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how many division 1 football players are there

There isn’t one perfectly precise, real-time number published every season, but the best available NCAA data and roster limits show that there are on the order of 16,000–20,000 Division 1 college football players in a typical year.

How that number breaks down

  • NCAA figures indicate there are about 81,000 total college football players across all NCAA and NAIA levels combined.
  • Division 1 is only a slice of that, made up of the FBS (the big-bowl schools) and FCS (playoff championship schools).
  • Recent estimates for D1 FBS alone list roughly 130 teams and about 18,500 players , based on average roster sizes over 140 per team in older data and updated roster-cap projections.
  • When you add FCS rosters (which are somewhat smaller and more varied), the combined Division 1 total lands in the rough mid–teens to around twenty thousand players range.

Why you don’t see an exact count

  • Roster sizes fluctuate every year with transfers, injuries, walk-ons, and early NFL departures, so there’s no single fixed, always-updated headcount.
  • Some sources track scholarship limits (like 85, or the newer 105-roster cap for FBS) rather than the full number of players actually on the team, which can include many walk-ons.

Quick takeaway for your question

  • If you’re asking “how many Division 1 football players are there?” in the sense of current active players , the most accurate way to think of it is:
    • D1 FBS: around 18,000+ players.
* **D1 overall (FBS + FCS):** roughly **16,000–20,000** players in total, depending on the exact season and rosters.

For perspective: those ~80,000 total college players across all divisions mean only a small fraction of high school players ever reach Division 1, which is why D1 spots are considered extremely competitive.

TL;DR: There’s no single exact published number each year, but Division 1 football typically has somewhere in the high tens of thousands of players, most likely in the 16k–20k range.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.