There were a lot of things that Pat Stewart expected to be a little behind the NFL when he first arrived at Nebraska, about two weeks ago, after leaving a job as an NFL pro scouting director to become the storied midwestern program’s first general manager. But there was one particular thing that really wasn’t, truth be told, that caught him by surprise.
The players.
Stewart, as you’d expect, was thinking he’d dive into high school tape and have to adjust his eyes to something that might not even look like the same sport he was evaluating over his 17 years working in NFL personnel departments. Instead, as he dove into one high-end, defensive front-seven prospect out of Texas, and then another, he was actually … impressed.
“They’re using their hands at the point of attack. And it was like, Wow, it was really high level stuff, really impressive,” Stewart says. “That kind of blew me away, because I thought it was going to be a bunch of bad high school football, right? But you can tell there’s a lot of really good players that are coming up, entering college, who are already trained at a high level, have high-quality coaching. That, to me, has been the most fun thing about this so far.
“There’s probably a little bit of, Ah, I gotta watch all this high school tape now. But these are all really good players. Like, at the end of the day, football is football.”
These are different times in America’s game, and the presence of folks like Stewart in major college football is vivid evidence of that. High school players are more prepared than ever before. College players are getting paid. The NFL, as a result, is impacted—sometimes for the better and sometimes the worse—at a lot of different levels.
And this time of year, draft season, is when we’re seeing it most. NFL scouting departments are being poached for evaluators like Stewart, as the college game adapts to a landscape that’s being irreversibly changed. That landscape is now producing a very different field of prospects than the NFL’s been used to scouting.
These changes didn’t happen overnight.
But they sure have kicked into overdrive over the past half-decade, which makes this as good a time as any to examine where it’s being felt at the sport’s highest level.
The MMQB’s back on this Monday morning. And while the veteran market may be slowing a little, we’ve got you covered in the takeaways with …
• The Aaron Rodgers waiting game.
• The Kirk Cousins waiting game?
• More on Travis Hunter’s place in the pros.
• An examination of the Cincinnati Bengals’ receiver contracts.
And a whole lot more. But we’re starting with a little bit of a different story this morning, and a look at this game of ours from more of a 30,000-foot view.
Stewart’s not alone. Former Carolina Panthers and Washington Commanders coach Ron Rivera was hired as GM at his alma mater, Cal. Jim Nagy left a job as executive director of the Senior Bowl to become Oklahoma’s GM. Former Atlanta Falcons cap czar Nick Polk left a good job at a leading NFL agency, Athletes First, to be Florida’s new GM. Detroit Lions personnel man Mike Martin bolted to become Notre Dame’s first GM. Bill Belichick brought former Cleveland Browns GM Mike Lombardi with him to North Carolina. And former Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck is Stanford’s new GM.
These guys have varying strengths. But all are being hired for similar reasons.
With the introduction of NIL and, soon, the beginning of players being paid directly by their schools, and the explosion of the transfer portal, college football’s challenges are now, well, a lot like the NFL’s. So, big college programs are dipping into pro football to find people to help them navigate what’s ahead.
In Rivera’s case, it came about organically. Taking last year off, he was looking ahead to 2025 with the idea that he’d either become a head coach again or go into a role with an NFL team where he’d help mentor a younger head coach. To that end, he did wind up interviewing for head coaching jobs with the New York Jets, Las Vegas Raiders and Chicago Bears, and an assistant head coaching spot with the Jacksonville Jaguars, where he’d have worked with Liam Coen.
Along the way, in December, he started talking to the Cal chancellor Rich Lyons—who was digging for information on how to blaze a trail through such an uncertain future, and what the Bears should look for in a GM. Then, the conversation turned.
“And then, after talking with him a few times about it,” Rivera recounts, “he asked, Would you consider it?”
Rivera said he wanted to go through the NFL’s hiring cycle first before making any sort of decision. But as he thought about it, the idea appealed to him.
“It’s the opportunity to go home,” he says. “I mean, I might have been able to work with and mentor an NFL coach. Well, there’s an opportunity to work with and mentor a college coach who I’ve gotten to know over the years, and I really like a lot. And I’d love to see if I can help Justin Wilcox out.”
So that’s what he’ll do now. And that, really, is where the idea for these jobs start.
The head coach has always been king in college football, and that’s not going to change with these “new” guys coming into that level of the sport.
In NFL parlance, the model that’s starting to emerge now is a little more like what you might see with the San Francisco 49ers under Kyle Shanahan or Los Angeles Rams under Sean McVay, or now Washington Commanders under Dan Quinn or the Denver Broncos under Sean Payton, where the head coach sets the tone for the whole building, but has a sturdy infrastructure with experienced folks around him so he doesn’t have to do it all.
To that end, Nagy—who scouted for the New England Patriots, Seattle Seahawks and Kansas City Chiefs before running the Senior Bowl—has his new office right across the hall from Oklahoma coach Brent Venables’s space in Norman. It’s intentional, because if Nagy’s time working in the NFL scouting world showed him anything, it was that the GM-coach relationship was the most important one in the building.
“We’re coming in here to help these coaches,” Nagy says. “That’s been my biggest messaging; we’re here to help. We’re here to help OU compete for championships every year. What we do on the scouting side is going to be Coach Venables’s vision, both on the field, in what we look for in certain positions on the field, and then the types of people he wants to bring in the program. And it’s our job as a scouting staff to identify the right guys, and the coaches play a role in that, in recruiting.
“If they get on the road in recruiting and he doesn’t fit what coach Venables wants in the program, then we need to pull off. We need to be disciplined on that. To me, that’s huge.”
At the same time, just like in the NFL, the job of a college coach has simply gotten too big for one guy to run the whole show anymore. In the pros, that’s led to the disappearance of the czar-of-everything coach, like what Andy Reid was with the Philadelphia Eagles (and hasn’t been nearly as much in Kansas City) or Belichick was in New England. In college football, it’s led the big programs to go get guys such as Nagy from the pros.
No one has a better background on all this than Mark Pantoni, who, almost accidentally, became one of the pioneering college football personnel men 20 years ago. Deciding to ditch an ambition to go to medical school after graduating undergrad from Florida, Pantoni enrolled in a one-year master’s program in kinesiology at UF in 2005, and took a job working in the football program under director of football operations Bob LaCivita.
He’d show up at 6:30 a.m. every morning. His first task was to hand address 500 envelopes for recruits.
“Back then,” he says, “everything was done by snail mail. There was no social media.”
After a year of assisting the football program on all the work no one wanted to do, opportunity arose for Pantoni when LaCivita bolted for Florida State after the Gators’ 2006 national title. LaCivita’s job was, essentially, to get eyes on recruits’ film and help the coaches, who did the evaluations, grade players. UF coach Urban Meyer replaced LaCivita with a high school football coach who quickly learned he liked to coach a whole lot more than he liked to evaluate—and took Pantoni under his wing, and taught him how to evaluate tape, so he could delegate that part of his job.
Pantoni would lock himself in a room and work through as much film as he could to try to train his eye for talent. Soon, Meyer caught wind of his development, bringing him into meetings on players with a star-studded coaching staff. In one case, Pantoni wasn’t really high on a high school lineman that line coach Steve Addazio loved.
“It was really healthy debate, Steve being a hot-blooded Italian and myself being Italian,” Pantoni says now. “Urban knew what he was doing, creating chaos.”
The result of that chaos: Pantoni wound up being right (“I still give Steve s--- about it”) and on his way. By the Gators’ 2008 season, during which they’d win a second national title in three years, Pantoni was running what was still, by today’s standards, a bare-bones personnel operation.
He followed Meyer to Ohio State in 2012 and, even then, upon arrival in Columbus, he was given just one staff hire. A couple of years later, it started to grow. Over the past five years, going back to the COVID-19 season, it’s exploded.
The pandemic, of course, led to the lid coming off the long-taboo subject of paying players and swung the doors to a nonstop stream of players transferring from school to school.
To that end, in 2021, now working for Ryan Day, Pantoni hired Ryan Cavanaugh, a former Houston Texans scout let go after Bill O’Brien and his staff were fired, to basically oversee transfer portal scouting. He sold it to Cavanaugh as “the Saban rehab”—referencing Nick Saban’s propensity for hiring ex-head coaches as analysts to get their careers restarted—and, sure enough, Cavanaugh spent the year at OSU, then went to the Bears.
He also became essential in that year, so in 2022, Pantoni hired former 49ers scout Billy Homer, who’d been at Florida under Dan Mullen, to replace him. Homer’s still there, and now oversees an ever-growing portal operation for the reigning national champion Buckeyes.
All this means that, in some ways, Pantoni would agree that college football needs to mimic the NFL. Last summer, on vacation, he read Crunching Numbers, a book by Jason Fitzgerald and Vijay Natarajan on the salary cap, to further familiarize himself with that end of the personnel game, for some of the same reasons he hired Cavanaugh to help with the portal.
But in others, no one really knows what they’re preparing for.
On April 7, there’s a hearing to approve a House settlement that orders $2.8 billion in backpay for college athletes who played from 2016 to ’24 and mandates that colleges give players a percentage of the revenue directly, rather than just funneling it through name, image and likeness payments, which often are thinly-veiled de facto salaries from donors.
That’ll change the game, like the 2021 NIL rulings did and, because the NCAA got in front of none of this ahead of time, there remains a Wild West feel to the future.
“The application of it really doesn’t exist in college yet, because there is no cap yet, and there is no structure,” Pantoni says. “So the valuation process you have to determine based on the market. But, I mean, the market is so out of whack, there is no semblance of NFL now. I mean, they can think there is. But just doing this for a few years now, there’s not. …
“You can say all you want, Hey, you’re gonna put 5% of your total value in the quarterback room or whatever. That doesn’t work. The market is too out of whack. Like, you’re not going to turn down a great player because, Oh, well, we’re at 5% of our budget.”
So the idea has to be to prepare as if that’s coming, and be ready even if it’s not.
The result has been more college programs building out their personnel departments in the image of NFL personnel departments. It’s why the more advanced college programs—such as Ohio State, Alabama and Miami (which was one of the first to go down this road, hiring Alonzo Highsmith away from the Seahawks three years ago)—are getting poached for personnel people. And it’s why college football programs keep looking to the pros for help.
What it’s getting to is a skeleton version of an NFL front office, with the general manager overseeing a high school scouting director, portal scouting director and NIL manager, which mirror the college scouting director, pro scouting director and cap czar spots in the pros.
Both Nagy and Stewart say their plan, over time, is to build their departments out like that, though not on the scale of the vast operations the NFL teams have.
“We’re going to evaluate what we have and kind of fill in the gaps as needed,” Stewart says. “I’m not going to say we’re going to go hire 13 people right away because that’s the other side of this—scouting departments are huge, and there’s a lot of infrastructure that is in the NFL that you can’t just hire over one hiring cycle in college. It’s a huge undertaking. So I think we’ll build it as we go and make it as competitive as possible.”
That starts, for Stewart, with organizing and creating a scouting system for Matt Rhule, who he started his career with at Western Carolina, and spent three years with the Carolina Panthers.
Similarly, Nagy went in and found that, really, college football had a lot of catching up to do, just in formalizing a process where scouts would thin the herd of players coaches had to look at—so they wouldn’t waste their time with guys who wouldn’t be fits—and then ask for the coaches to write reports on a specific pool of players.
“Coaches crave that. They want structure. They want guidance,” Nagy says. “One of the biggest things I’ve heard over the years, with my time at the Senior Bowl, and I talk to a lot of coaches, they’re watching too many guys at their respective programs that aren’t good enough to play at their programs. So just a better filtering system so we’re not wasting their time. Time is everything for these college coaches. They’ve got so much on their plate.”
Which, ultimately, leads to the financial piece of this.
Nagy’s plan is to have a portal director and a high school scouting director, and handle the money management part of it himself. “I will be the cap guy,” he jokes. And that, for sure, will be an important role to hold.
For 17 seasons, Polk ran the Atlanta Falcons’ salary cap.
So in a way, Florida, once at the head of the spear of all this, is now hiring its own cap guy to run the whole thing, which, again, is a sign of how important the NIL and payment piece will be to all of this going forward. And a huge part of that comes down to how these big programs allocate their resources—where the money isn’t endless, even if it has, in the past, seemed like it was.
“It’s putting the valuation on the evaluation,” Polk says. “That’s going to be a very big part of it. But the biggest difference in that, from the NFL, is that until the House settlement goes through, there’s going to be a lot of unknown. In the NFL, you have rules and guidelines for everything. Here, we’re literally reacting to what’s happening every other day.”
And that comes back to the reality facing college programs.
The days when one person could lord over everything are over.
The coach, to be sure, is still very much in charge. But as his job has become bigger and bigger over the years, and covered more areas, he’s had to pull away from what the core of that job has always been—actually coaching football.
It’s why last year you started to see moves that seemed, at best, to be lateral from guys in prominent jobs. Chip Kelly left his post as UCLA’s head coach to become Day’s offensive coordinator at Ohio State. Jeff Hafley left a job as Boston College’s head coach to become the Green Bay Packers’ defensive coordinator. In these cases, for the coaches, it was about the desire to focus on the work they got into coaching for.
Building out these personnel departments, the hope is, will allow college coaches to find more balance and be less caught up in the weeds of tasks outside what they were actually hired to do.
“It has become a much larger job for anyone who is in it,” Polk says. “It’s because of the transfer portal, NIL, revenue sharing—none of that was there a couple years ago. The amount of work on anyone running these programs has doubled, if not more than that, from when they started.”
As a result, the ruptures in the old college system have been felt, in a big way, in the pros.
There are plenty of obvious differences that all this change has created in the players who are now making it to the NFL.
Last year, six quarterbacks were drafted in the first round and four of them had transferred to the schools they finished with. The presumptive top three quarterbacks in this year’s class—Miami’s Cam Ward, Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders and Ole Miss’s Jaxson Dart—are also all transfers (Ward actually transferred twice).
Another potential top-100 pick at quarterback spent seven years in college at three schools and, in going to Oregon (where he backed up Justin Herbert for two years), Texas Tech and Louisville, Tyler Shough earned four degrees. He’ll turn 26 in the first month of his rookie season.
And while in some cases, there’s definitely a negative connotation to all this movement, there’s plenty of positive, too.
“One thing taken from all this is, O.K., here’s a guy who’s played in like three different systems in four years, because he’s transferred twice,” says Stewart, who spent 17 years as an NFL scout. “And that, to me, is a more realistic transition to the NFL, where you’re gonna have to come in and learn a new system quickly and get up to speed. It tests guys’ aptitude to learn an offense or a defense better than previously, where a guy got into a system, he redshirted, and then by his junior year, he was good to go.
“Well, that took him three years to get to that point. Now, guys have to get into a program and acclimate themselves right away. It’s a more direct translation to what we do in the NFL.”
There’s also less projection on how a kid is going to handle having money for the first time.
In the past, NFL teams would have to dig into a player’s background, and his character, and make an educated guess on whether he’d be as hungry and driven once he had the comfort of financial stability. In today’s environment, there are actually cases where a kid might be taking a pay cut going from college to the pros.
“It was, What are these guys gonna do with more time on their hands and more money in their pockets?” Nagy says. “Because of NIL, if teams are connecting with the right people in these college buildings, they can drill down on that and really identify that. People ask, What are the benefits and pitfalls of NIL? I think a real benefit for the NFL has been being able to figure out that piece. So that’s one thing I’ve noticed—these guys are more self-sufficient, they need less hand-holding, they’re used to being responsible in a lot more areas.”
And you can take that to another level, where it’s allowed for more players to make better decisions on their future, with money being a little less of a factor.
It happens when, for example, a kid whose family may be in dire financial straits no longer feels the need to declare for the draft at the first opportunity—because now he can make money in college to support his loved ones. As a result, rather than making what could be a shaky football decision and leaving school as a raw potential late-round pick or undrafted free agent a year too early, that kid can now stay and perhaps play his way into the middle rounds.
The end result of that, in some cases, has been that kid getting a degree, his college program getting another year or two out of him and the NFL getting a more finished prospect.
It works, too, on the front end of the college game, where now football has a better chance of keeping top athletes at the sport, since the sport is no longer telling them that they have to wait until they’re 21 or 22 to make money playing—something baseball, basketball and hockey have never done.
“Some of these guys decide early on in life: Am I gonna play basketball? Am I gonna play baseball? Am I gonna play football?” says Stewart, whose dad, Court, was a high school football coach in Ohio. “Early on, they probably said, Well, if I really want to make money out of high school, I gotta go play minor league baseball. Now, they have the option to come to college football and make a little bit of money.
“And I think that’s always going to be a plus for us, having the best available talent.”
In turn, this is working for scouts, too.
Traditionally paid far less than coaches, college programs’ abilities to get into or near seven-figures in paying these guys has a shot to change how NFL teams pay their front-office folks in a very significant way. Which is another example of how there’s a lot more good that promises to come from all these changes than bad.
Rivera walks past Yogurt Park, a dessert spot on the Cal campus, where he and his wife, Stephanie, first met. The area has changed a lot since Rivera was a linebacker in Berkeley in the 1980s, but there are still plenty of sights like that one that bring him back.
As he said, that was part of the appeal in taking the job as the GM at his alma mater.
But this isn’t just a reunion or a homecoming dance for him. Yes, he sees the good that all this change can do for the sport he loves, and that he’s made his life’s work.
He also sees that, for everyone, there’s still a long way to go.
“There’s no structure,” Rivera says. “That’s the first thing that’s obvious. I mean, they give you a manual, and the NCAA says, O.K., follow the rules. These are the rules. You got to follow them. Well, you got to interpret them first. And that’s what we’ve got to be aware of, is how are they being interpreted? Secondly—because there’s no structure, as far as NIL is concerned, on paying players—players can opt out of contracts. I mean, you sign a contract, and they can opt out by going into the portal, and it’s like, Players aren’t learning what a contract’s about.
“When you put your name on, you sign the dotted lines. In the NFL, you’re tied in …”
And just as Rivera gets himself going, he stops, and goes back to the main thing.
“Somewhere along the line,” he says, “there’s got to be some structure.”
Maybe the NFL can give college football that. And maybe, just maybe, that’ll lead to more of the sort of evolution that’s clearly happening fast at all levels of the sport, and is even evident on the tape of a few high school prospects out of Texas.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as How College Football Programs Are Looking More Like NFL Teams.