I emailed the media-relations folks at UVA Athletics on Aug. 20, 2024, to ask if there was “someone who would be considered akin to a general manager” for the UVA Football program.
The answer: no.
Turns out, they were working on it.
“We didn’t want to be the first school to jump out there and just start hiring people, you know, so we took our time to really review and scan the entire landscape and recognize the fact that a lot of the skill sets that are needed, and we’ve got people here that have those skill sets,” Athletics Director Carla Williams said on the second installment of the “Inside Virginia Athletics” podcast, which dropped last week.
ICYMI
Virginia wouldn’t have been the first school with a football GM – what had prompted me to ask was a news report about Alabama hiring a general manager to work with its new football coach, Kalen DeBoer, which turned out to be the tip of the iceberg in terms of Power 4 schools moving over the past several months to hire GMs for their football and men’s basketball programs.
UVA Athletics named Tyler Jones, who was already working in the department as an associate athletics director, to be the general manager for football, in addition to serving as GM for baseball and women’s basketball, last week.
I would imagine that football, with a $33.0 million operating budget in the 2023-2024 academic sports year, would be the top priority for Jones, given the pressure that comes with football needing to turn a profit sufficient to provide operating revenues for pretty much everything else.
Jones, speaking on the podcast, said Williams approached him last fall to “think about what would a front office look like,” and he went to work on the assignment, picking up the phone and talking with former and current NFL GMs, “to just understand the landscape and find ways to pick their brains and implement a plan.”
Williams also announced the hire of Justin Speros, another department staffer, to serve as the assistant GM for football under Jones, which signals right there, that the UVA folks don’t envision the football front office as something to do just for the sake of appearing to look like they’re doing it.
Speros has experience as director of recruiting and director of scouting under the administration of UVA Football coach Tony Elliott, so, he’s had his hands in the dirt on this kind of thing for a while now.
ICYMI
The job for Jones and Speros is comparable to what NFL front-office people do in terms of roster construction, with a catch.
“When I talk with NFL GMs, they just laugh at me, like, your job is impossible, like, what are you guys doing over there? You have all these acquisition windows, and you have to negotiate with the player several times, and they’re like, you don’t draft players, you have to recruit them, and it’s like you’re speaking two different languages,” Jones said.
In season, the focus is on evaluating the current roster and trying to forecast what that looks like in the future, while also keeping tabs on what is out there on what is effectively the college free-agent market – the transfer portal makes it so that student-athletes are theoretically available at the end of each season – and the prep-recruiting scene.
The core principle: “making data-informed decisions.”
“Ultimately, we have to define a value, right, for a particular student-athlete,” Jones said.
“The data sometimes affirms a decision that you’ve made, layering another data point to affirm,” Jones said. “Sometimes it’s a tough conversation with the coach and saying, you may love that particular prospect, but this data point, let’s have a conversation about that, and that goes back to the relationship that you have with the coaches, the level of trust, right? And having some tough conversations when you’re trying to make sure you have alignment in the resources, and the data has been an awesome piece for us to be able to make sure we’re making the right decision.”
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Chris Graham
