Your Son's Dream To Be Pro At Football Can Realize In 2026

So it's been your son's dream since you can even remember, to go and play under the big Saturday night lights of college football, to play at a Division 1 level, to play on a SEC championship game, to just even play at an FBS school, a big time school, whether that's your local school. And you know he's dedicated and you know you're dedicated to helping him. But the raw reality is, you know, that not everyone gets a chance to play college football at the next level. And not everyone gets the chance to play Division 1 college football. So today I'm going to walk through that raw reality, the actual numbers behind the scenes that most people just completely gloss over and say that they're going to be the one that breaks all the odds, which I totally understand. But it's still important to recognize how difficult it can be and how you can increase those odds. So without further ado, let's dive into it. But first, if you don't know who I am, a Trent Lawyer. I'm a former college quarterback. I now help families get recruited to play college football. For the past two and a half years, we've helped generate well over $20 million in scholarship money for over 200 families. So I've seen families go from feeling like there was no chance that they could get a scholarship or even a Division 1 scholarship, to earning that scholarship and getting multiple options to choose from and allowing their son to pick the best fit for them and their future. So let's talk about those raw numbers and have them pulled up right here. So based on the numbers from 2022 to 2023, there were a total number of high school football players out there of 1,000,000, 28,000, 761. Basically, we usually round up that number, especially now in 2026, that number is generally 1.1 million. So that's the total amount of football players that you're competing against. Of course, you have it split up class by class. So if you're taking the average of that, you know, dividing by four, it's generally going to be 255,000 high school football players that you're competing against in your own class. So about a quarter million. So that's quite a bit right there. Now, if you're looking at all divisions anywhere within the NCAA, this is not counting NAIA or junior colleges as well, 7.5% of all high school football players go and play at the next level. At an NCAA school, that comes out to 77,204. Again, this is basically from that 1.1 million number all the way down to right below 80,000. And I do have to understand this isn't the freshmen that are coming in. This is everybody. So freshmen, sophomore, junior, seniors, essentially, you know, four to five different classes of kids that is wrapped up in that number. At the Division 1 level you only have about 3%. The number is 30,863. And that is with 265 total Division 1 football programs out there. And if you didn't know this, the roster limit used to be 120. They recently reduced that down to 105. So you have about 105 kids at each of these programs, at each of these 265 programs. Now we talked about some of the numbers in terms of who's actually on the team, who's not high school, all that good stuff. But we haven't talked about the actual scholarships. So of all the D1 programs combined, there's about 22,400 scholarships available out there. This is essentially factoring for that an FPS school is going to have somewhere around 85 to 105 total scholarships available. FCS programs usually aren't going to use up all that 105 scholarships that they could potentially use just because of their own resources and financial limitations. So we're factoring in that they're going to usually give about 63 scholarships for their entire team. This means that only 1.7% of high school football players earn a D1 scholarship, aka 1 in about 58. This could potentially mean they're that if your team is about 50 to 60 players, only one of you may receive that Division I scholarship. If you're on a team less than that 58 number, that means like point whatever is going to get a scholarship, meaning that most likely one of you probably won't even get a scholarship to a Division 1 school. And again, I mentioned that this is just a Division 1 scholarship. Overall at the FBS level for an actual scholarship, we're looking at about.08 to 1.2% of high school football players actually earn a FBS scholarship. So we talked about that. 7.5% actually go and play in NCAA school. Only 2.7% actually earn a full ride scholarship. So that's enough numbers talk from there. Let's talk about why these numbers are happening and then what you can do to actually increase your chances of increasing these odds in your own favor. Now, two of the biggest ones that you've heard all the time is the transfer portal and nil. The truth is that these people that are saying this is causing high school recruiting to have a lower amount of players to go play at the Division 1 level. They aren't wrong. NIL has ultimate allowed players to get paid while going to college AKA they want to play college longer. Meaning that when they may have gone into clear for the draft they're going to stick around for a couple more years. The transfer portal has also allowed schools to instead of just pick from high school or junior college or maybe a couple grad transfers that come out now, they have a big player pool of guys that transfer from all kinds of different schools, D2s, D3s, other FBS schools, other FCS schools. And this means that these teams can now shift to a heavier win now mode and go get a a guy that just started a couple games at another Division 1 program and he's probably going to have a higher likelihood of competing doing the job they want than a high school guy that may need time to develop and actually figure out the system. On top of that, I mentioned this earlier Roster limits. Roster limits have caused a big amount of high school guys to not go play at the highest level possible. The reason why is they constricted the amount of roster spots out there for Division 1 FPS schools down to from 120 to 105. This happened last year in the year 2025, not 2026. They're doing the same thing to the FCS schools. The plan is for the following year they'll do the same thing to D2 schools. Meaning that that supply demand curve got even more extreme because they're cutting supply even more. Those three reasons are the reasons why it is so difficult and more difficult now than ever now. What this does not mean is that you don't need to go get an agent to connect you with these coaches. That is not necessarily going to help you unless you're a four or five star guy that's already getting recruited these schools and you're trying to set up nil deals. And no, this does not mean that you need to become TikTok famous to stand out. What this does mean is that you need to do a couple different things to prove to coaches why they should take a chance on you. Number one, you need to address that transfer portal issue. You need to be so good and prove you're so good that they don't see a reason to take a transfer portal guy for that position spot. They see that they already have a guy that's ready now and that can compete now that they don't need to necessarily develop and that is worth taking over some guy that may be a little bit more proven than you. One of the best ways to do this is just by building a brand, building continuity in your own personality and what the coaches see from you. This is not just building a highlight one time and showing to coaches that's generally not like might be enough to grab their attention, but it's not going to be enough to show them why they should take you over it. Every other possible prospect that they could take. You need to be consistent throughout every single thing you post, every single thing you show the coaches. And that means that you need to be getting from these coaches multiple times. You really think that that one highlight you post with the huddle link saying, check out my highlights is going to get you recruited? Probably not. You need to be making it easy for coaches. You need to be making it yourself a clear option for them to choose. That is what is going to increase your odds. Because you have to understand that the realistic percentage of players that could play the division one, probably somewhere between 3 to 5%, maybe even higher. And I mean, guys that could just be on a Division 1 program and no one would blink an eye. If somebody told me that percentage was 10%, I would probably agree with them as well. There's a lot of talented high school football players out there that are going overlooked every single year, not just because of the three reasons I listed out, but also just because they're not even known by the coaches in the first place, or they're not seen enough by the coaches in the first place, or they don't do a good job of presenting themselves in a clear way that coaches want to see. And so I don't want you to be in that position where you could have played and I don't want you to be in that position. I don't want your son to be in that position where he could have played at a higher level or he could have just played college football in general, earned a scholarship, had a great experience, but instead he didn't. Just because he didn't increase his odds. He just sat there and waited and was hopeless in the whole process and relied on hope, which is not a strategy. So hopefully this gave you a real look at what the recruiting process is actually about. Increasing your odds, giving yourself as much of a chance to get those opportunities. Because at the end of the day, that's all you can do. You can control what you can control. You can't control what a coach actually thinks about you. You can't control whether the coach offers you or not, but you can control how much you actually get in front of them and how much you give yourself a chance to to get the scholarship offers that you want. So if you're looking for more tactical tips in terms of how to email these coaches, how to DM these coaches on X, how to set up your profile on X, and then X is where 90% of college football recruiting happens. So you better know that if you want to know how to get seen at college camps, then you can check out my profile. We post two videos every single week on the college football recruiting landscape, how to get recruited, all of that good stuff there. On top of that, if you're looking at these percentages and you just feel like the way that your recruiting process is going is not going in the right direction, or maybe you're confused and you guys haven't even started yet because you're just so lost and you don't want to make the wrong step. Like I mentioned earlier, we've worked with over 200 families on the recruiting process. During that time, we've seen a 93% success rate in getting those families placed to a college football program. So if you're interested in doing that, what you can do is click down below. It'll take you to a website where there's a quick video of me walking through what we do, what our process is, what our system is, and what we've accomplished as well. Then what you can do is you click the button, it'll take you to application form, you can fill that out. So that way we can make sure we're a right fit. And then if you're approved, it'll allow you to book in a call with our team. On that call, our team will get a better understanding of what you're facing right now, what your goals are. That way we can properly give you a good game plan to move forward with. And then if we feel like we're aligned, we're a good fit, we'll walk you through our program, what we do, how we do it, and the next steps from there. So with that being said, I hope to see you inside your first scholarship.