Alabama opened the week with the most players on NFL active rosters, and the gap was as thin as it gets. ’s Sept. 9 count found 57 Alabama players across the league, one more than Ohio State and enough to leave the Crimson Tide alone at No. 1 as Week 1 of the 2026 NFL season approached.
That is why the Alabama football schedule 2026 search is landing on roster news today: the opening week picture is now set, and Alabama’s place in it still points to the same pipeline it has built for years. Georgia followed with 52 players, LSU had 44, Texas 42, Notre Dame 41 and Michigan 40, all part of a pool that left 202 colleges represented on the NFL’s 32 active rosters.
analyzed NFL.com roster data for nearly 1,700 players and counted 1,689 with a college listed. The method matters because this is a tally taken immediately before Week 1, while the 2019 through 2025 figures came from the NFL’s official Kickoff Weekend counts. That means the 2026 number is useful for showing where the league stood on Sept. 9, but it is not a perfect apples-to-apples match with prior seasons.
Even so, the Alabama line is hard to miss. If the Crimson Tide stays first through Week 1, it will be the 10th straight season Alabama has had the most or tied for the most players in the NFL. That run has already included 61 players on Week 1 rosters in 2024, 60 last season and 57 in 2023, which is the kind of steadiness that makes one September count feel like more than a snapshot.
And the broader map still shows how spread out NFL talent has become. Texas had 16 schools represented in the dataset, California had 11, Ohio had 10 and North Carolina had 10, while 127 FBS schools had at least one player on a roster. There were 11 FBS schools without an NFL player, including Army, Northern Illinois and UAB, and South Dakota State led the FCS group with six players.
The unresolved piece is the simplest one. ’s totals do not name the 57 Alabama players, and four active players without a college listed on NFL.com were excluded from the count. That leaves the Crimson Tide on top for now, with one week of games standing between Alabama and another season at the head of the class.
