The first thing I did after reading the news was open a real estate tab. Ten million dollars, divided by the median Columbus home price of around $350,000, equals approximately 28.5 houses. Jeremiah Smith is 20 years old. He said no to 28.5 houses.
He said it plainly, too — not in the tortured syntax of a man who almost took the money. “Over 10 million dollars, easy,” Smith told reporters, clarifying the size of the offer in case anyone thought the figure had been inflated. “But that’s not how I operate. I came to Ohio State for a reason, to win championships, develop as a player and a person and keep building on this legacy.” This is either the most coherent thing a 20-year-old has said in the history of the NIL era or the most unsettling. I keep going back and forth.
The offer, reportedly from Miami — where Smith grew up in South Florida, where Miami knocked Ohio State out of the CFP quarterfinals in 2025 — was constructed to maximize its logic. Go home. Play for the school that just beat yours. Take the check. Smith’s response was: the loss made the decision easier, not harder. “Just because they beat us and things went their way, I wasn’t going back home. It didn’t make sense for me to go back.” The sentence structure there is doing a lot of work; he’s not saying he wasn’t tempted, he’s saying the entire premise was wrong.
This is where the NIL era gets genuinely strange. The transfer portal and what NIL actually did to college football was supposed to function as a corrective — a market that would finally price loyalty honestly, expose institutional manipulation, and give players the economic agency they’d been denied for decades. The implicit argument was that loyalty-as-institutional-value was a lie coaches told recruits, and that given a real choice, players would follow the money because the money was real and the legacy talk was not. Smith’s decision does not fit this model cleanly, and the model has no good place to put him.
He’s not naive about what he’s giving up. His NIL valuation sits at $4.2 million annually — third nationally, highest for any non-quarterback — and his résumé at 20 reads like something you’d staple to a Heisman ballot: 87 catches, 1,243 yards, 12 touchdowns across 13 games last season; an FBS freshman receiving record; a national championship ring. He’s projected as a top-10 pick in the 2027 NFL Draft. The people setting that $10 million offer knew exactly who they were bidding on, which means Smith knew exactly what he was declining.
Ohio State counter-retained him with a $5 million NIL package, so it’s fair to note he didn’t choose poverty; he chose the lesser pile. The version of this story where Smith walks away from everything is not this story. But here’s why that caveat doesn’t fully land: the gap between $5 million and $10 million — in any mathematical universe that doesn’t also contain a second NFL draft — is not a rounding error. Darian Mensah took $10 million to play amateur football and nobody called it irrational, because it wasn’t. Smith left $5 million on the table and stayed in Columbus. That’s the number. That’s the sentence.
Ryan Day, for his part, sounded like a man still processing it. “I’m not sure what crazy is anymore,” he said, which is the most honest thing a head coach has uttered about the NIL economy since the whole apparatus came into being. What he meant, I think, is that the framework he’d been using to understand player decisions had just stopped working, and he didn’t have a new one yet.
Neither do I, honestly. The NIL era produced a genuine outlier in Jeremiah Smith — a player who understood exactly what the market offered, ran the math, and filed it away. He plays for the Buckeyes entering his junior season. I’m going to watch him very carefully this fall, the way you watch something you don’t entirely understand but can’t stop looking at.
