In the NFL, the General Manager typically acts as the head coach’s boss. Unsurprisingly, college head coaches don’t envision a future where that’s true for them. That’s not to say it won’t happen at some places. It already has at Stanford where GM Andrew Luck effectively fired head coach Troy Taylor in March. At Cal, newly hired Ron Rivera is answering to the AD, not head coach Justin Wilcox. 

But in Texas and the south, where head coaches at the high school and college level are typically the highest paid and most deified employees at the schools, and in some cases the most in the state, the future doesn’t look like Cal and Stanford. The coaches we spoke to about the future of the GM see Luck as an outlier. A person with the wrong title, in fact. 

“I think they should call Andrew Luck the athletic director for football, right?” Texas A&M head coach Mike Elko said. “That appears to be the role he’s taking. The role has always existed, he’s just doing it with strictly a football mindset.” 

That makes sense at schools with dozens of sanctioned sports and who don’t view football as a monolith. Hiring a Luck or Rivera to oversee football, more and more a beast onto itself in the current landscape, while the AD focuses on Olympic sports is a good idea. That’s just not how the structure is set up at places like Texas or Texas Tech or even G5 programs like North Texas. The organizational chart reads school president then AD then head coach. The GM will always fall after that. 

“I don’t foresee a scenario where the head coach, in most cases, isn’t the leader of the program,” SMU head coach Rhett Lashlee said. “That’s what (we’re) hired to do. But the head coach needs a lot of help and it’s becoming an even bigger job than it used to be, so having people with expertise in recruiting or roster budget and managements or scouting is just as important as having a good offensive and defensive coordinators.” 

Here's the thing about the budding role of the GM in college football: They all have unique roles and some of it is semantics. Five or 10 years ago, there was no such thing as a Chief of Staff. That is until a couple of colleges began using that title as a nice way to describe the Director of Operations, and suddenly every college football program in America had a Chief of Staff. 

The transfer portal and revenue sharing and NIL converged to force the college model to inch closer toward the professional model of the NFL. GM is an important title in the NFL and it serves to reason that the director of recruiting or the head of scouting would view it as added importance. Not too dissimilarly from my insistence on being named the “senior writer” when I was hired. Does it mean anything? Not really, but it looks good on a resumé.  

The role of an individual GM at a specific school comes down to the strengths and weaknesses, or likes and dislikes, of the head coach. Take Texas State head coach G.J. Kinne, for example. The third-year head coach of the Bobcats loves evaluation. Talk to him long enough about it and you’ll get the impression he wouldn’t mind being an NFL GM. He’ll never relinquish the responsibility of picking players for his teams, but there are new realities of college football he’d rather not face regularly, and that’s where the GM comes in. 

“I don’t want to talk to agents and be in on those initial conversations about payroll and NIL and all that,” Kinne said. “Some coaches might not love the evaluations and roster construction, but that’s my baby and I’m never giving that part up completely. It all comes down to what you need to supplement.” 

Texas Tech GM James Blanchard believes college general managers will be making similar money to coordinators in the next three to five years. He spent a few years working in the NFL and believes the model will be similar, but not exact. He doesn’t ever expect to have hiring and firing power over other coaches. But he does believe that the head coaches who accept the new reality and don’t swim against the current will be best equipped to win. 

“In the NFL, some of the GMs are cap experts. Others are into scouting. Some are just the owner’s best friend,” Blanchard said. “It is no different in college. Look around the country and each of us do something a little bit different based on our strengths and what the head coach needs. I think some of these guys are stuck in their ways and don’t want to give up control.” 

Control was always slanted unevenly toward the coaches, and specifically the head coaches, in college football. For decades, the players weren’t allowed freedom of movement or financial considerations. The coaches could leave in the middle of the night but the running back was forced to sit a year if he wanted a fresh start. And while salaries for coaches and administrations grew by millions, a free meal could end a player’s eligibility.

A head coach in college football has never had less control. The players can leave freely in two separate transfer windows. They can make millions of dollars in NIL. Soon, they’ll be paid directly by the athletic departments when revenue sharing passes. With growing staffs and responsibilities, head coaches are finding it harder and harder to monitor every inch of their program. There are thousands of high school recruits and thousands of portal entrants. And words like “payroll” and “budget” are creeping into the sport. 

There is room for two truths here. In football obsessed areas like Texas, the head coach remains king. He’ll only answer to the athletic director and have final say on personnel and staffing decisions. Also, the emergence of the general manager is an undeniable truth. Maybe the shared name with NFL counterparts blurs our perception of their roles, but those roles are increasing in value and importance. 

“I’ve thought the GM was the most important position on your staff for the last decade because the roster dictates your success and failures more than any other single factor and building those rosters is no longer just about recruiting high school players and developing them for a few years,” TCU head coach Sonny Dykes said. “The strength coach and the GM are your two biggest hires.”