UVA Athletics appears to be headed in the direction of finally hiring a general manager for the UVA Football program, to have somebody in place to provide direction for roster development in the NIL era.
For a sense of what the job, which we’ve needed to have on staff for a while now, would entail, think recruiting coordinator with a salary cap.
You should view this as being a welcome development, given that, and I am obviously emphasizing the bejeezus out of this, UVA Football is very much behind the times in not already having a GM in place.
The history of the college-football GM job is that it began to evolve from the traditional recruiting coordinator to director of player personnel, mimicking the front-office structure of an NFL team, back when Chan Gailey, then the head coach at Georgia Tech, hired Geoff Collins to serve as his player-personnel guy in 2006.
Rich Rodriguez, then at Arizona, made Matt Dudek the first by-name GM at the college level in 2016, though that was several years before NIL complicated things, by adding in the need to factor in the role of above-the-table money in recruiting and retention.
Collins and Dudek and their brethren in player-personnel and GM jobs were basically recruiting coordinators-on-steroids before NIL.
Today, schools across the breadth of the Power 4/Power 5 have GMs heading up their roster-development efforts, encompassing traditional recruiting, focused on the high-school ranks, then recruiting the transfer portal, and finally, and crucially, the role that money plays in both.
An assistant on coach Tony Elliott’s staff told us over the summer that the current approach to recruiting within the UVA Football program, which resembles what you would have seen back when George Welsh was the coach at Virginia in the 1980s and 1990s, had long since gotten outdated.
In the good old days, coaches worked their recruiting contacts, zoned in on a few prospects, talked with the kids directly, and their coaches and parents, to gauge interest, and then got the kids to commit.
Today, among the first things a recruit being targeted by a Power 4/Power 5 school like Virginia is, how much can I expect get through NIL if I commit?
Assistants with schools who have a GM directing things walk into a recruit’s living room already knowing the answer to that question; from what we’ve been told, Elliott’s assistants, when they get that question, have to tell recruits that they’ll get back to them on that.
The frustrating thing here is, it’s not like UVA shouldn’t be able to play this game. Back in April, Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed into law a measure that allow colleges and universities in Virginia to directly compensate student-athletes via NIL deals.
It emerged as that was coming to fruition that Carla Williams, the athletics director at the University of Virginia, had spearheaded the effort to get a bipartisan coalition together in the Virginia General Assembly to get that law on the books.
The new law allows UVA Athletics, which was fifth in the ACC and ranked 35th nationally in athletics revenues in fiscal-year 2022-2023, according to Sportico, to more easily and efficiently direct NIL resources to the direct benefit of student-athletes straight from the athletics department’s coffers.
The law also ends the competition for donor dollars between the school’s NIL collective, Cav Futures, and UVA Athletics, with donors able to give money to the athletics department to use toward everyday expenses and NIL.
Elliott, who represented UVA alongside Williams at an April 18 bill-signing ceremony with Youngkin in Richmond, was the proverbial kid in the candy store, telling reporters at the signing event that the new law “gives us an opportunity to have a conversation without feeling like you’re breaking a rule or crossing a line that you’re not supposed to cross, and it allows us to be able to speak openly.”
“I think one of the things that we’ve got to understand is that this is all new to the student-athletes, and this brings more challenges that we need to be able to speak to,” Elliott said. “They need financial literacy, education, contract reviews that they need help and support. So, it just allows us to be able to speak openly and freely and educate, and I think that’s our role as coaches in the industry that we’re in, to educate on all different fronts.”
Sounds like a job for a general manager.
And if you’re thinking with me here, I think we’ve already got our guy.
Lo Davis, the current executive director at Cav Futures, the NIL collective for UVA Athletics, is the obvious choice, with his background in NIL and 12 years at the Virginia Athletics Foundation, the fundraising arm for UVA Athletics.
Assuming this is going to happen, chop, chop.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how the 2025 prep recruiting class is almost entirely set already – just one of the top 50 players in the Commonwealth in the 2025 class is uncommitted, and UVA has just five of those kids, the top-rated recruit being Kempsville/Virginia Beach cornerback Christopher Spence, a three-star recruit, who ranks 14th overall in Virginia in 2025.
It’s time already to get moving on the classes of 2026 and 2027.
The next bye week for UVA Football, which will get the assistants back on the road to recruit their areas, is Oct. 27-Nov. 2.
It would be nice to have a GM in place so that the assistants can make some real inroads with the high-school sophomores and juniors wrapping up their regular seasons later this month.
I can tell you with certainty that the money is there.
We just need somebody in place to put a plan in place on how it’s spent.
Share
Chris Graham
