Here's why a former AD just signed on to be a mid-major GM

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

A few weeks ago, we announced a new content series with Teamworks on how General Managers work. We’ve previously published newsletters that covered the specific skills needed to be successful as a P4 CFB GM, what mid-major basketball GMs actually do, and what types of technology platforms GMs use to actually DO the job.

I’ve talked to a lot of GMs, or folks who do GM-like jobs under different job titles, over the last month. While nobody has the exact same career journey, the two most typical pathways to the gig are either via professional sports front office management, or through more traditional collegiate player personnel roles.

East Tennessee State is doing something very different.

For one, it’s notable that they have a general manager role at all. Not every school in The Southern Conference is opting into the House settlement this season (if that even gets approved), if at all. The handful of other institutions that are opting in are not expecting to share anywhere close to the $20ish million maximum amount. Shoot, according to financial data in the Extra Points Library, plenty of SoCon schools don’t even report $20 million in total operating revenue. As a department.

But having a GM isn’t the only unusual thing. It’s who ETSU hired for that role.

The school hired David Blackburn. Blackburn was the athletic director at UT Chattanooga from 2013-2017, and has served in high level athletic administrator positions at Tennessee and Middle Tennessee.

If anything, he’s deeply overqualified for the job, right? So I had to ask him. Why, after a long and distinguished career, would he want to jump into a job that is as chaotic as a mid-major GM role?

“I guess I’m not very good at being retired,” Blackburn told me, laughing.

Every GM gig is a huge undertaking, but the ETSU role is particularly suited for somebody who wants every day to be different

Most GM roles across the country focus on just one sport. There are a handful, like at George Washington, where a single GM may serve both men’s and women’s basketball. But Blackburn’s official title is “General Manager of Revenue Sports”, meaning he will support football and men’s basketball and women’s basketball.

The football side isn’t completely new to Blackburn. Before becoming an athletic director, he spent years working in recruiting and operations roles for Tennessee football. Blackburn already has a professional relationship with ETSU football coach Will Healy, and has worked with many of the staffers before.

Handling GM support services for three different sports is a tall order, and Blackburn acknowledged to me that there will likely be a bit of a learning curve on the women’s basketball side, where he hasn’t had the time to build as strong relationships as he has with football.

But Blackburn is confident he’s up to the challenge. His GM duties, as he described them to me, are less about grinding tape of player evaluations or making roster management decisions, although he’s happy to provide his opinion or bounce ideas off other coaches. He views his role as helping to support coaches by moving some administrative duties off their plates, and supporting athletes more directly.

You don’t get into college sports administration, typically, unless you love working with young people and seeing them grow. Blackburn told me he’s excited about being able to do that in a more direct way than perhaps some of his other positions.

So what do we mean, exactly, when we talk about supporting the athletes?

Part of the GM job, whether you’re at Tennessee, Middle Tennessee or East Tennessee, is figuring out how to deploy limited financial resources to support the construction of rosters. Blackburn will be helping in that effort, assisting in negotiations, contracts, and valuations.

But again, ETSU does not have SEC level resources. While there will be revenue shared directly from the school to athletes, if maximizing earning potential is critically important to an athlete, they’ll need to find some actual marketing dollars.

Because Blackburn has spent so much of his career in the state of Tennessee, he knows everybody. Sure, that includes high school coaches, which will help with recruit evaluations and relationship building. But that also means donors, businessmen, brands, and others. He told me that he believes part of this GM job will involve preparing ETSU athletes to participate (and reach out) to brands and business opportunities, and to hit the pavement a bit and find opportunities for those athletes.

Life as mid-major athletic director forces you to become familiar with sponsorship packages, unique corporate fundraising opportunities, and asking folks again and again for money. All of those are transferable skills for athletes and the outside world.

How well will the rest of his experience transfer?

When I talked to Andy Vaughn, the GM at NC State football, he mentioned that he felt institutional college administration knowledge was critical for an effective GM. The GM needs to know who to talk to about getting somebody eligible. They need to understand in-state vs out-of-state scholarship payments, and JUCO credits, and a litany of other tiny details that somebody straight out of the Denver Broncos might not totally appreciate.

If Vaughn is correct, then Blackburn should have that knowledge in spades. Blackburn also told me that even on the player evaluation side, there are more similarities between football and basketball evaluation than you might think. Watch enough high school athletes over the years, he explained, and you learn to figure out who has the explosiveness or range to play different positions.

And while he’s not a lawyer or a cap-ologist, anybody who worked as an athletic director has been involved in contract negotiations or managing a budget. Blackburn, or any college GM, isn’t going to be asked to write athlete rev-share contracts from scratch. There will be templates and other conversations to support those efforts.

But is this a template that can scale? How many mid-majors have a former AD or administrator with 30+ years of experience sitting in their backyard? How many schools could potentially afford a staffer with that type of experience and connections? And can one guy, no matter how experienced and connected, handle meaningful GM support functions for three different sports? That’s over 100 athletes, plus head and assistant coaches.

Even though he’s been in this business for a long time, Blackburn admitted that he’s never jumped into anything quite like this before. There are templates for building recruiting visits, constructing stadiums or securing new MMR partners. The chaos of a major coaching search might be the closest thing to the unpredictability of roster building in the NIL era, but even that isn’t a perfect 1:1 comparison.

But if ETSU doesn’t have that perfect template…good news. Nobody does! So why not roll the dice on something different and try to build something that works for ETSU?

It sure won’t be boring. Can’t necessarily say the same thing about retirement.