The new director of the prestigious Senior Bowl, Drew Fabianich, owns nearly two decades' time with America's Team -- the Dallas Cowboys -- as well as college general manager stints at Auburn and West Virginia.
When he speaks about college football, as he did Tuesday, folks tend to listen.
Appearing as a guest on the SEC Network's Paul Finebaum Show, Fabianich addressed his move from the NFL -- 18 years as a scout in Jerry Jones' Dallas Cowboys organization -- as well as where college football most differs from the NFL.
Namely: constant change.
"The NFL doesn't change a lot, but in college football it changes every five minutes," said Fabianich, who briefly coached at the University of Tennessee under both Johnny Majors and Phillip Fulmer.
Fabianich earlier this year replaced Jim Nagy atop the Senior Bowl after Nagy departed for a lucrative, multi-year deal worth nearly seven figures annually to serve as general manager of the Oklahoma Sooners football program.
But Fabianich, based on his own experiences at the collegiate level and applying his NFL knowledge, believes there's a better path for college "general managers."
"A lot of the quote general manager titles are young men that really, truly don't handle everything that a general manager in the NFL does," he said. "Do they handle structure, do they handle the 85 support staff (members)? Do they handle how the money is allocated, the valuation of it? Probably not
"But I think what I learned is that it is a lot of work in college football. And, if you split it up and have the Transfer Portal part and the high school recruiting part separate, I think it makes you program a lot more efficient. And, again, I also think that you have to work within a salary cap. It's not really a cap; it's really a budget."
Like the NFL, Fabianich said college rosters need to have a tiered pay structure for players/positions and noted that assistant coaches cannot carry excess influence into a business situation that has personal feelings.
"If you have a budget that you have to work within, I think that's ultra-important," Fabianich said. "Like, your left tackle is going to make more than your right tackle. Your receiver is going to make more than your tight end. Your quarterback is going to make more than everybody. If you have to split that up by percentage and how you value those positions, because you can't have a lot of assistant coaches saying, 'Well, we just have to pay him this just to keep him.' Well, the first thing that happens is that you over-promise and under-deliver and it drives your program down. Because then guys don't want to play or guys leave really quickly. That's what I learned taking the pro model into college and showing them actually how to structure their programs. And I think that's the way of the future and that's why guys like Jim (Nagy) ventured into it, and that's why I did, too. You get tired of being on the road. While I was there with the Cowboys for 18 years, I spent 13-and-a-half of them in hotel rooms. So, it got a little old.
"It changes every five minutes in college football and it's going to be that way until somebody governs it. "
On the Senior Bowl, which has a new title sponsor in Panini as it enters its 77th year in Mobile, Alabama, Fabianich teased some changes to the selection process.
"We're going to have a different form of the (Senior Bowl) watch-list coming out in the middle of August," he revealed. "So, we already know who we're targeting already through a lot of work, through a lot of time watching tape and then we'll get into a 'Hot List' of guys who are increasing their value. Then we'll go with the invites in November like we always have.
"The process never really stops. As soon as the first cycle ends after the game, we move into the cycle of getting the next class ready to go."