Catching Georgia
Jaden Rashada, recruiting and strategic vision

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If you asked just about anyone who follows college football closely why Georgia is now back-to-back College Football Playoff champions, and you’ll likely get one answer: recruiting.

Yes, Kirby Smart motivates his teams and was a great defensive coordinator at Alabama, but when you boil down college football to its essence at the very, very top, winning comes down to the quality of the players on the roster. That’s a lesson that Florida fans have learned the hard way over the past decade as first Alabama, and now Georgia, have surpassed the Gators as the class of the SEC.

But it’s really easy to say “recruit” and just get mad when your coach or program doesn’t put up the same results as Georgia, Alabama or Ohio State. But the reality is that whether it’s money, facilities, staff or something else, every organization is going to have limitations. And it’s a very different thing to look at the limitations of your organization and then try to compete against others if they don’t have the same limitations.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and a lot of my thinking has crystallized as the wild saga of Jaden Rashada has gone on over the past week or two. How do you set up a program to succeed from a strategic perspective, so that recruiting success is an outgrowth rather than just a desire?

Here’s where I’d start to build that strategic vision.

Cash Flow versus Leverage

During this past offseason, Billy Napier was asked about getting into bidding wars when it came to NIL. His response gives us some insight into his thinking:

“I think there is some of that, but we don’t operate that way.” – Billy Napier, Florida head coach

So Napier has strategically decided not to get into bidding wars for players and wasn’t unclear about it. That begs the natural question of whether that is the right decision when you’re rebuilding a program like Florida.

I have been thinking about this topic a lot lately and had initially thought about comparing the rebuild of a big-time college football program to a start-up company, but that’s not really accurate. There are expectations associated with rebuilding a program that don’t come with a brand new entity. What that means is that any new coach taking over is really tantamount to rebuilding an established company that’s come upon hard times.

Often you’re tearing the entire staff and/or organization down to the studs and rebuilding. You’re doing it while having to go out and recruit just prior to the early signing day period. And all of that comes with expectations of what that program was able to accomplish in prior times.

But we still need to recognize that at its highest level, and even with those additional expectations, Napier is still rebuilding an organization. And the first decision any business has to make is whether it’s going to cash flow the business or borrow to get the job done. I’m not just talking money here (though it certainly applies). In some ways, I’m talking about the strategic vision, how it is communicated and whether that vision can match reality.

We can actually use Read & Reaction as an example here. I’ve built the website slowly in my spare time using funds from another job. I haven’t borrowed a cent to do what I do here. But that has slowed growth down considerably and we’re still a two-person organization. Had I taken on investors with a stated goal of becoming the most-read website associated with Gator football, I would have been fired by now and deservedly so. But I’m happy with the growth (though always welcome more) because my vision was to grow slowly using time and funds available to me.

Compare that to The Athletic. That organization was started in 2015 ( just three years before Read & Reaction), but founders Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann made a conscious decision to hire elite writing talent from major news sources to build something far reaching and with immediate credibility.

That required funding, and The Athletic raised $139 million over the years to help the organization grow.

And grow it did. As of 2022, the staff at that site numbered around 600 employees and was bringing in $65 million in revenue. Of course, it was also running with operating losses of $55 million the same year, and based on the best numbers I can find was operating around that same level of total losses from 2019-2021 as well.

In 2022, The Athletic was purchased by The New York Times for $550 million. Given the venture capital borrowed and the operating losses, it is unclear how much meat was left on the bone for Mather and Hansmann after the sale.

I suspect they’ve come out way ahead of where I will three years from now (once we’ve each had the same amount of time to grow). But even if they did, they decided to take a much riskier path than I have. Neither is right or wrong, they’re just different given the circumstances.

The reason I bring up these examples is that it leads to a question that I find really interesting: if you’re a college football coach at a program with blue-blood history, should you be willing to leverage the program (i.e. take a high-risk strategy that might crash and burn) or should you cash flow it (i.e. take a lower-risk strategy with likely lower returns)?

In my opinion, it’s pretty clear that philosophically a coach at a blue-blood program should take the leverage strategy. Let’s go over the reasoning.

1. You have three, maybe four years to succeed. Your fan base has expectations of winning even if it hasn’t happened in a long time. And cat memes (thanks Bo Pelini) only go so far to placate the masses if you get stuck at 9-4 or 10-3 seasons.
2. Most first year coaches struggle (Saban and Smart both did). Fans have to see your vision taking shape despite struggles on the field to prevent discouragement.
3. You’re a mercenary. If you do the job you’ll be lionized but if you don’t, you’ll be fired just as quickly.
4. The risk to you personally of crashing and burning is minimal (since you have a multi-year contract at $5-7 million per year). Coordinator and/or media jobs will be available to you immediately after you’re let go. You’ll get another opportunity.

You obviously don’t rise to that level in your profession by settling for a buyout after getting fired. But the reality is that you have a great parachute, still have job prospects and expectations are high. Slow builds are going to be a struggle.

Compare that to a coach hired at a school in the Sun Belt or MAC, especially one with a limited history of winning.

1. Starting a season 5-0 gets everyone excited even if it comes crashing down towards the end of the year.
2. The expectation is winning more than you lose, going to a bowl and leaving if you get them to a conference championship.
3. You’re a member of the community, rather than a mercenary. You gain standing in the program by eschewing higher-level jobs to stay with what you’ve built (until you decide to make the leap).
4. Large-scale success will be rewarded, but just maintaining positive results will build credibility.

The point is that in my view, these jobs are fundamentally different. The football side of it may be identical, but the player acquisition and fan engagement sides have different goals, which means they require different approaches as well.

At the Group of 5 school, you can afford to build slowly and value culture over talent. After all, players in the recruiting range brought into those programs turn into NFL draft picks at relatively similar rates, meaning attitude, development and projection make that a huge part of the job.

But at a blue blood school, you don’t have that luxury.

That means the strategy for NIL has to be to fundraise for 5-stars above all else. Relationships may be important, but having clarity around the NIL organization to be able to promise and deliver to players the same financial windfall they’d get elsewhere. Keeping those promises is just as important as playing time and a clear path to the NFL. It means skirting rules that don’t make a whole lot of sense or understanding that pay-for-play may technically be against the rules, but the NCAA isn’t going to enforce those rules anyway. Essentially, it means riding right on the edge of what is acceptable (or even over) instead of being completely within the letter of the rules.

You may not want to act that way. That’s fine. But I don’t think it’s going to get you very far sticking to your ethical standards in a sport that has been defined by back-room deals for decades. And if recruiting is the way to win, you have to do what is necessary to bring in the best recruits.

Information Asymmetry

Reports from The Athletic and others have detailed a deal for Rashada that is somewhere in the neighborhood of $13 million. What those reports don’t detail the terms of that deal. Is it $13 million upfront? Is it  backloaded with $500,000 payments in years one and two and then $6 million payments in years three and four?

Without that information, it’s virtually impossible to say whether a player’s deal is “worth it” because the second option might give you a two year trial run with the ability to encouraged a transfer prior to year three. It’s also impossible to say whether one deal is worth more than another.

This used to be a problem when buying a car until the company Edmunds was founded in 1966 “for the purpose of publishing new and used automotive pricing guides to assist automobile buyers.”

The concept was simple: sellers of cars knew way more about their pricing than buyers did, meaning there was an information asymmetry that advantaged the seller. Edmunds brought value by helping somewhat relieve that information asymmetry.

But in 1995, Edmunds.com was born as the first automotive information website. Now, all you needed was an AOL account and a phone line (yes, I’m dating myself) before you went to a dealer or bought a car privately to know what it was worth. That has expanded to CarFax reports, no-haggle dealers and Autotrader at this point, but the fundamental tipping point was that the seller of the car no longer had way more information than the buyer.

The same holds true in recruiting.

NIL can be an opportunity for organizations that use the information that is made public (and much of it that is not made public) to understand what the market forces are for not just individual players, but also for specific positions with in the team.

You couldn’t do that in the past. Previously, you had bag men running cash to players or their parents. You had car dealerships granting “jobs” to players who either wouldn’t show up but still would get paid or all of a sudden were driving really nice cars. And you had players who couldn’t talk about what they got (or at least shouldn’t have) because that would have put their eligibility at risk.

That has changed now that NIL payments are allowed. There are some semantics about whether it is allowed as an inducement for pay-for-play, but we all know that line is gray at best, and likely completely non-existent. That means players can talk, dollar figures are above board, and losing out on a recruit isn’t a zero-sum game if you can extract from him exactly what it took to secure his commitment.

Essentially, you’re running a market blueprinting analysis on the college football talent market. For example, did Jimbo Fisher (and associated NIL players) really buy his way to the best recruiting class ever in 2022? Nick Saban called him out on it, and given Fisher’s visceral reaction, you can be assured that money was involved. That’s a data point.

Can you confirm the details in the deal a 5-star recruit received where the contract was leaked to The Athletic?  Not only does it have a number included ($8 million) but also details how the deal is structured ($350k upfront with escalating monthly payments). That’s another data point.

The more information you have as a staff and the more data you can gather, the better off you’re going to be. Then there isn’t any questioning of whether a player is “worth it”. You know the market price for a player with a given ranking at a given position and you can make a choice based on your budgetary restrictions.

But if you’re going into all of this blind, it’s going to paralyze any and all decision-making.

Organizational Structure

Bud Davis put out this tweet in the middle of the Rashada saga that I thought was interesting:

How to Fix UF NIL

▫️Invest in full-time staff
▫️Hire a CEO w/ development experience and/or booster connections
▫️Let them run fundraising
▫️Don't try to be a message board or insider (be the opposite actually)
▫️Hire an analytics consulting firm to help allocate resources

— Joshua "Bud" Davis, PhD (@JBudDavis) December 20, 2022

I agree with much of it, but the one bullet point that really got my attention was the last one detailing the hiring of an analytics consulting firm for resource allocation. Billy Napier has hired an army of folks to help him rebuild Florida, but he’s a football coach. It makes sense that if he has a finite number of resources, he’s going to emphasize spending them on football people, even on the recruiting side of the organization.

Vanderbilt actually wrestled with this problem when they hired Clark Lea away from Notre Dame. In addition to Lea, they also hired Barton Simmons as General Manager, Director of Personnel. Simmons had spent decades with Rivals and 247Sports after finishing up his football career at Yale. I’m not entirely sure what Simmons’ responsibilities are at Vanderbilt, but I find it fascinating that Vanderbilt has now done what professional sports organizations do: separate the roster building positions from the coaching positions.

The logic of that sort of move seems obvious. When a coach gets on the hot seat, he’s going to make impulsive, win-now decisions that are bad for the organization in the long-term. That’s different than deciding to gain an edge by leveraging as described above because that decision is strategic, whereas a coach worried about getting fired is responding emotionally.

Think about Bill O’Brien when he was coaching the Houston Texans. He traded receiver DeAndre Hopkins for running back David Johnson and actually gave the Browns a second-round pick to eat Brock Osweiler’s salary. O’Brien the coach was pretty good (52-48, 4 division titles in 7 years). O’Brien the GM while being O’Brien the coach was a disaster.

We’ve seen this separation of powers strategy work over-and-over in other sports.

The Oakland A’s hired Billy Beane and have been way more relevant than fair given its miniscule payroll. The Red Sox and Cubs both hired Theo Epstein to run operations and broke curses that were either near or more than a century old.

Daryl Morey took over the Houston Rockets and built them into a championship contender around a trade for James Harden. Morey and others of his ilk were the Godfathers of what Steph Curry was able to perfect in Oakland and the three-point revolution.

This is more difficult to do in football because the 11 players are so intertwined. A quarterback who gets sacked because his left tackle is a turnstile may actually be a good player with good offensive line play. A left tackle who struggles in a zone blocking scheme might be great in a gap scheme.

But as decision-making gets driven more and more by analytics, having people who understand the numbers and can translate those numbers into clearly communicatable actions that help recruiting and on-field decision-making becomes critical.

That’s a big part of what makes Bill Belichick so special as both the GM and head coach of the Patriots. But Belichick – perhaps more than others – doesn’t have to worry about job security. That has allowed him to trade down in the draft in a way that no coach in win-now mode would ever do.

This makes me wonder whether folks like Urban Meyer, Nick Saban, Dabo Swinney and Kirby Smart are really superior football coaches (they may be). Or are they just able to separate the roster building portion of their jobs from the football coaching portion of their jobs more successfully than others?

Prior to NIL, you could argue (unconvincingly to me, but you could make the argument) that college football was a football-first business. You can’t do that anymore.

With the introduction of real money, and the rapid inflation that we’re seeing across the spectrum, coaches no longer have the time nor the expertise to build their rosters. Roster construction is a 12-month around the clock job in the NFL. I suspect it’s time to have it be the same in College Football as well.

Takeaway

These are all high-level strategies for roster building, but none of them mean very much without proper and repeated communication. For any successful organization, the strategic vision must be crystal clear because without definition and communication of the overall organizational strategy, you do two things.

First, people in the organization can’t make decisions because they don’t know whether their decisions align with the strategy of the organization. Instead of having everyone moving in lockstep, folks hold back making decisions because they don’t know whether they will be viewed as the right ones. Communication suffers as well because nobody wants to admit that they don’t know, and so they start holding back ideas that would make things better because they can’t define how those ideas fit within the strategic vision.

But second and perhaps more importantly, in an organization without clear strategic vision, trust suffers. This is true both internally and externally. Fundamentally, this is because every single person that you meet, work with or interact with has an expectation. When strategic vision is unclear, one person has an expectation different than another person even though they both have the same fundamental goals in mind. That definitionally means that regardless of what actually happens, reality will not meet expectations, and people will get frustrated.

Need an example? When Billy Napier got up and told us during his introductory press conference that “this is a talent acquisition business”, I took that to mean that he had a strategic vision of bringing in 5-star recruits no matter the cost. Given the feedback I get when I criticize this 2023 bump class, other folks believe a top-10 class is more than enough (though he’s not even accomplishing that anymore).

But more than that, he promised Florida wouldn’t get into a bidding war for players publicly, yet apparently folks in the NIL sphere associated with Florida got into a bidding war when it came to Rashada. That’s the reason for the vitriol around the this particular saga.

It was assumed by most that the Gators flipped Rashada because of an NIL deal. The expectation was that the entities agreeing to the deal had the structure in place to fund and seal the deal. From a high-level strategic perspective, Florida has to have a functioning NIL program that can ensure that commits who sign national letters of intent make their way onto the field.

That apparently is not the case. We can talk about who is to blame for that happening, but the key to me is that it isn’t happening at any other program in the country. That includes programs that are bringing in players with much better profiles than Rashada.

That suggests an organizational misalignment, one that starts with communicating that talent is key but that bidding is not part of the strategy for bringing recruits in, but then allowing outside entities to apparently put in high-level bids to secure talent.

I couldn’t bring myself to watch Kirby Smart’s postgame press conference after the annihilation of TCU, but I can almost guarantee that he spoke of the quality of the players that he has on the roster, but also about the way that everyone bought in and was moving in the same direction.

Florida has a problem right now that has nothing to do with on-field performance. Instead, the problem is a lack of clarity around the strategic vision of the organization that can be clearly communicated to staff, boosters, and the fans. The responsibility for casting that vision is in the job description of both the head coach and the athletic director.

Florida fans aren’t stingy. If you can cast a compelling strategic vision, they’ll fund the operation. But when there isn’t clear communication about exactly what you need from them to succeed and exactly what you plan to do with what you’re asking of them, then inevitably there will be a gap between expectations and reality.

You can talk about funds or relationships or NIL all you want. You can talk about fourth down decisions or the last four minutes of the first half and the first four of the second. You can talk about penalties and discipline and turnovers. But those things are downstream from a strategic vision about how you’re going to become who and what you want to be.

And until that gets clearly communicated to everyone critical to execution of that vision, it’s going to continue to be rough sledding for the Gators.