Emerging from the revolutionary changes to the collegiate model is a new and critical role in athletics departments — football program general managers, or GMs. This article examines the substantial risks associated with this position and safeguards institutions can employ.

To understand the GM role — and protect against foreseeable risk — it’s helpful to first consider college football’s unique aspects and the impact of recent rule changes. Football, the driving force behind the growth of college athletics media rights and athletic department budgets, has an outsized impact on institutions that field high-level teams. Additionally, college football rosters are unusually large, including more than 100 student athletes on a team, and a sizable part of the roster turns over every year.

Given their importance and complexity, football programs have long had large recruiting staffs, often led by a director of player personnel. In addition to attending to recruiting logistics — like coordinating campus visits — recruiters are evaluators who review film and develop team recruiting boards. In college football, that’s a yearlong, 24/7 process.

Against that backdrop, add two major structural changes: the relaxation of transfer restrictions and institutional payments to student athletes. Recently relaxed transfer rules have increased year-over-year roster turnover. In addition to evaluating high schoolers, recruiters now evaluate current football student athletes so that programs are prepared for the mad dash of the........

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