index is built

Weight those four and you get a Team NIL Score, a 0 to 100 rating of a program’s NIL momentum. Three components are imported from the wider sport. One is generated here, and it is the only one that can move before a game is played.

What the poll misses

USC, up ten. Fourteenth by the voters, fourth here. Performance 32 and social power 41 both rank third in the field, and the Trojans post that with almost nothing yet from Fan Demand. Los Angeles is doing the work the poll does not price.

SMU, up nine. A social power score of 41 matches USC and trails only Oregon, Ole Miss and Ohio State. A program that was in the American three seasons ago now carries one of the ten largest audiences in this field, with a performance score of 27 behind it. The voters have it 19th.

Louisville, quietly. Twenty-fourth in the poll and 22nd here, but its Fan Demand ranks fourth in the entire field — ahead of Ole Miss, Texas A&M, Texas, BYU and USC. A smaller fanbase that actually shows up is worth more on this board than a larger one that does not, which is the whole argument for measuring it.

Georgia, down ten. The cleanest illustration of the split. Performance 29 is second only to Indiana. Visibility 27 and social power 32 are beaten by BYU, by Michigan, by Missouri. Georgia plays like a top-three team and reads like a regional brand, and this board weights those facts at 35% and 40%.

Alabama, down ten. Performance 17 is the lowest full figure in the field and Fan Demand is 0. Neither reach column is bad. The football is what moved it.

Michigan, down three. Performance 15, with no Michigan quarterback, running back or receiver in the national top 50 for passing, rushing or receiving. Visibility 28 and social 36 are roughly Penn State’s, which is why the fall is three places rather than ten.

The column that hasn’t spoken yet

Fan Demand is 25% of the score, and in August it is barely awake. The median across this field is 2 out of 100. Only Ohio State and Indiana sit meaningfully above the floor.

That is the calendar, not a verdict. Before a snap has been played the Index is reading these programs almost entirely on their history: box scores from a finished season, follower counts built over years, deal values negotiated last winter. All three are records of what has already happened, and all three are why a preseason poll and a preseason index broadly agree in the middle of the board.

Fan Demand is the live one. It moves in days rather than seasons, it is the only component that does not repeat what college football already believes, and it starts changing on August 29. The three programs currently separated by three points at the top are separated by almost nothing in the one column that can actually move this autumn.

Which makes this a starting position. We will run it again every week.

Notes on the data

Figures are the live Team NIL Score on each program’s RallyFuel football page, captured August 19, 2026. The Index refreshes weekly. AP ranks are from the 2026 preseason poll.

Performance is built from the athletes currently indexed for each program, so it reflects documented production and can move between refreshes as roster records update. Iowa is unrated this week because three of its four components are still populating; it will return to the board once complete.

Our August 16 SEC board ran before the most recent refresh. Texas A&M and Texas have since moved to 25.0 and 24.4, and Ole Miss leads that conference at 25.9. That piece also stated that sixteen SEC programs held the national top 16; on the current board Indiana, Oregon and Ohio State all score above the SEC leader.

The NIL Index measures NIL momentum rather than on-field strength, which is why a team can be third in the country by the poll and thirteenth here. Both numbers are correct. They are answering different questions.

Fueling an athlete on RallyFuel is a purchase of conditional NIL engagement rights, which convert into an NIL deal only when the stated conditions are met. It is not a donation, and it is not a payment for athletic performance. Terms and refund conditions are posted at checkout. 90% reaches the athlete.

Dig into the numbers

• Compare two programs — the School Rivalry tool stacks any two side by side, like Indiana against Ohio State
• Make your picks — football predictions week by week, +20 points per pick
• See the national board — schools leaderboard
• Browse a conference — Big Ten · SEC · ACC · Big 12
• Watch the movement — the Transfer Tracker follows who is entering and committing
• Learn the terms — the NIL Glossary covers the vocabulary behind the numbers