In case you missed it, I dove deep into the ongoing revolution around general managers in college football in this week’s magazine.
The role varies vastly from school to school, where responsibilities include everything from salary capologist to recruiting coordinator.
The folks in these roles, too, are as diverse as any contingent in college football. You have NFL lifers like North Carolina’s Michael Lombardi, to recruiting types like Texas Tech’s James Blanchard and Alabama’s Courtney Morgan. There are also outliers like Stanford’s Andrew Luck.
What do industry voices think about the growing role? Here are just a couple of their thoughts:
Answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Jake Rosenberg: partner, The Athlete Group (former Eagles front office exec)
“These have only started to evolve in the grand scheme of things. Initially, it was really more of a title than a role change, and you are seeing some form of role change, but it’s all generally within the same overall structure that it’s been historically. But we’re on the precipice because of necessity and all the changes and all the additional work that needs to occur. Different work that needs to occur that never has before.
“This GM role, it’s not only a title, but it really starts absorbing a lot more of the responsibility and true autonomy in the team build. It becomes more empowered over time. And not really to head coaches’ detriment, but to the head coaches’ benefit in the sense that coaches are doing a lot of work that is really outside their primary skills that are skills unto themselves, and that the entire team as a whole would benefit by someone else really handling.
“There are just so many new functions that were not part of the process at all in the past, and now are part of the process and are being handled by coaches. They’re really kind of taking away from a lot of the true skills and value that these coaches are able to add.”
Rob Sine: CEO, Blueprint Sports
“There’s a gap in the industry. If you look back last summer, Oklahoma was the first to [partner with Rosenberg’s outfit], and it was groundbreaking breaking news. Everybody was all excited about it. You’ve seen a lot of other hires that have been made over the past six or eight months. And now what?
“… It’s a fad right now that is appropriate that a lot of people are focusing on, because professional sports is penetrating this industry top to bottom in a lot of different areas. Professional sports have been doing roster management for a long time, so it makes sense to bring it to the college level. But you also look at the roster or the staff size at a professional sports team compared to a college, you can’t just check a box and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a GM that I’m paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year,’ or ‘I have a software solution.’ … How do you make it actionable? How do you go out and actually negotiate, recruit and look for the right student athletes, build the right budget to afford the players you want to pick? It all has to be linked together.
“So much of it right now is sitting in boxes in departments across the country, and I’m not quite sure that they know what they have or what they’re going to be getting to in the long run.”
Jason Belzer: founder, Student Athlete NIL (SANIL)
“I don’t think it’s evolved at all. Universities are basically doing what they’ve always done, which is they look at another model and they say, ‘Oh, we need to go hire a general manager,’ without actually giving thought to what that means.
“If you look at the general manager position in the professional sports space, number one, more important than anything in almost every instance, that GM has complete authority on the players that are on that team and not the coach. That dynamic I have yet to see exist in the college space. I don’t think there’s a scenario in which there’s any GM right now that can go to a head coach and say, ‘We’re not recruiting this player,’ or ‘I don’t believe we should have him on the staff.’ So, inherently, the GM position is not the true GM position that you see in professional sports.
“Second to that, the vast majority of GMs have substantial negotiation experience. They have law backgrounds. They’re responsible for managing a cap and putting together the pieces of the puzzle for the team to be successful and then the coach may say ‘This guy and this guy and this guy,’ but at the end of the day, it’s the GM’s job. Until that authority happens, and eventually it will, the GM role is really just figurative.”
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