The Future of College Football Looks Like an NFL Front Office

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

All the things that I believed in for all these years, 50 years of coaching, no longer exist in college athletics.

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Jake Rosenberg, you're here in studio.

Thank you for being here in studio with me.

Happy to be here.

I brought you in here because I believe you have a unique perspective on the future of college football, but I should discuss with you first your past.

Your title was with the Philadelphia Eagles, Vice President of Football Administration.

What does that mean?

Football administration is the area that oversees contract salary cap management, CBA compliance, all the areas

that administrate a football team.

There it is.

Yeah.

And worked for the Eagles for almost 13 years,

but

broadly helped with team building, roster building, hiring, whatever really needed to be done, worked really closely with our general manager.

I mean, it was primarily just everything having to do with money and the players.

So when Jake Rosenberg got in charge of everything having to do with money and the players for the Philadelphia Eagles,

there weren't a lot of Jake Rosenbergs in the NFL.

Jake had worked as a finance guy, a trader, for almost 15 years before Eagles general manager Howie Roseman hired him in 2012.

And the job was to sniff out these big edges and market inefficiencies that were still sitting across the NFL.

At that point, quants, you know, data-driven, probability-obsessed financial experts, were largely outsiders still to front offices.

And the NFL was still trying to suppress its own money ball revolution.

The Eagles, as one CBS Sports headline posited, were consequently considered magicians at manipulating the salary cap.

And a significant part of Philly's magic, it turns out, was Jake.

But those days, those same edges

are long gone.

I would say now the caliber of people who are migrating into sports,

these are defined like career tracks that at Ivy League schools, people are getting PhDs and going to work for teams.

This has turned into a

game of micro edges.

When I first started trading, I was on a trading floor and there were days where the edges, the inefficiencies were insane.

And so I think that all of a sudden then technology, capital, all those things rush in and tighten it up.

That's the nature of markets.

So I'd say the same thing about professional sports.

You're getting a much higher caliber of influx of, you know, academic pedigree, resources for sure, technology, systems, you know, the use of data is tightening all these things up.

But there is a parallel market, the subject of today's episode, that remains loose as hell.

And this market just happens to be the second biggest sport in the United States.

Even though the most famous figures in college football, the head coaches,

don't quite grasp what's about to happen.

I would say that college football is in for

a rude awakening.

What has been the case in college football has been a lot of the same

for a very long time.

And I think that there hasn't been nearly as much strategic problem solving.

There hasn't been nearly as much need to evolve.

And what is in the process of going on right now

is the antithesis of that.

These edges, to a large degree, have closed in the NFL, have closed in markets.

But right now, in the midst of huge disruption, edges galore.

Yes.

For college sports, they need a model, not that looks like the NFL, but a model for everything decision-making that makes sense with what things look like in 2024, 2025 going forward, not what they looked like in 2020, 2015, 2010.

Like those are not, there are no similarities to that anymore.

So why are we doing things the same way?

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So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

Learn more at remymartin.com.

Remy Martin Cognac, Feene Champain, afforded an alcoholic volume, reported by Remy Control, USA, Inc.

in York, New York, 1738, Centaur design.

Please drink responsibly.

So I want to acknowledge that for a couple of years now, maybe fans, listeners have become accustomed to name, image, and likeness payments, of course, which can very often just be schools paying players under the guise of marketing.

We've covered that on the show extensively.

But I want to look ahead to 24, 25, and beyond because of the house settlement, which, of course, is winding its way through the court system still, going towards another step of authorization.

But the point is that this is the official beginning of the salary cap era in college football.

In an historic first, the NCAA and Nation's Power Five conferences have reached a deal to pay their athletes.

The ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC, and Pac-12 accepted the general terms of a settlement that will see the NCAA pay nearly $2.8 billion in damages over 10 years to nearly 14,000 athletes dating from 2016 to now.

It also creates a new system that allows schools to use up to $21 million a year to pay student athletes in any sport starting in 2025.

The agreement was permitted to be available.

And it's not just any salary cap, Jake.

This is a hard-ass cap.

How do you explain for people who are not fluent in your world what is happening here and what that means?

Well, I think what it means is that college athletic programs are now going to have a certain amount of money for those schools that participate in the RevShare model.

They are all going to have the same amount of money that they will be distributing to sports.

And so it'll vary depending on the school or, you know, how they see football.

But effectively, it is a salary cap and it is an athletic department-wide salary cap.

You know, when you talk about efficiency and competitive advantages and things like that,

do you salivate?

Do I salivate?

No, I mean, I think it's fun and interesting to think about problem solving and the idea that

There might be a school who will be the Tampa Bay Rays of the NCAA, you know, in the sense that they're going to say, you know what?

We're not going to be nostalgic about the way that we have operated.

We're going to be entirely forward-thinking and look and try to just find whatever advantages we can to build teams.

And I think that that's exciting and fun.

I would love to be part of that.

And so just a few months ago, Jake Rosenberg left the Philadelphia Eagles and he launched his own consulting firm called the Athlete Group.

And his clients now include these big-time football programs like the University of Florida and the University of Oklahoma.

And Oklahoma, for instance, hired Jake to take everything he learned about NFL money and NFL players and designed for them a modern day college football front office.

But some of the biggest things that Jake made his bones navigating in the NFL, NFL, like the league's 439-page collective bargain agreement, and also, you know, the basic concept of teams signing players to employment contracts, still had no real equivalent in the college game.

Coaches, administrators, you know, athletic directors, they're all,

if they're not already, going to have to be rethinking their strategy, rethinking every aspect of how they are building a team or how they're managing a budget.

And until I actually started talking to schools, working with some schools and understanding better what was kind of under,

you know, behind the curtain, I did have a little bit of, you know, that fear of being an imposter and like, okay, so cool, I did this, I worked in the NFL, but what if I really can't help them and it's, you know, I don't want to, I'm not trying to take anything for nothing,

but I think that that has certainly dissipated.

I understand now how much my experience translates.

Yes.

I mean, one fundamental difference between the college sports, the college football landscape of your versus the one now is that a cap guy didn't really seem all that interesting to the people running these programs, Jake.

No, I think that's true.

A cap guy didn't seem all that interesting.

And the concept of paying players generally.

Well, officially was not allowed.

I think there's been less of a transition, perhaps, for some schools in that sense.

I actually, in the beginning, I think a lot of the conversations I had were specifically schools who thought that the way that I could help them was by delivering some like black box model to them that would inform them how much or how to pay a player.

Like a, like a, like a, like a model, you know, like oh okay this is this is how much you pay a quarterback and this is how much you pay a running back

what the problem is in college sports is not that we don't know how to pay players it's we don't even understand how to find and evaluate and

you know like if player if the whole universe of players is at the top and just the players you want to add to your team is at the bottom that entire process is the problem right now because

you know things like the transfer portal you know which is akin to kind of college free agency in a sense never existed

so when you talked about what the scouting needs were in college it was high school players and now the universe includes conceivably every player in college football that you need to have some idea about so the needs to scout players have expanded exponentially and how you whittle those down how you compare you know replacement options whether you're going to keep your own player who may be thinking about jumping in the portal, or, you know, whether you go to the portal to replace, whether you recruit players, recruit players in high school.

There's optionality

here that never existed before.

Yes.

And, you know, the extra complication in college, that is not the case in the NFL.

If you think it's a competitive advantage to have a coaching staff of 35 people and a front office of 100 people, If you thought having twice as many people on staff was an advantage, you could do it.

And it would not impact your ability to pay players.

You'd have the exact same players theoretically.

In college, this is now we're entering where the athletic department dollars need to be allocated between staff, coaches, and players.

That's one pool, basically.

So if you have a bunch of extra staff, extra coaches,

they're taking money away from

paying players.

And so that dynamic is even more intense, really, if you think about it, because now there's like this efficiency dynamic about how you operate.

It's almost as if you're describing a salary cap.

Well, right.

I'm describing a salary cap of sorts, even more restrictive than the NFL, which to me, if we're talking about strategy and we're talking about opportunity and inefficiencies,

even more room for those things

for teams.

What's exciting and interesting to me are that there are going to be teams, hopefully ones that I work with, who

allocate resources in a smarter, more deliberate, more efficient way.

and then get a better roster, get better on-field results.

And so this is where I just got to jump in here and turn for a second to Nick Sabin,

the guy who won six national titles more than any coach of the modern era, and also took the University of Alabama to the college football playoff eight times in 10 years.

Because something Sabin did in 2007 upon arrival in Tuscaloosa remains an underrated aspect of his entire legend.

Remember, Sabin had just washed out of Miami at this point, having coached the Dolphins.

It went terribly.

But what he did upon getting to Alabama was implement an important lesson from that otherwise miserable NFL experience that helped him change college football.

And that lesson was specialization.

Historically, college football coaches had always done everything.

That was their legend.

They scouted and recruited high school prospects and made in-game decisions and ran practices and all of it and more.

But what Nick Sabin did specifically was hire a director of player personnel, just like in the NFL, who specialized in building Alabama's roster, which is an enormous reason why Alabama left everybody in the dust.

I think he was very, very early with the way he set up program there.

A lot of aspects that he had at Alabama that didn't necessarily catch on elsewhere.

You know, the way he ran that program and his credentials and,

you know, intellect, all that stuff, it's not a model that everybody could necessarily pull off.

But I think what you see there is you see an understanding of specialization and how that could benefit a program.

Yes.

And that sort of brings us to this current environment where we still, like if we're just, we're looking backwards into how schools have been doing this, very little specialization.

So you may have,

a lot of schools, in fact, do have titles like director, player, personnel.

They have, you know, a lot of them now

over the last couple of years have hired general managers.

Yep.

But what you would find is that the general manager is not in any way, shape, form performing the duties, having the skill set experience of what your professional general manager has.

Like what most people in their minds think of a general manager's role or what their experience was like leading into this job, not much parallel.

So we have a sense of what a general manager does from the NFL context.

The biggest difference in the before times.

Before all of the chaos has befallen college football, who became a GM?

What was that job as you would describe it?

Well, I would describe a general manager profile in college football mostly as

a recruiter or

someone on a personnel side of things.

But I think that that title has a certain level of cachet and currency.

NFL general manager starting salaries are there, seven figures, multiple seven figures.

And college staff salaries are not anywhere in in that ballpark.

So I think that the title has been used as a way to offset.

We're not going to pay you.

You know, those general managers over there.

Yeah, we're not paying you anything close to that, but we're going to give you this really cool title.

Yeah.

On LinkedIn, this is going to look great.

And this is going to, this, it's a way to keep somebody who you see as an up-and-comer, who you see as important.

I'm not, I'm not diminishing their importance, experience in some cases, or anything like that, but it's not consistent with what people think.

And so the net effect of all of this is you have effectively like a three-ring circus.

There's so much going on.

There's so many more moving parts, but you haven't necessarily adapted the organization to meet those needs.

And so where is all that extra stuff going?

For the most part, it's going to the head coach.

You know, like coaches in college football have done a lot of different things for a lot of different times.

You know, they've been like pretty much the primary evaluators, primary recruiters, and they coach on the side.

And they do

fundraise.

They do all these conferences.

And the question is, right.

The question is like, look, in the NFL, we have personnel staffs and you have pro evaluators.

You have college evaluators.

You have over-the-top evaluators.

And

do they do other things?

Sure.

They go.

They eat meals occasionally, but mostly they're sitting there grinding tape, writing up players.

And that's the way they spend all of their time, all of their focus.

They're building up this mental database of players they've seen, you know, and they know what a player looks like, they know how they develop.

That's not a perfect science, it's an art.

But when you have people who are doing that part-time, it's hard to imagine that they're doing it as well.

Well, and this is why Nick Sabin, for all of his cutting-edgeness,

is like, I'm out of here.

Oh, yeah, it's a brutal job.

Brutal job.

That's my major concern, the combination of pay-for-play, free agency, and how that impacts development.

And I can attest that I've had two NFL coaches tell me, and this is a football deal because they're concerned about the football part, that the players come to them less developed, with more entitlements, and less resiliency to overcome adversity.

And these are concerns that they have even in their football development.

Well, if that's true in their football development, is that true in other parts of their development, whether it's academics or personal development?

And each time you transfer, you minimize your chances of graduating by probably about 20%.

Now we have guys transferring two or three times.

That clip of Sabin, by the way, is from his testimony on Capitol Hill back in March.

The same month Jake Rosenberg happened to retire from the Philadelphia Eagles.

And also not that long after Sabin retired himself as the greatest coach in college football history.

He made that decision in January.

And sitting right next to Sabin on the hill was Texas Senator Ted Cruz,

who then asked him this.

How much did the current chaos and state of the law contribute to your decision to retire now?

Well,

all the things that I believed in for all these years, 50 years of coaching, no longer exist in college athletics.

On PTFO this year, you may have noticed, we have been doing an ongoing series on the metamorphosis of college sports.

We started it with the antitrust lawyer who beat the NCAA at the Supreme Court, before then diving into Olympic sports in the wake of the House v.

NCAA settlement.

And then we dissected the arms race between NIL collectives,

which has led us now to Jake Rosenberg and his front office futurism, as well as the nostalgia that you just heard.

And whether you find Nick Sabin's frustrations moving or just kind of like an old guy complaining about having to finally pay all these kids,

just know that if Nick Sabin was flailing to adapt to what the job of head coach actually practically requires now,

you can imagine what so many other coaches might be feeling too.

They were not hired to be a cat manager, right?

You're not hiring head coach and vice president of football administration.

You're hiring someone who you think, whatever it is, whatever the blend is, X's and O's, culture, you know, managing a staff, like those are the things that you're typically hiring a head coach for.

Let's talk about the blend, though, because there are different archetypes.

There are different,

you know, in the taxonomy of head coaches in college football.

There's the X's and O's guy.

There's the recruiter who's a retail politician, master of a living room.

There, of course, the guys who are special who can do both.

Is that as binary as you see it?

Or are there other variations on this before I move on in this text?

Well, I think that if we're going to say that the two main components have historically more typically been like X's and O's and recruiting, I think what we're seeing is the introduction of a couple other,

at least one, you know, maybe maybe a couple other skill sets that are highly demanded and valuable that a current coach may or may not have.

I think that there's an administrative component to this now that hasn't mattered because in my view, you know, just totally speaking,

for just the way I see things, I think that the

time where people and college staffs could really sort of split their time and weave across the highway between what they do.

To me, there's just too much to do.

There's too many players to evaluate.

I think specialization is a way where you achieve efficiency.

And so, if we're talking about we need to be efficient because we need to preserve as much of the money for the players as we can, then I think we get to efficiency.

Now, if you're going to go from a pretty unstructured to a highly structured,

who other than the person who is empowered to to run the whole place needs to take responsibility for that so that's a skill set now the question i have for that of course is that in this first phase of rolling out this reimagined let's call it college football front office it would make sense for the guy the incumbent the head coach to be also somebody who has some administrative talent

but the question becomes whether in fact true efficiency means that it does resemble the NFL model.

Right.

And it's not the same guy who's doing that.

And in fact, there is somebody, AGM, who now on the org chart has oversight over everyone, including the head coach.

I think that could be at some point.

I don't think we're anywhere just based on my conversations and just understanding where we're rooted on certain things.

I think that's far away in my personal view.

But I think having someone who is sort of balancing the head coach and who is genuinely empowered to do a lot of these things and take them off the head coach, whether the reporting structure is a little bit different and maybe looks closer to an NFL team in the sense that, you know, if the parallel to an NFL team's ownership is the athletic director or administration, perhaps they report to the administration and the general manager is not reporting to the head coach.

I think those things could, you might find those in certain models, but I also think you're going to find head coaches who have been head coaches for a long time, who are highly paid, successful, who are every bit the leader and manager that you think.

And they say to themselves, I know where my limitations are.

I am going to empower people.

And I also think, like, even if you can do it, even if you're a head coach who is super financially oriented, number oriented, and you can sit there and create a model and you know how you want this allocated, I think you can make an argument that a head coach who's negotiating contracts with their players,

that's probably not healthy.

Right.

So I think like the relationship a coach needs to have with players,

no matter, you know, how hardline the coach is or otherwise, like, That's a huge part of the team and the way he runs a team and the culture.

I think it would be hard to argue that it's healthy or it helps the relationship when the coach is also the one who's saying yes or no to

amounts.

So that may be a decision for a completely different reason as well.

But I certainly can see this going in a number of different ways.

And I could see, you know, somebody being hired to be sort of a cat manager, be the quantitative person who understands valuations and all that.

Yeah.

I mean, look, I'm just thinking of Nick Saban being like, I don't want to do this.

Or coaches like him saying, what I am great at doesn't matter as much, which signals so much about what actually

somebody who is perfect for this new job would resemble.

Correct.

And I think that that's the part that may lead to change in some spots.

or may lead some coaches to change and see that coming because a lot of these traits may be slightly de-emphasized.

Like we said, recruiting might be a little less important.

That's what I wanted to ask you about specifically, which is among those three types and the first two, recruiting X's and O's, it does feel like the guy who is awesome in your living room,

that isn't going to be as much of the pie chart of his responsibilities.

Recruiting still matters because, like I would say, in the NFL, recruiting matters in the NFL.

I think the question is,

how does it matter differently?

How do we line up resources with how much it matters?

And that's just part of what I'm trying to do with schools or talk to them about is

whatever your recruiting budget was in terms of time, money, people

five years ago or 10 years ago,

if that's still the exact same, maybe it's right, but you don't know if it's right because you haven't purposefully like looked at it and said, well, how should we be spending?

How does recruiting matter?

And those are places where you could potentially pick up, you know, efficiencies.

You could potentially spend less on recruiting than you have.

And that's all money that falls to the bottom line.

It's like ask the list of your hundred top, you know, recruits or something.

Would you rather

spend,

you know, 4X on how much we spend to try to convince you to come here?

Or would you rather spend 2X and then give you the difference in cash?

You know, do you want to have 10 people at your recruiting dinner or do you want to have four and keep the difference?

And so I think like oversimplification, but

it's a really, you just need to open it all up and say, is this still the right way?

As a cap expert, as that being the thing I'm going to keep on hammering to your frustration, because it's clear that, of course, football administration entails a lot more than simply the cap.

What do people not understand?

I've said personally that

the most value you could possibly provide is if there was an owner or a new owner who trusted you and understood that you had this experience, you could save them probably five years of their life and hundreds of millions of dollars in mistakes because it seems like just about every owner makes the same mistakes.

Wait, wait, wait, what's what's what's the brief summary on, okay, they all do this and this and this.

Is there a category that you think of?

Yeah, I think they're mistakes that they wouldn't make with their primary business.

That's one thing.

Yeah.

Okay, what does that mean?

People who are in the position that they are to own an NFL team, have financial resources beyond most people's wildest dreams, and typically have made those

through a level of discipline, forward-thinking, planning,

you know, structure,

and then

don't necessarily carry over that same process with a team.

I'm detecting

some emotion, some gut, some not quite data-driven decision-making is what you're doing.

I think that that's frustrating.

I think that that's the case.

I mean, I'm not going to say I'm frustrated by it at this point.

I think part of the reason I'm not in the NFL may have to do with that to a certain extent, because I think I got to a certain point where I'm just like, the hiring to some extent

doesn't really make sense, not just for me.

I mean, just looking around, I know there's a lot of talented people in the NFL who are not necessarily kind of on the conveyor belt towards, you know, running a team.

And it's just like, all right, maybe the conveyor belt's busted.

Have you considered getting a dad who worked in the NFL?

I mean, I think what people will not understand or, is that you can't have the best of everything.

There need to be choices.

You need to prioritize, you know, from a team building standpoint, from a staff, coaching, all those types of things.

You need to make hard choices.

Well, to be clear, up until, I guess, this, this new and scary future, a lot of teams are accustomed to to having the best of everything.

Correct, correct.

That's the whole point of college football and the eternal glory of someone like Nick Saban.

Right.

And I think

I have this is not officially the marketing slogan for my endeavor here, but I think you know, Nick Saban said on game day at some point: I just want to say, you guys keep talking about a $20 million roster.

Yeah, if you don't pay the right guys, you'll be out of luck.

That's life, babe.

That's life.

Congratulations.

You just broke the internet.

It's about paying the right players.

You know, it's not about paying players, about paying the right players.

And I think there are examples right now, even

less than halfway through the season, where

allegedly teams have spent, you know, or collectives have spent inordinate amounts of money and are not getting any kind of return on that investment.

Those are examples of there is a strategy to spending spending money.

And while this is the wild west and we don't have transparency on all the things that you do in the NFL, and there are a lot of other considerations here to building a team, recruiting matters, you know, all these things we've talked about,

I still think that you need strategy.

You need to be purposeful.

You need to make choices.

And if you just sort of let it happen on its own, it's not going to be a good situation.

And so if I were to to ask you that same question about what the teams that you're learning about, meeting,

what they are

still not quite getting.

If the fan perspective is you can't have the best of everything, sure.

What do the teams, the schools, I should say, what are they needing to come to grips with?

I think they need to come to grips with the idea that you can be nostalgic and you can love

college football or what it's always been.

But the more you hold on to that and that becomes a barrier for moving forward and making changes and adapting to what it is now, like being nostalgic is not bringing it back, you know, effectively.

Are you saying nostalgia isn't a strategy?

I'm saying nostalgia is, I like to say hope is not a strategy.

In this case, nostalgia is a terrible strategy because it's going to hold you back.

That's the hardest thing is that there are going to be big changes.

You know, I think what we've seen here

is that a coach's ability to maintain a certain culture when players are now evaluating whether to leave in the portal for an offer.

Thousands of players are in the portal every year right now.

And not only that, but What also complicates the situation is because they are not employees or there's no association there's no collective bargaining agreement as we said you know there is in the nfl yep is

what's an agent right in the nfl

an agent needs to be certified right say what you will about the nfl pa you know there there is a certain standard and process that makes someone an nfl agent and able to interact with teams on behalf of players.

What you have right now

is

agents, and I would do air quotes on some of these.

Agents are

players' friends, players' coaches, people who live down the street from them.

It's, it could be anybody.

Like, it's literally like you could just one day wake up and you say, yeah, I'm an agent.

And so

what goes on here is that,

first of all, a lot of these people don't have the experience to to provide credible advice.

You know, they don't have situational awareness.

They don't have a network to really get to people who matter.

And they also don't have a real like vested stake in what happens in

the bigger picture.

In this situation, when you have someone who's representing a player who may be doing something completely different next week,

if it comes down to lying to a team about some offer that they've gotten,

like they don't care.

And so teams are sitting there and they're saying, Yeah, I want to keep this player.

Yeah, I want to pay the player something fair, but I've got this guy who's telling me he got this offer from some other school.

I have no way to know if that's a real offer.

It's just so crazy.

Well, even the basics of like a publicly available salary database,

you don't actually know what anybody is making on the record.

It sounds like you have a bunch of, you have a whisper network of sorts.

What, how does it work now?

Yeah, well, I think that's something that I'm working on

with the schools that I've been fortunate enough to be retained by is understanding, look, where things are right now, you're not going to have the level of transparency and data and things that we have in the NFL.

I do not make NFL comparisons, you know, and say, oh, we're moving to this like NFL model and everything is going to look like the NFL.

No, I don't think it's going to.

I don't believe that,

at least not for a long time.

I think that the head coaches are still going to have a lot more influence over who's on their team and have final say and things like that for quite a while.

But I think a lot of the considerations that NFL teams or professional teams deal with are now coming into play.

They need to basically have the same level of disciplines, understand how they want to build a team, and sort of work this top-down approach in terms of we may not know what players at other schools are making at a certain position, but we know what we have to spend theoretically.

And from there, we're going to figure out what we prioritize.

We're going to be able to,

through walking through at least some level of an exercise and over time,

come up with some disciplines, lanes,

walk away points to an extent.

So

when you actually look at your roster, it's not just like all situational, like, hey, these were the first, you know, 20 players who took our offer and we've disproportionately spent on this position.

And oh my God, look at where, how bad we are at this other position.

Like, I think that there's, um, it's not perfect.

You know, it's a human business.

So much about football is situational and scheme and coaches.

And so all that may not work.

But I think, as someone who used to play blackjack before I worked in the NFL and other stuff, why am I not surprised?

This is just about

maximizing your chances, the better odds for every bet we make, and we just keep making good bets, making good decisions, and those stack, and over time, we're going to wind up with better results.

But if you look at the arc of this, why wouldn't college football look almost indistinguishable from the NFL org chart in the way that you are familiar with and the way you just described?

I think it's a possibility.

There's so many different ways that this can go.

You know, there's, there are, you know, private equity,

you know, enterprises floating around.

There, we don't know if players are going to be employees.

We don't know if there'll be a CBA.

Like all of these things will have a real impact on the future.

And I think, you know, looking two years, five years, 10 years, anything could happen.

You know, there's been conversations about, you know, this turning into like professional teams.

Yeah, like a minor league de facto.

Yeah, or, yeah, or, I mean, these brands are so strong in college football.

And there's, you know, these players are students, right?

They are students.

Allegedly.

Right.

So the question is, is that something that

has to be part of the equation?

Because talk about you know a lot of people from another generation maybe before they had free agency and everything talk about how players spent their whole life and now it's like you just root for the laundry

and if effectively in college sports you have these brands and jerseys and

a lot of people go to games i don't know hardly any players they're just rooting for their alma mater so you know could you have a professional league, professional players, but wearing a college logo, brand colors.

Like, I have no idea.

You could sit here and, you know, come up with a million different things.

But I think one of those paths, perhaps you start to think about, yeah, as coaches maybe have less on their plate or become more specialized, and there is so much to do.

Do you have a general manager who is the roster builder?

And then you have a coach who's overseeing and you have a lot of the same balance as you do in the NFL.

That's not a model I'm selling to any schools because I think I'm going to be shown the door and laughed out.

And I don't think I'll have a single coach who will want to deal with me.

I'll be toxic.

I haven't necessarily said that aloud yet, but it has occurred to me that you're trying to partner with schools to advise them in the present tense.

And the people who are signing off on those deals are the people who may, in fact, have a very different job and job security in 10 years versus

right now.

I think that's true, but I think,

and that's fine because I know that there's going to be coaches or schools who are resistant to change.

And also you, just for the record here, you, Jake Rosenberg, are not responsible for the direction this market is flowing.

Oh, yeah.

It's a matter of like, I have no.

Do you want to get on board now or like delay to it?

No, and I don't have like, and that's the thing.

Hopefully people would say this about me that know me, that have dealt with me.

I'm not preachy.

I don't have like a model that I'm trying to sell them and say, this is the right way to do it.

And either it's my way or the highway.

Like that's nothing like what I'm doing.

What I'm doing, though, is I have a certain experience set, you know, football and then, and otherwise.

And I've seen how it's done at a high level in the NFL, at our, at our club, certainly, and, you know, every coach and every, you do it a lot of different ways.

I want the Eagles guy.

If I'm, I mean, this is just me now as

thank you.

But for real, I want the magician.

I want the person who has sought out every data-driven edge that I am not at all interested in deciphering based on the 400-plus pages of the CBA.

I want whoever that psychopath is.

Well,

so you just call me a psychopath?

I mean,

I think that when it, you know, just coming back to the original question,

people's job security and everything.

I think job security is about production.

And this is a production-based business.

Your job is only going to be so cool and cush

as long as you're winning.

And I believe to my heart that what I am selling or, you know, the value that I am bringing will more closely help, you know, it will lead to them winning.

I do believe that.

And so

not for everybody.

I'm good.

I've always been that way.

I'm good like that.

All right, so near the end here, what I want to do is be very clear about what it is that I personally have found out today, which is that the old school idea of the head coach in college football, this all-powerful boss in charge of everything, is doomed.

Destined for the endangered species list.

And Jake has been noticeably reluctant to make so grandiose a declaration, given his aforementioned client relations considerations.

But I just need to point out for you that in the NFL, the number of head coaches who also serve as general manager

is zero.

And that extinction happened in January of this year.

Ranking news into sports center busy news cycles of Septogenarian coaching great.

greats.

72-year-old Nick Sabin retired yesterday, 72-year-old Pete Carroll out in Seattle.

And just now, the news that Bill Belichick, who turned 72 in April, is parting ways with the Patriots after 24 seasons in Foxborough, the sixth Super Bowl.

Titles in all that, let's bring in Adam Shepard, the man who works.

Yes, Bill Belichick, the man Jake Eagles defeated in that 2018 Super Bowl,

retired the day after his good friend Nick Sabin did the same.

The GOAT, reportedly, had been offered zero opportunities anywhere to be both a head coach and the GM.

But there is one more obstacle, one more idea slowing the evolution and the rise of the college sports general manager that is worth highlighting here before we say goodbye to Jake.

And it happens to be the very idea that Jake really did master as the Eagles VP of football administration.

Of course, we have to get to the idea of contracts.

The idea that, oh, right, like we're still in this purgatory interstitial scene where players are students, but also getting paid and they're professionals, but also they don't have contracts.

And so at the risk of daring you to be preachy, do you believe that college ball players should, in fact, be treated as employees and sign contracts?

Wow.

i will say this

i think that for everyone's benefit the way that things are are right now because i think that there is a unenforceability of sorts on both sides yes can you explain that by the way what it's like again how how messy is it right now james

so it is it is super messy for both for both sides honestly it's messy for players it's messy for schools in the sense that the timing and the way that this all goes and through the collectives, players are able to receive money,

but there really is no enforceability from the school side that they're getting value for that.

So, you know, if a player makes a business decision at some point during the season, you know, and says, I'm done because I'm going to get ready for the draft, there's no CBA that governs like how that money is going to get clawed back or anything like that.

And then I'd say to the other side,

there's stories of players having, you know, agreements to come to a school for a certain price and it's not met.

And

what's their recourse?

There's no like, you know, grievance process through the CBA to file.

There's no standardized contract.

From the world of college football, this might be the biggest story.

If you haven't heard it, I'm going to explain it to you because I think it could be the beginning of an entirely new normal for all of us who follow sports.

UNLV quarterback Matthew Sluka has decided to sit out the rest of this season season because of a dispute over a $100,000 NIL payment that his agent says was promised by an assistant coach over the phone in January, but never paid.

The NIL collective that works with UNLV athletes said there was no signed agreement between them and Sluka.

Breaking news here in college football.

Georgia quarterback Jaden Rashada has sued Florida head coach Billy Napier, a top gators booster and a former football staffer over a failed NIL deal.

In a lawsuit filed today, Rashada claims they defrauded him out of a promised $13.85 million in NIL.

And now the saga continues as Rashada currently is a member of the Georgia Bulldogs.

And this story has no way of going away anytime soon.

So with this breaking news, let's now...

You want to know you're getting what you paid for, and you also want to know you're getting what you negotiated for.

I think that that is obviously

things need to move in a direction where both sides have comfort with that.

Sure.

You know, I am just not going to, at this point,

wade into these

litigious waters here.

I mean, where I see litigious, I suppose.

But it feels to me, again,

I just need to say this because it is almost gaslighting somebody who's like, wait a minute.

So everything about this is professionalizing, except for the part where contracts can protect both sides of a transaction.

It just feels, by virtue of logic,

inevitable.

I think, by nature of logic, it seems inevitable.

If that's what you want to find out, then

put that on a slogan.

I would agree with that.

It seems inevitable because this is not sustainable.

There's too much money.

There's too much at stake.

So they got to fill that hole somehow.

Jake Rosenberg.

Truly a person who is living a dream job that I didn't think was a job at all.

Thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having me.

This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Meadowlark media production.

And I'll talk to you next time.

Perfect.

Jake, awesome man.

Man, I know.

If I ever, oh my God, six butt, if I ever think about going to podcasting, I'll realize it's exhausting.