By Matt Banker, of CCH+A
As some Division I athletic departments prepare for the prospect (no pun intended) of roster caps and revenue sharing, the oft used ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ metaphor may be usurped, at least in the short term, with ‘keeping up with the GMs.’
As several Division I universities and their athletic departments prepare to implement the proposed settlement terms tied to the ‘House v. NCAA’ case, the variety and depth of questions and scenarios on how best to adapt to college athletics new roster cap and revenue sharing world are accumulating on campuses.
Acknowledging that many questions and ‘what-ifs’ remain, the focus of this article centers on providing a starting perspective and a few questions to consider around the recent onset of general manager (GM) roles in Athletic Departments.
What exactly are these newly christened ‘General Manager’ roles in Division I Athletic Departments about?
We are seeing general manager positions emerging primarily in higher resourced FBS football programs and, to a degree, in men’s and women’s basketball programs.
The University of Oklahoma announced in July that it had created three new positions including hiring its first ever General Manager and forming a partnership with a former NFL front office administrator. In addition to its new GM role, Sooner Athletics also announced additional hires as part of the overall structure, including the roles of assistant general manager, director of recruiting strategy, coordinator of on-campus recruiting and coordinator of recruiting operations.[1]
“We’re incredibly excited for this new set-up,” said OU Vice President and Director of Athletics Joe Castiglione. “The instability we’ve seen in college athletics the past few years has presented both responsibilities and opportunities for us to refine our focus on how we evaluate, attract and keep talented athletes. With this move, we’re innovating at a time that demands it and in doing so, we’re demonstrating Oklahoma’s commitment to a championship culture.”
Other Power-4 athletics programs also made moves around GM roles. The University of Florida moved its long-time football Director of Player Personnel into a General Manager role. The University of Texas football program also established a General Manager role, elevating its Director of Recruiting to the new GM role to assist Head Coach Steve Sarkisian with: “…managing the roster, assessing the transfer portal, relating to prospects and their families, and navigating all that with Name, Image, and Likeness…”[2]
On the basketball side, St. Bonaventure University announced in September that it was hiring long-time ESPN NBA Insider and St. Bonaventure alum Adrian Wojnarowski to serve as the General Manager for the St. Bonaventure Men’s Basketball program.[3] Wojnarowski’s GM role has been described, in part, as supporting student-athlete NIL allocation, recruiting and the men’s basketball staff. These are a mere few examples of what appears to be a trend and reaction to the proposed settlement in the House case.
The common denominator in these GM positions is – to no surprise — recruiting and talent evaluation and, by extension, roster management and NIL. Beyond ‘General Manager’ as a position title, positions of this ilk may also include descriptors such as “Talent Manager”, “Manager of Player Personnel” or “Talent Development.”
In terms of what these roles would cover, positions descriptions tied to GM roles have included the following responsibilities:
- “…responsible for carrying out the athletic department and football program’s mission statement to recruit and retain the best and brightest student-athletes at the University.”
- “This position is part of a recruiting team that determines the football program’s on-field success and the student-athlete’s success as an individual….”
The opaque position descriptions may be intentional and reflect present-day unknowns such as the level of involvement an institution desires to have with direct NIL payments as the House matter remains pending to future unknowns around how recruiting, player mobility, and roster build out cycles will evolve in the coming years.
Is the General Manager role an NCAA-defined position?
Periodically, a job title or position status within an athletics department carries additional meaning in the NCAA regulatory world. NCAA rules continue to govern certain aspects of personnel including setting criteria and conditions of certain staff roles and designations in Athletics Departments. Two examples regulated by the NCAA are an assistant coach designated as the institution’s next head coach (aka the ‘head coach in waiting’)[4] and student managers.[5]
Yet ‘General Manager’ is not a term you will find in the NCAA Division I Manual. It is a term nouveau to college athletics generally speaking. The position title is familiar to many from the pro sports’ ranks and it is beginning to emerge in athletics department staff directories and press releases. At this point, the general manager role is defined exclusively by universities and their athletics departments and, even on a day-to-day level, by the sports programs for which they support.
Even though conference rivals in football have created general manager roles, the function, roles, and decision-making authority of GM positions are not automatically cut-and-paste clones from one athletics department to another.
Athletic Department leaders along with their head coaches and other University personnel are sorting out how to structure these positions, identify the blind spots of these positions, and ask other role-shaping questions – ‘What does their position description entail?’ ‘How much experience should this person have?’, ‘Will they be supervising staff?’, ‘Will they have a reporting-line to the Head Coach?’, ‘Will they be supporting multiple sports?’ to more fundamentalquestions — ‘Do we even need this position?’, ‘Can we afford this position?’, and ‘Can we afford NOT to have this position?’
With some schools leaning into some amalgamation of a GM role to support their football and/or basketball programs, let’s explore a few more level-setting questions.
Do college athletics’ GM roles mirror the role of a pro sports team’s GM?
GM roles have long been embedded in pro sports. Whether serving as the GM of the Detroit Lions (NFL) or the Chicago Bulls (NBA), pro sports GMs (and their staffs) have well chronicled responsibilities that touch scouting, athlete evaluations, draft preparation, free agency, salary cap management, budgeting and spending parameters, roster management, among others areas.
Pro sports player personnel and roster management are, all at once, complex, interconnected, fluid, and mathematical. Yet, pro sports seemingly offers a clearer and more predictable landscape to personnel and roster management than what Division I athletics programs are encountering in preparing for in a revenue-sharing environment.
The GM roles in pro sports are shaped by major distinctions from the college sports enterprise. For starters, college athletics does not have a draft like pro sports. A popular college athletics maxim is that ‘recruiting is the lifeblood of your sport program.’ Although some wooing of in-demand free agent players is naturally part of the free-agent market in the NFL, the Green Bay Packers and Kansas City Chiefs, like all other NFL teams, are not recruiting players year-round to fill out their rosters like a college football program is compelled to do.
Pro sport teams have the power of player selection through allocated draft picks or the acquisition of draft picks through trades, in addition to acquiring players through trades and free agency. When it comes to roster management and revenue sharing, most pro sports are also moored by a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between the pro sport teams’ owners and a players association. Along with CBA terms, league rules have direct say in governing many aspects of player acquisition and roster construction at the pro level.
College athletics is not built like the pro model despite some common terrain. In the walk-up to implementing the proposed settlement in the House matter, college athletics stakeholders have been ruminating for months on various financial models, legal considerations, recurring revenue projects, and player-pipeline strategies. Developing a strategy for, managing, and operationalizing roster management and revenue sharing on-campus — at least for the foreseeable future – may be stay a localized endeavor for universities and their athletic departments even with parameters constructed by the proposed House settlement. Player identification, talent evaluation, and roster needs are where pro and college GM roles certainly overlap, but the inherent complexities and coursing through college athletics and higher education calls for more than solely talent evaluation.
Is hiring a former pro sports GM and player personnel executive the singular solution for Universities here?
College athletics is wired differently than pro sports. From financial frameworks to legal considerations, to staffing, and the fact that college athletics remains rooted in the academy—college sports and pro sports have as many differences as they share common ground.
For starters, unlike college athletes, pro athletes are not enrolled full-time at a university. Although progress toward degree and graduation rates remain priorities for the NCAA and member schools, academic topics have fallen completely out of the 2024 college athletics dialogue in deference to continuous buzz surrounding NIL, the transfer portal, and conference realignment. Despite those changing focal points, one long-standing tenet to college athletics remains true to this day — college athletes are students and, as a result, they remain tethered to the higher education infrastructure.
Whether determining an athlete’s admission status, financial aid package, housing assignment, cost of attendance adjustment, healthcare resources, academic support services, or how athletics eligibility is assessed – the college athlete life-cycle is contoured by university, conference, NCAA, state, and federal laws, processes, policies, and check-points that mostly do not apply to pro athletes.
Hiring a GM or building a personnel management department to support one’s football, men’s basketball, and/or women’s basketball program may be a good place to start for Division I athletic departments in piecing together a strategy for revenue sharing and roster management, but university leaders should be (and are) thinking more broadly.
By all accounts, the individuals being hired in these GM roles do bring valuable experience and extensive skills relevant to college athletics recruiting, sport-talent evaluation, data mining, technology, and other skills that benefit roster building.
However, the financial, academic, legal, communication, marketing, licensing, enrollment, and eligibility dynamics entrenched in college-athletics will play as vital a role for universities approach to roster management and revenue sharing as identifying the players themselves. Universities desire to field competitive, winning programs. Universities also seek to mitigate financial and legal risks and develop alignment and stability in this new paradigm for college sports.
These additional disciplines and roles tied that also touch roster management and revenue sharing will likely be filled by other Athletics Department personnel, University personnel and perhaps strategic outside partners and advisors. In complementing the talent identification roles, Universities should consider how to effectively integrate other key functions tied to roster management and revenue sharing such as:
- negotiating with athletes and agents (a role that may not exclusively reside with a coach),
- developing the ‘fine print’ terms and conditions for direct NIL licensing agreements,
- forecasting and navigating the impacts of athletics department revenue inflows and budget shortfalls,
- managing when and how athletes are moved on and off rosters,
- coordinating communications with involved parties,
- determining what technologies and platforms may be necessary to efficiently fulfill deliverables and coalesce the operations,
- determining what other University units and departments need to be involved,
- stewarding university licensing policies and interests,
- considering other university interests (e.g., legal, reputational) not already enumerated,
- fielding and resolving inquiries from player agents, family members,
The above is not meant to serve as an exhaustive list of ingredients that may help build an effective roster management and revenue sharing program, but it does reflect the breadth of perspectives and interests.
Don’t we already have GM roles tied to our Athletics Department?
This is a question a stakeholder who is removed from day-to-day athletics operations – say a University president, chancellor, board member — might ask. And it’s a fair question because other types of ‘General Manager’ roles have existed in and around Athletics Departments for years—with some having little to do with recruiting student-athletes or managing a roster.
As an example, who runs athletic department concessions, catering, and food service operations in your biggest facilities are sometimes titled “General Manager” which is customary for the food service industry. For example, the University of Kansas recently posted a General Manager position tied to Athletics, yet it was specific to food and event services. In its posting, KU sought an individual to lead an: “…efficient, professional, and profitable operation of the University of Kansas (“KU”) Gateway Stadium project and Conference Center. The purpose of this role is to manage, in conjunction with KU and Kansas Athletics, Inc. (“KAI”), all aspects of the Stadium and Conference Center, making it a high profile, commercial public venue suitable for conducting national, international and community sporting and entertainment events….” Nothing in that position summary screams transfer portal, roster management, or agent negotiations.
In the Multi-Media Rights (MMR) neighborhood of college athletics, you may see a ‘General Manager’ role akin to your senior sales rep or sales manager position leading a staff tasked with unearthing corporate sponsorships and other multi-media rights activations. These individuals may be full-time University staff or MMR staff who are planted in a University’s back yard. Unlike a General Manager overseeing events and food service in your football stadium, a General Manager role in the MMR sector likely carries a keener interest in NIL, revenue sharing, and what student-athletes are filling a schools’ varsity rosters. MMR partners may be active in facilitating multi-party (student-athlete, university, corporate sponsor, MMR partner) NIL agreements that impact roster building to navigating how the proposed House revenue sharing model could impact the future financial relationship between a University and its MMR partner (a good topic for another article!)
For GM roles specific to roster management in football or basketball, how athletic departments are evaluating their needs leads us to our last question in this initial calibration of GM roles.
Is the GM role a person or a department?
In a roundabout way, the line from Romeo and Juliet — “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet” – comes to mind.
Whether a Division I athletics department gearing up for a post-House settlement world has a position entitled General Manager is a matter of institutional preference, strategy, and funding.
It should be said that talent evaluators have long existed in Division I sport programs, especially FBS football for ages. In addition to coaches, FBS programs were chock full of recruiting coordinators, player personnel directors, and other recruiting-consumed positions. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with having a general manager—quite the opposite. It shows the intent by a Division I university and its athletics department to prepare for the modernized realities of high-resource Division I athletics participating in revenue sharing and its obligations to comply with proposed roster caps.
Whether an athletics department has a person entitled ‘General Manager’ — institutional strategy around revenue sharing and roster management can’t be delegated to one person, even if the person is a former NFL front office executive considered a roster-building guru.
There needs to be a team of people involved in managing the strategic, financial, legal, and transactional aspects to roster building. Ironically, the art of building one’s football, men’s basketball or women’s basketball roster could directly benefit from how a university builds its own roster management and revenue sharing team. The right mixture of subject-matter experts, infrastructure specialists, reporting lines, and protocols matter.
Whether a university designates its roster management group a department, an internal project team, or otherwise – what’s in a name?
What matters most is recognizing the scope and weight of roster management and revenue sharing goes well beyond one person’s shoulders. Bringing the right people together in a strategic way could make for a sweeter smelling future around a university’s athletics department.
[About the author: Matt Banker serves as senior advisor to the CCH+A Sports Law Group and Principal to MB Sports Consulting. Prior to entering the college athletics consulting space in 2022, Matt spent over 20 years in athletics leadership roles at the NCAA national office, the Ohio Valley Conference, and the University of Louisville including strategy for NIL, legal affairs, compliance, budgeting, sport administration and served as advisor to university and conference leadership and boards.]
[1] “OU Announces New Football Recruiting Structure and Engagement with Former Eagles VP of Football Administration”, July 11, 2024. https://soonersports.com/news/2024/7/11/ou-announces-new-football-recruiting-structure-and-engagement-with-former-eagles-vp-of-football-administration
[2] ‘Steve Sarkisian Calls Brandon Harris a Rock Star and describes new ‘General Manager’ role’ https://www.burntorangenation.com/2024/2/7/24065123/brandon-harris-general-manager-texas-longhorns-steve-sarkisian#:~:text=Longhorns%20Football%20Recruiting-,Steve%20Sarkisian%20calls%20Brandon%20Harris%20a%20’rock%20star’%20and%20describes,current%20landscape%20of%20college%20football.
[3] ‘Adrian Wojnarowski retires from ESPN, joins St. Bonaventure’, https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/41313868/adrian-wojnarowski-retires-espn-joins-st-bonaventure
[4] Division I Bylaw 13.1.2.6.1 – Assistant Coach Publicly Designated as Institution’s Next Head Coach.
[5] Division I Bylaw 11.02.5 – Manager.
