‘Bama is paying its football GM a lot of money: Does UVA Football even have a GM?

Seeing a headline about Alabama giving its football general manager a record contract, I thought to inquire with UVA Athletics to see if the UVA Football program even has a general manager.

The word, per a department spokesman: no.

Courtney Morgan is the GM for Alabama Football, and the record contract that he signed will pay him $825,000 a year for the next three years.

The background on Morgan is, he followed Kalen DeBoer, the guy hired to replace Nick Saban, from Washington, to Alabama, and his job as GM is akin to a rollup of recruiting director, player-personnel director and budget director all in one person.

Morgan is being credited with assembling at ‘Bama what is now the second-ranked recruiting class for the 2025 recruiting cycle.

The work he has done already at Alabama, on the heels of what he did working under DeBoer at Washington, which played in the national championship game last season, got Morgan a look-see from Southern Cal, prompting the new contract – Morgan had been working on a $500,000-per-year deal before Alabama ripped that contract up to be able to give him more cash.

For context on how his $825,000-a-year to be the football GM relates: UVA’s athletics director, Carla Williams, is currently under contract with a salary at $1.09 million per year.

That’s to run the entire athletics department at UVA, which has more than 750 student-athletes competing in 27 varsity sports.

This we need us a college football GM trend is still nascent, but more schools are seeing the value to having one person overseeing the increasingly complicated player-acquisition part of the football business.

It wasn’t that long ago that your recruiting coordinator only had to oversee what the assistant coaches were doing to recruit the high schools in their recruiting regions, but now with the transfer portal making everybody on every roster a free agent every year, and the advent of NIL bringing money into the equation, there’s an obvious need for someone in an NFL general manager-type role to make it all make sense.

Count this one, then, as another area where UVA Athletics is behind its peers.

Chris Graham: Should UVA Football hire a GM?