The general manager position in college football has grown faster than a toddler seen by a grandparent for the first time from Thanksgiving to Christmas. Seemingly overnight, the position has evolved from "point person on logistics for recruitments that coaches are managing" to, well, everything a professional general manager does. Not only are GMs now handling contract negotiations, they're making decisions on which players get offers and which ones don't.
Take Oklahoma's Jim Nagy. He'll earn three quarters of a million dollars to handle negotiations, identify roster needs, scout prospects, and work shoulder to shoulder with head coach Brent Venables on which players do and do not eventually become Sooners. "People have asked if you and Brent don't see the same," Nagy said at his introductory press conference last week. "There's enough high school players and players in the portal that we're going to find common ground on, for sure."
In stating that he and Venables will need to find common ground, Nagy implies that not only will Venables have veto power on a player Nagy might like, Nagy will have veto power over Venables. Needless to say, that's a massive change to the status quo at Oklahoma.
That's not how it's going to be at Georgia, though, where Kirby Smart will still be his own general manager.
“We’ve reorganized and restructured some things in terms of what falls under whose duty and whose aspects. But at the end of the day, I’m not ready to run off and go hire somebody that’s just going to make all the decisions for what goes on on the football field," Smart told reporters Tuesday. "I think I’ve got to stay involved in that heavily. We’ve got the capacity and the quality of people in the areas that I think we need. So I think we’ll be fine in that world as it changes.”
As the landscape evolves, more work has to be done and more, weightier decisions are to be made, each program will find its own equilibrium on where the power rests between the head coach and the top personnel staffer. Venables is 22-17 with two losing seasons in three years at Oklahoma; Smart is 105-19 with two national championships. Naturally, Smart is going to have more internal power than Venables.
Temperament also plays a role here. Some head coaches may not want to be involved in deciding whether the rising junior defensive end is worth 15 percent more than his slotted value, and others, like Smart, recoil at the thought of having someone else make the ultimate decision on who is and is not a Bulldog. Again, milage may very on where the balance of power rests between head coach and GM.
But one thing is clear. When Georgia eventually hires a new head coach, his successor's relationship to his top off-field personnel assistant will likely look a lot more like Venables's than Smart's.