Blatant Homerism: Bringing an NFL front office to college football
I wouldn’t blame anyone who ignores conference media days, but if you were paying attention to the SEC’s gabfest a couple weeks ago, you might have noticed something strange about the Oklahoma Sooners’ traveling party. In addition to the usual group of player representatives and head coach Brent Venables, general manager Jim Nagy was in attendance.
While Nagy’s presence was unusual relative to the rest of OU’s conference mates, it was par for the course for OU’s new personnel director. He has made numerous media appearances since he was hired roughly six months ago, and his name is popping up on all sorts of official announcements from the football program. OU has clearly made it a point of emphasis to hype up his addition this offseason. Given Nagy’s profile as the former director of the Senior Bowl, we can surmise the school is looking to position itself in the vanguard of a new era of college football.
That’s a departure from the norm in a sport where head coaches historically serve as the faces of their teams. Yet, here’s how the Washington Commanders kicked off the squad’s opening day of training camp this year:
Both Washington head coach Dan Quinn and GM Adam Peters fielded questions from the media together at the same time. It makes sense based on how most NFL teams operate. After an offseason of wheeling and dealing, the personnel executive can speak to how and why the team’s roster was built the way it is. The head coach can offer insight into how the team will deploy that talent on the field. Two complementary perspectives, separated by a delineation in their roles.
Nagy’s media blitz also owes in large part to broader interest in Oklahoma’s efforts to organize its football program around an NFL-like model in which the GM and head coach collaborate to varying degrees on personnel management. But can that kind of organizational structure work on the collegiate level?
Every college football program has its own way of doing things, but head coaches have historically acted as their own personnel executives. Traditionally, they have worked with their staff members to target high school prospects, cultivate relationships with them and the people of influence in their lives, and sell them on joining their programs.
Adopting the NFL model means taking an entirely different approach to decisionmaking. The front office essentially takes command over things like scouting talent and managing salary allocations. The coaching staff focuses more on the actual coaching parts of their jobs, which also includes some soft skills such as managing team culture.
From an organizational standpoint, the benefits of the traditional college setup include efficiency and accountability: head coaches have the final word personnel decisions; conversely, everyone knows whose head is on the chopping block when things go south. Moreover, in a profession filled with ego-driven megalomaniacs, many coaches would obviously prefer the highest degree of autonomy in matters such as choosing their personnel: To paraphrase legendary NFL coach Bill Parcells, they want to pick out the groceries if they’re going to cook dinner. (Also, see Kirby Smart’s recent comments on the idea of hiring a general manager.)
The main selling point of the NFL model, on the other hand, is specialization. Between compensating players and relaxing restrictions on their movement, what would fall under the purview of the head coach according to the traditional way of doing business has changed dramatically. By offloading most of your personnel functions to a front office, you get people who are dedicated to things like monitoring the transfer portal, maintaining relationships with agents, and managing the college version of a soft salary cap. Not to mention, coaches can distance themselves from touchy contract negotiations with players. (To be sure, a head coach can maintain a high degree of control and achieve commensurate levels of specialization, but you’re risking losing efficiency at that point.)
You can come up with any number of reasons why the NFL model wouldn’t work on the college level. In terms of pure mechanics, one of the biggest concerns about the NFL model is actually doing the recruiting. Who’s in charge of the basic tasks like making contact with prospects and keeping up the lines of communication? How do the relationships between recruits and the representatives of the schools work?
There are also philosophical questions to be answered. For example, whose opinion carries the day when the GM and head coach clash? Will this kind of organization produce more transactional relationships between coaches and players? (If so, is that a good thing?) How much say should the GM get in hiring coaches? How do we know if a bust is due to a poor evaluation or a lack of development?
The answers to these questions are all variations of “that depends” or “we’ll find out when it happens.” Naturally, you open up the possibility of friction and leakage when you introduce new processes into any organization. Restructuring a college football program is no different.
Overall, though, skepticism about applying the NFL model on the college level sounds like a knee-jerk reticence to change. We are accustomed to telling the stories of college football with head coaches as protagonists – they’re the constants in a sport in which endless change is fundamental to its existence. But perhaps we put too much stock in the notion of successful coaches as visionaries who are masterful tacticians, motivators, and personnel managers all at once.
In the end, I suspect some programs will go down the NFL path and find it works for them, while some will do it and fail. Some college programs will be successful with autocratic head coaches, while some will fail at it. The capabilities and talents of the people filling these jobs, including Nagy at OU, will mean a lot more to their ultimate achievements than the structures in which they operate.
The things that made college football so different from the pros are disappearing. The reasons for consolidating organizational power with head coaches are disappearing with them. Going forward, coaches who think they want the utmost degree of control over their programs may find that prospect less attractive if and when they get it.
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