How would you "money-ball" college football?
The Oklahoma Sooners have officially taken the plunge into becoming the first front office-driven team. What's the path to making that work?
The Oklahoma Sooners announced the hire of Jim Nagy as General Manager for the football program the other day. Nagy is a longtime scout with time spent with Pete Carroll and the Seahawks, Bill Belichick and the Patriots, and also the Chiefs and Redskins (now Commanders). For the last several years he’s been running the Senior Bowl, where seniors from around the country in college football go to camp to be coached and evaluated for the NFL.
Here’s what the Sooners are saying about the nature of their new organizational structure:
Nagy will lead OU's roster management and talent acquisition, including player recruitment, evaluation, retention, and compensation as part of his duties. He also will manage the impact of rules governing name, image, and likeness, the transfer portal process, revenue-share allocation, scholarship limits, and eligibility requirements.
The new model is intended to meet the emerging challenges of college football and mirrors many aspects of professional sports teams. It allows for the general manager and head football coach to work side-by-side in partnership, each focusing on a specific area of expertise. To facilitate the implementation and operation of this new model, Randall Stephenson has been asked to assume the role of Chair of Football and Special Advisor to the President and the Director of Athletics. In that role, he will provide day-to-day oversight of the general manager and head football coach. In addition, he will continue offering his oversight and expertise of the budgeting, strategic planning, and business planning functions during this unique time of change in college athletics.
In other words the top man is Randall Stephenson, who volunteered for this as a retiree after stepping down from being CEO of AT&T, a tenure which seems to have gone rather badly due to poorly considered acquisitions.
Nagy does not report to head coach Brent Venables. To some extent you have to conclude that Venables does report to Nagy.
“Can I have $2 million for the top safety in DFW?”
“No.”
The “side by side” bit makes clear Venables is no longer fully in charge. Coup d’etát.
In some regards, it would seem Nagy is a potentially big upgrade. The Sooner allocation of limited resources to build their roster has been pretty poor under Venables and his crew. They’ll be going into this next season in a make or break year for Venables with FCS transfers at over half of the offensive skill positions.
As I’ve already discussed though, when it’s time to fire Venables after next year’s SEC schedule squashes his Sooners…who’s making the hire? Athletic director Joe Castiglione? Stephenson? Nagy? And what caliber of head coach is going to want to walk into that situation and try to take over? But today, I want to get into something different.
Let’s say you wanted to try and “money-ball” college football? Let’s say you’re Oklahoma and you’ve done the math and determined that the changed landscape with NIL and SEC membership has put you behind the 8-ball, perhaps permanently, with regards to self-imposed salary cap. You’re not going to match Texas, you’re not going to match Georgia, and on a given prospect you’re not going to be able to match Auburn, LSU, Ole Miss, etc.
Your strategy instead is to figure out how to win more with less. How would you do it?
If I’m Jim Nagy, my first task needs to be to consolidate power within the Oklahoma football department politically and try to arrive at where Howie Roseman is with the Eagles. After I’ve acquired enough power to actually run the show?