Notre Dame and Ohio State will meet tomorrow in the college football national championship game. After the final whistle, the authors of the victory will be paraded across your television. You will hear from the head coach, the quarterback, maybe the athletic director.
Who you probably won’t hear from, though, is the person who built the winning team: the general manager.
General managers, once purely the domain of professional sports, are taking over college football. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain why.
Enter the G.M.
Managing a roster of over 100 players, and a staff of dozens, was always a difficult job for a coach. Now it is impossible.
That’s because the sport has changed drastically in the past few years. Players can be paid — for some, more than they would get in the N.F.L. — without sacrificing eligibility. And they can transfer to different schools between each season.
“The job is too big for a college coach,” said Andrew Luck, the former Stanford quarterback who recently returned to his alma mater as its football general manager. “The role has changed. The system has changed so much and continues to change.”
Luck, like most general managers, is largely responsible for securing money and signing players, many of whom announce they wish to change schools by entering the sport’s so-called transfer portal.
The portal was most recently open from Dec. 9 to 28. Not only was that over the holidays, but it was also when dozens of teams were competing in bowl games. Without a general manager, a coach would have to prepare for a big game while also evaluating thousands of potential players to build next year’s roster.
“The transfer portal was intense,” said Luck, a college football optimist who stayed at Stanford to finish his degree in 2011, even when he was projected to be the first pick in the N.F.L. draft. “If I had any romantic notion of the thing, the business side, it was lost there.”
On the field
The influence of general managers will be apparent tomorrow night: Both teams’ starting quarterbacks are transfers. Notre Dame will be led by Riley Leonard, who spent the past three seasons at Duke, and Ohio State will be led by Will Howard, who spent four seasons at Kansas State.
Of course, not all players are transfers. A majority of players on both rosters were recruited straight from high school, as they have always been. One big difference for those players, however, is they were paid to be there.
Ryan Day, Ohio State’s coach, said in 2022 that it would cost $13 million to keep his team together. Four months ago, Ohio State’s athletic director revised that figure upward and said $20 million was being spent on the team’s roster.
Looking to the future
Notre Dame and Ohio State are both powerhouses. But the College Football Playoff — the 12-team tournament that led to the championship game — also included relative upstarts like Boise State, Arizona State and Southern Methodist University.
Will the changes to college football further entrench the dominance of the blue bloods, the few programs that can raise and spend $20 million or more on a roster? Or will they allow less prestigious teams to strategically spend the dollars they do have to poach players that otherwise might have gone to the big teams? Luck, whose Stanford Cardinal program hasn’t had a winning record for seven seasons, hopes it is the latter.
“I still want to believe there is space for a broad college football landscape,” he said, “that if you hit enough of the right notes, every program has a chance to succeed and win championships.”
For more: Read my story about how general managers have made the college game more appealing for some coaches, including Bill Belichick, the new head coach for the University of North Carolina.
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So why is democracy so bad?
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