CFB is a business today.
All businesses are increasingly complex to run. Data and IT make it easier for your competition to improve themselves and assess and plan for you. If you don't follow suit, you're going into a fight with one hand tied behind your back.
There are probably a few ways to organize a program structurally, but the principles shouldn't really vary. First, map out your outputs, then your processes and systems required to generate them. Assess your capabilities. Identify resource and capability gaps.
Outputs: wins, obviously. But how?
- Culture: there's a lot more understood about this than there was a generation ago - a good leader has to understand culture and how to build and maintain it and what threatens it
- Talent identification, evaluations, acquisition and retention (leverages data, systems and processes)
- Talent development: S&C, nutrition, skill development, football IQ and experience development (leverages data, systems and processes)
- Roster management: planning and anticipating needs, considering all sources of talent (not just HS recruiting), retaining kids you want to retain
- Coaching: staff (and support team) assembly, cohesion, planning, schemes, practices, player-personnel decisions, game plans, play calling (all impacted by data, systems, processes)
- Analytics: QA, film breakdown of opponents, of your own kids and practices, of recruits (all about data, systems and processes)
Beyond and in support of the above, the program needs IT capabilities -- systems and skilled people to operate them. It also has to do branding/marketing and PR, community relations, alumni relations, medical support, academic support, development (donations), staff management (HR), compliance, scheduling, logistics and finance (FP&A at a minimum). It has to host official visits, research character and eligibility on prospects, Do this stuff poorly and you waste time and effort or lose effectiveness. So not exciting but impactful to get it right, or at least not wrong. And I don't care how much money a program has. It's easy to spend it poorly. Just look at governments around the world.
And all these functions need to be managed. They're overseen by people. They need direction and leadership and follow-up. Asking a coach to also oversee all this makes no sense. NFL teams have front officers, player personnel departments, support organizations, etc. The coach coaches. He's not the owner or President or GM. College coaches are generally less talented than NFL head coaches, and they have bigger teams, greater turnover of talent, less experienced players and less patient fans in many instances.
A good corporation builds redundancy into its planning. It has a talent development plan and a succession plan and a break glass in case of emergency plan. There's really no excuse for an institution to view a major CFB program differently. The HC doesn't own the program or its assets. He's a CEO, but the infrastructure and systems belong to the company, not him. He runs them, and in some cases is a client. In this case, the company is really the AD, which owns the program. It has a stake in all these decisions and processes. It needs to understand them so it can carry on if a coach departs.
Having good infrastructure doesn't ensure success. A bad coach or bad evals or bad luck can lead to losses. Being prepared doesn't guarantee success, but it's always table stakes for success. Not being prepared may not guarantee failure, either -- but it sure increases the chances of it.
None of this is particularly hard, or expensive. Compared to the cost of buy-outs and new coaches, you could massively upgrade the capabilities of the program in a lasting way for probably a few million dollars a year. You'd spend it on IT systems, data and analytics capabilities, and a couple good managers to clear the deck for the coaches to focus on their highest and best uses, which is coaching, not supervising back office functions.
