What if you can't afford a GM?

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

Allow me to take a brief break from World Cup Fever to pass the microphone over to my pal, Kristi Dosh. Kristi runs the Business of College Sports and is, in my humble opinion, one of the few actual experts when it comes to athlete compensation. She also consults with College Sports Solutions.

And recently, she pitched me a freelance idea I hadn’t properly considered before. The role of general manager is certainly becoming more common across all of college sports, including outside of football and men’s basketball. But not everybody has a GM, and for that matter … not everybody can even afford one.

So what should an athletic department do when it needs somebody to handle the front office-type roles of a GM but can’t dedicate specific headcount to that area yet?

I’m happy to unlock what would typically be a premium article to share Kristi’s thoughts below…

by Kristi Dosh

The general manager has become the defining hire of the revenue-sharing era. Power Four programs are building front offices that would look familiar to anyone who has worked in pro sports: a GM at the top, assistant GMs beneath, analysts, player personnel staff and even capologists tracking every dollar against the cap.

Most schools cannot replicate that. The budget isn't there, and it isn't coming. But that isn’t as big of an issues as it sounds. Programs don't have to replicate the org chart to replicate the function.

Recently, I spoke to Sun Belt football and basketball coaches about this, and the framing that resonated most was simple: The GM role is not one job. It is a collection of jobs that someone at every school is already doing, well or poorly, on purpose or by accident. A Power Four department pays specialists to own each role. Other schools have to figure out who owns them, often with a single person wearing every hat.

So before you decide whether you can afford a GM, get clear on what the GM function actually contains. There are six areas where I would suggest you find someone who can “own” that function.

Roster valuation

Someone has to decide what a player is worth to a program. Not what an agent says, or what a rival reportedly paid, but what the player is worth to you, in your system, for the role he or she will actually play.

At the Power Four level, this is increasingly a quantitative exercise, with analysts building models and comparables. You probably can't staff that. But the core discipline does not require a data team. 

Instead, it requires a defensible method for arriving at a number and the willingness to walk away when the number doesn't make sense. The most useful approach I've heard is to anchor offers by asking what a larger-budget school would pay the same player. A starter for you might be depth somewhere else, and knowing roughly what that tier pays tells you whether the figure you're being quoted is real.

If no one owns valuation, you will overpay for the wrong players and lose the right ones over small money. That is the most expensive mistake a budget-conscious program can make.

Portal triage

The transfer portal produces volume that can overwhelm a small staff: hundreds of names, narrow windows and enormous pressure to act fast.

Triage is the discipline of sorting that volume before it sorts you. Which positions are actual needs? Which players fit the scheme and the budget? Which evaluations can you trust, and which require film you haven't watched yet? 

Power Four departments may assign personnel staff to this year-round. At your school, it may be one person doing it between every other responsibility, which makes a repeatable process even more important, not less.

Triage runs in both directions. It is just as much about understanding your attrition as it is about evaluating who to bring in. 

Retention forecasting

The cheapest player to acquire is the one you already have. Retention forecasting is the work of knowing, before the portal opens, who is a flight risk and why.

This is mostly a communication function, not a financial one, which is good news for programs without money to spend. It means tracking satisfaction, unearthing problems early and understanding which non-monetary factors keep a given player on your campus. 

Degree value, development, role, relationships and culture are all retention factors you can leverage. But only if someone owns the forecasting and isn't simply reacting when an athlete is already halfway out the door.

Agent management

Players increasingly have representation, and someone at your program has to be the consistent point of contact for those agents. Power Four GMs treat this as a relationship to be managed over years, not a transaction to be survived through each portal.

The risk for under-resourced programs is that agent communication falls to the head coach by default, or worse, that it falls to no one and happens ad hoc through whoever picks up the phone. 

Both create the mixed messaging that kills deals and damages reputations. One designated, informed voice protects a program. Agents talk to one another, and being known as an organization that communicates clearly and honors its word is worth real money you don't have to spend.

Donor alignment

Revenue sharing did not eliminate donors and collectives. It reorganized them. Money still flows from people who care about programs, and someone has to keep that money aligned with roster strategy rather than working against it.

Misalignment is corrosive. Donors who fund players directly or push for specific signings can blow up a carefully built budget and undermine whoever is supposed to be managing the roster. 

The Power Four answer is a GM who works alongside the head coach, with the coach often serving as the forward-facing fundraiser and the GM ensuring the dollars land where the plan says they should. Smaller programs need the same alignment, even if the same person is doing both jobs.

Internal communication

The last area is the one most often left unowned, but without which the other five won’t matter. Internal communication is making sure the head coach, assistant coaches, administration, compliance and collective are all on the same page.

Most of the dysfunction I see at this level is internal before it is external. The portal and the agents and the donors are real pressures, but the failures usually start with mixed messaging, undefined ownership, emotional decisions and last-minute reactions inside the building. Money alone won’t fix that. A clear decision about who communicates what, to whom, and when will.

Define ownership before you hire anyone

Here is the practical move, and it costs nothing. Before you debate whether you can fund a GM, answer four questions:

If the honest answer to all four is "the head coach, in between coaching," you have found your problem. The head coach should function as the CEO of the operation, setting direction and carrying the relationships only they can carry. 

The execution underneath needs an owner. When ownership is undefined, every one of the six functions degrades, and they degrade fastest under the time pressure the portal creates.

You may not be able to assign each function to a different specialist. But you can assign them. You can decide one person will own valuation and triage, another will own retention and agent communication, and the head coach will own donor relationships and final calls. The point is that someone's name sits next to each responsibility, and everyone knows whose it is.

You don't need a pro-style front office

The instinct when you look at a Power Four front office is to assume you need a smaller version of the same thing. You don't. You need the functions covered, not the titles filled.

That reframing opens up options that have nothing to do with budget. You can build efficiency instead of buying it. You can organize the resources you already have, starting with the contracts, files and institutional knowledge that are probably scattered across drives and people. You can lean on campus partnerships, sport management students, business and analytics programs, law school clinics and faculty who would treat your program as a real-world laboratory if you asked. And you can create scalable systems that survive the constant turnover at this level, so the function doesn't collapse every time a staffer leaves.

The GM function isn’t really about one person with a shiny new title. It’s about deciding, deliberately and in advance, who owns the work that determines your roster. That decision is available to every program in the country, regardless of budget.