The evolution of personnel departments leads to massive pay raise for college football General Managers

It’s December 20, 2023 and the city of Lubbock, TX is buzzing. Joey McGuire is coming off leading Texas Tech to its second bowl game victory in as many seasons, becoming the university’s first head coach to secure a bowl win in each of his first two seasons. Wide receiver Micah Hudson has officially signed with the Texas Tech Red Raiders, becoming the program’s highest rated recruit and the first Industry five-star in school history. Texas Tech is on its way to securing back-to-back top-25 recruiting classes for the first time ever.

Meanwhile, the College Football Playoff field is set and the Washington Huskies are preparing to take on the Texas Longhorns while the Michigan Wolverines are set to square off against the Alabama Crimson Tide. Nick Saban and Jim Harbaugh are about to coach in their final college football games, inevitably causing one of the wilder coaching carousels of the last decade. A carousel that ends with a certain Washington head coach making his way to Tuscaloosa, replacing arguably the most legendary college football coach of all time. And when that certain coach walks off the plane in Alabama, there is a key off-field staffer that walks off right behind him. The future highest paid general manager in the history of college football.

Fast forward to today. Courtney Morgan just signed a three-year deal to become the General Manager of Alabama football that averages over $800,000 per year officially making him the highest paid personnel or recruiting staff member ever in college football. Roughly one month prior to Morgan’s deal, James Blanchard, Texas Tech’s General Manager, finalized a contract that nearly doubled his previous salary pushing him to the $400,000 per year mark. That number would put him comfortably in the top ten amongst current General Managers in college football. But these two men did not just accidentally fall into these positions. Their journeys took them on paths that were unconventional, to say the least. Yet both find themselves at the mountaintop of a profession that didn’t even exist 20 years ago.

How Player Personnel Invaded College Football

When asking a football fan what the first thing they think of when they hear the term “GM” or “General Manager” they most likely point to the NFL. The general manager is widely considered the shot caller for each team when it comes to roster management, draft picks, salary cap or anything related to player acquisition or retention. It’s a role that has been around professional football dating back to the 1930’s, but in more of a team ownership type capacity.

The modern football front office was born in the 1960’s when the Dallas Cowboys’ President/General Manager Tex Schramm hired Gil Brandt to be the team’s chief scout and gave him the title of Vice President of Player Personnel. Brandt laid the foundation for modern scouting practices and is considered one of the founding fathers of player evaluation. His practices laid the groundwork that we see today in modern player evaluation and scouting, both in professional and now college football.

College football’s modern personnel departments were born in the mid-2000’s with the “godfathers of player personnel” who created the first personnel departments that we see found in virtually every football operations building today.

Geoff Collins technically started it all. Yes, that Geoff Collins. The former Georgia Tech head coach was named the first ever Director of Player Personnel in college football at Georgia Tech in 2006 under Chan Gailey. After Collins helped Georgia Tech sign the highest rated recruiting class in school history, he moved on to take the same role at Alabama the following year under Nick Saban. In 2007, Saban was coming off a short tenure as the Miami Dolphins head coach but wanted to implement an NFL-style personnel department into his collegiate recruiting efforts. A department that cut high school game tape, honed the craft of player evaluation, analyzed the roster and assisted in the management of scholarships. These methods and practices going into effect paid off immediately as Alabama finished with the nation’s top-ranked recruiting class and one that served as the foundation for the Crimson Tide’s impending dynasty. The success also kick-started the development of modern college football personnel departments.

In the collective personnel community’s opinion, the “godfathers” are four men: Matt Dudek, Ed Marynowitz, Mark Pantoni and Austin Thomas.

Matt Dudek became the first official General Manager in college football earning the title at the University of Arizona in 2016 under head coach Rich Rodriguez. Dudek went on to become the Director of Recruiting at Michigan for four seasons where the Wolverines finished in the top 20 nationally in the recruiting rankings every season. He is now the Senior Account Executive at one of the top recruiting resources for college football programs, Teamworks.

Ed Marynowitz was the man who was responsible for replacing Geoff Collins at Alabama when Collins left the program to get back into coaching. Marynowitz went on to assist the Crimson Tide and head coach Nick Saban in landing four top five nationally ranked classes, three of which were the number one class in the country. He is now an agent at Creative Artists Agency (CAA).

Mark Pantoni started his career in football as an intern at the University of Florida under head coach Urban Meyer and eventually became an integral piece in the Florida machine that won two national championships during his tenure. He followed Urban Meyer to Ohio State and is now entering his twelfth season as the team’s General Manager, adding another national championship to his resume in 2015.

Austin Thomas. The man who gave me my first job in player personnel, was named the first ever General Manager in SEC football when he was promoted from Director of Player Personnel to GM in 2016 at LSU under Ed Orgeron. During his first stint at LSU, Thomas orchestrated a roster that finished in the top 25 four times. He also played a pivotal role in laying the foundation for one of the greatest college football rosters ever, helping build LSU’s 2019 national championship team. He then headed to Ole Miss where he embraced the new era of college athletics with the addition of NIL and the transfer portal. Thomas is currently the Senior Associate Athletic Director for Football Administration at LSU.

These four paved the way for personnel and recruiting staffers across the sport, but it took years of work and proving themselves to the right people to earn their stripes in the world of college football.

Humble Beginnings and Developing Relationships

What were these “godfathers” being asked to do that turned this DPP or GM position into a must have for college coaches?

“The main goal was to identify and evaluate. You’re doing prospect identification and discovery, getting things into a database, writing some brief evals,” says Austin Thomas of those early days. “You’re basically organizing the coaches so they can go recruit. You’re managing boards, you’re giving input with evals; your role was to assist the coaches with their recruitment of prospects.

“When I got started it was me and JV (Justin Vincent). That’s it for full-time. I was making $65,0000 and we had four or five students with us but that was it, that was the personnel department.”

This is the room that I remember walking into when I got my career started as a student personnel assistant. But not everyone was as fortunate to get their career started being mentored by one of the “godfathers’ of the profession. Some had to learn the ropes, earn respect and make a name for themselves in a different way.

James Blanchard was giving evaluations for free online to anyone that would listen.

“It all started on Twitter and message boards. I was working at a fire hydrant plant building fire hydrants for a living and while I was working, I would be watching high school highlight tapes,” says Blanchard. “Basically, I would post to forums for all these Texas colleges with my rankings, or players that I thought were the real deal. Then after posting on message boards for a while I would start getting these coaches following my twitter and hitting me up asking about players.

Blanchard became so well known among recruiting fans in Texas that when Matt Rhule took the head coaching job at Baylor in 2017, fans tweeted at Rhule advocating for Blanchard. After building a relationship with Baylor’s then DPP, Evan Cooper, Blanchard was offered a job with the Bears, taking a $30,000 paycut to begin his career in football.

“I was just happy to have coaches hitting me up online,” Blanchard says. “Once I got in the building? I never wanted to leave. It gave me a new goal. To become a college General Manager.”

Courtney Morgan’s journey weaved in and out of football buildings for a couple of decades after his playing career at Michigan ended in 2003. After earning his degree from Michigan, he spent the next seven years in medical device sales. Eventually, he would make it back to his hometown of Los Angeles after being hired by UCLA as their Director of Player Development/High School Relations under Jim Mora in 2013. The job allowed Morgan to empower athletes and encourage them to make the most of their opportunities inside and outside of athletics. The role also highlighted one of Morgan’s greatest strengths, his ability to develop relationships. Morgan then pivoted into the agency world where he became the Director of Client Development for one of the top agencies in sports, Vanguard Sports Group, before eventually co-founding his own business, Pure Influence Group. He got back into college football in 2019 when he became the Coordinator of Player Personnel at San Jose State. After one season with San Jose State, Morgan landed the job that kicked his personnel career into overdrive. A job at Fresno State that matched him up with the man he currently calls his head coach, Kalen DeBoer.

Gaining Trust, Earning Respect and Forging Your Own Path

On July 1, 2021, the NCAA dropped a bomb in the world of college athletics, announcing a policy that would allow college athletes to benefit from their name, image and likeness. The NIL era was born. This was briefly preceded by a new regulation  allowing student-athletes in Division I football to transfer once without sitting out a year. Those two rule changes were monumental, changing the landscape of college football forever. They also changed the way teams have to build their rosters and manage their scholarships. And who was forced to carry the hefty burden of these rule changes on their shoulders? Personnel departments.

The staff members who had been trusted to navigate and manage the rosters for the last decade were now tasked with two more massive challenges. This led to an increase in value and, ultimately, elevated compensation. However, getting to that point was not instantaneous.

“I remember walking into the coach’s office being like, ‘hey if I’m going to be asked to add the portal and this NIL stuff to my plate plus going out on the road, I think I need to be compensated properly for that and that coach literally laughed in my face,” says Austin Thomas.

This was a common issue in personnel departments across the country – being underpaid for a job that is the lifeblood of the program. Everyone knows the saying “football is about the Jimmy’s and Joe’s, not X’s and O’s.” And to a point, it’s true. Nick Saban and the rest of this generation’s best coaches know the value of a roster construction. The talent on the roster sets the floor for a program. Want to find out how low your program can go? Stop finding talented football players.

Personnel staffers have been at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to compensation since the late 2000’s. Meanwhile, the importance of their roles has exploded. Objectively speaking, these General Managers and Directors of Player Personnel are equally if not more impactful on a programs’ success than many position coaches, who are often paid in the upper six figures.

It took forward-thinking coaches gaining trust with their personnel staff to see advances in the field.

“It’s who you worked for. That was the thing that mattered when it came to how much respect you were given in your building,” says Austin Thomas. “I had Frank Wilson when I was getting started at LSU. He believed in me and what I brought to the table, and he was able to be a voice for me when speaking to the head coach, which eventually turned into the head coach coming to me more and trusting me with opinions on players and how to manage the roster. I think that’s the same way right now with the GM position, you’ve got to have a head coach that trusts you to do what you do best.”

Courtney Morgan and James Blanchard are two who have shown the ability to develop trust, essentially becoming the right hand man for their respective head coaches. Both men chose to remain loyal to their respective programs and coaches this past offseason turning down major advances from the University of Southern California that would have made both men exponentially more money.

Morgan was hired in 2020 to be Fresno State’s Director of Player Personnel by Kalen DeBoer. He excelled in this role and finished the 2021 recruiting cycle as the fourth-ranked recruiter in the Mountain West Conference. No other off-field staff member in the MWC finished in the top fifty.

“It was probably one of the toughest years, you could argue, it is the toughest year of coaching, 2020,” DeBoer told Andy Staples (https://youtu.be/PzWfaozhv6s?si=WBf-VDRD0s8BZSGn). “But he was so creative and finding ways and never say die mentality and those types of things. We gelled. We spent a lot of time together during those months.”

Blanchard fostered a similar type of mutual trust and aligned philosophy with Texas Tech head coach Joey McGuire, dating back to their time at Baylor under Matt Rhule and Dave Aranda.

“I think the way Blanchard and I wanted to go about sending out offers to players allowed us to get ahead of most people in the game and helped us build relationships faster because we were usually the first program to offer an athlete,” McGuire explains.

Their relationship was so strong in fact, that when McGuire was hired to be the next head coach at Texas Tech, Blanchard was his first hire – similar to DeBoer and Morgan at Alabama.

“Blanchard’s a game changer, plain and simple,” McGuire says of his General Manager.

Resetting the Market and the Future of the College Football GM

What do the big new contracts for Courtney Morgan and James Blanchard mean for the future of these positions?

“In my opinion, Courtney reshaped the financial landscape for blue-bloods and conference champions. If you work at those schools, you now have a deal that you can point at that resets the market for you,” says Blanchard.

The Texas Tech GM understands the impact that Morgan’s deal has for some of the top tier programs in the country, but what does it mean for up-and-coming programs?

“I think the deal that Joey McGuire, Kirby Hocutt (Texas Tech’s Athletic Director) and Texas Tech gave me is just as important because what Texas Tech is showing the entire country is that this spot is this important from a monetary standpoint. I think we’ll eventually get to blue-blood status here, but the fact we are on our way and are an up-and-coming program and the university still showed that they believe that this is the level of commitment we need in our program in order to reach our goals is monumental.”

One hurdle for administrators and head coaches appears to be determining each the specific roles and responsibilities for personnel staffers. It can vary from program to program.

“There are tiers to it,” notes Austin Thomas. “You have GM’s now that are being asked to do what the old-school DPP was being asked to do, which was the whole roster management and eval sort of thing and that’s it. Then you have GM’s that are being asked to assist with all of that and then throw in NIL management, transfer portal, advanced scouting, coaching contracts, fundraising, administration, etc. That’s another layer to the position that wasn’t being asked from it three or four years ago.”

Thomas thinks NFL front office personnel will start to migrate towards the college game because they think the “drop in level” could be an easier gig for more pay.

“I think you’re going to see an influx of NFL personnel try and come into the college game. The problem is this job is arguably harder than what the NFL people are used to. If you just look at the current landscape – we deal with more players, more yearly turnover, shorter contracts, two transfer windows, and most importantly we don’t get to draft our guys. We can’t hand pick the players we want. You are dealing with hundreds of families and prospects, some of which are sophomores and juniors in high school, for years. And most of them won’t end up at your school. Plus, the recruiting calendar never ends which means we never stop working.”

It’s a grueling schedule. But, somehow, these people find ways to make it work. And the ones that thrive in this harsh climate are the ones that will come out on top. Blanchard shares what the average day looks like for a top player personnel staffer in 2024.

“I get into the office around six in the morning. Do all of the roster management stuff, check in with coaches, make sure the head man is all good. Then I go have meetings with departments all over campus and make sure we have everything squared away with compliance, NIL, administration. And then I make phone calls with five to eight prospects every single night. Sometimes they’re fifteen minutes. Sometimes it can be an hour. Then I look up and it’s eleven o’clock at night. I ain’t even seen my kids yet.”

Blanchard understands it’s a grind, but he also understands he is living the dream.

“I get to go to work with great people and watch football every day. I’m one of the luckiest humans on the planet.”

The tides are turning and the light is finally being shined on one of the most under-appreciated roles in the sport. We are witnessing the birth of the modern General Manager in college football.

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