Adrian “Woj” Wojnarowski is one of the most popular names in basketball. And not for playing or coaching.
Woj was ESPN’s premier NBA insider for the last seven years, being the first to announce nearly every major event in the league since he took the job. The “Woj Bomb” became one of the most common phrases used in the world of basketball, as players, coaches, pundits, and fans alike knew the potential for game-changing news that could occur with every one of his posts.
However, at 10:40 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024, Woj dropped the biggest Woj Bomb yet. Except this time it wasn’t about basketball. It was his retirement.
Woj retired from his role at ESPN to pursue a different career venture: the General Manager (GM) of the St. Bonaventure University men’s basketball program, his alma mater. While this position seems out of the ordinary for college sports, it’s gaining traction in college basketball and football and may be more popular than you think.
After the 2021 policy allowing NCAA athletes to earn money based on their name, image, and likeness (NIL), the landscape of college athletics, particularly in basketball and football, has changed drastically, and the impact of successful collegiate programs has varied significantly based on their ability to keep up with the times.
Sponsors go where the money is, so University of Alabama Football and Duke University Men’s Basketball help their players earn massive NIL deals. Similarly, with the opportunity to now cash in on their talent at the collegiate level, student athletes are traveling where the opportunities to make money are, so use of the transfer portal has significantly increased. While this is helpful for student athletes who are looking to increase their draft stock while earning compensation, it has also put more pressure on collegiate programs to provide NIL opportunities to their student athletes.
Coaches often have difficulty spearheading this operation, as they are busy worrying about their game plans and preparing the team for competition. As a result, at these high-achieving collegiate athletics programs, there’s a high demand for someone to step in and take over the business side of the team, helping student athletes earn NIL deals and helping the program to earn high-level talent in the transfer portal. Insert the role of GM.
The GM of a collegiate sports program can handle the sponsorships and the finances of the team, while the coaches and student athletes can continue to perform at their highest level on the field or court. The emergence of this role has become especially popular after the NCAA and Power 5 schools struck a deal last May allowing schools to pay their student athletes. With a GM, the money can be allocated properly to student athletes and coaches in these sports without blending too much into the role of the coaches.
They also can manage the program’s activity in the transfer portal, which has become even more popular post-NIL. As more athletes use the transfer portal, attractive programs that can pay their athletes and garner significant deals need to be vigilant about their use of the portal to recruit talent. GMs can monitor student athletes that are likely to utilize the portal to acquire the best talent for their team. They can also help student athletes get in with coaches to talk about how they see themselves contributing to the team, so the gap is bridged between the business and athletic sides of an athlete’s decision to transfer.
With the popularization of this role emerging over the last couple of years, the state of college basketball and college football has given us several case studies to see what being a college athletic program’s GM looks like. Overall, there are four approaches which programs take when considering who to hire as a GM and deciding what their role can be: the business-minded approach, the scouting approach, the former athlete approach, and the coach-centered approach.
The business-minded approach involves hiring a former sports business executive to acquire talent and manage the financial side of the role. This is a more administrative take on the GM position, and it has generated significant results. On June 7, 2022, Duke’s new men’s basketball coach, Jon Scheyer, hired Rachel Baker as the team’s GM. Baker, a former Nike exec, was brought into the Blue Devils’ program as a bridge between student athletes and possible sponsors to support the financial success of the team. She works with student athletes one-on-one to best craft NIL packages for each, from five-star recruits to walk-ons. She also helps Scheyer on the recruitment trail, describing how Duke basketball players can succeed on and off the court. Baker’s success as GM has been particularly evident this year, as the Blue Devils made the Final Four for the first time in both Scheyer and Baker’s time in their positions. Led by an impressive Baker-orchestrated recruiting class of 2024 that included Cooper Flagg, Konn Knueppel, and Khaman Maluach, her approach to the GM position is starting to pay off.
The scouting GM focuses mostly on talent acquisition through high school recruitment and the transfer portal. At Syracuse Men’s Basketball, former New York Knicks and New Orleans Pelicans scout Alex Kline was hired as GM last summer. The storied program brought in Kline to help revive its glory days after their longest March Madness drought since the 1970s. His role as GM, similar to Baker, is under the direction of Head Coach Adrian Autry, while also operating separately to help student athletes with NIL deals and recruitment opportunities. With an eye for talent, Kline’s experience as a scout plays heavily into his approach as GM, trying to secure the best talent for the Orange’s success on the court. On the financial end, Kline has an upper hand thanks to Syracuse program booster Adam Weitsman, who assists student athletes in earning NIL deals. While year one wasn’t as successful for Kline and the Orange, the new GM scored big by convincing Kiyan Anthony, son of Syracuse and NBA legend Carmelo Anthony, to commit to Syracuse starting next season. If anything’s obvious from Baker’s tenure so far at Duke, it takes a couple of years for GMs’ work to pay off, so we will see how Kline’s actions now will fare for the future of Syracuse men’s basketball.
Some programs hire a former student athlete of the university to be their general manager, focusing on the athlete-to-athlete connection in NIL negotiations and recruiting conversations. The most prominent example of this is at Stanford University, where on Saturday, Nov. 30, 2024, Andrew Luck was named as Stanford Football General Manager. One of the most successful Stanford football players in school history, Luck was asked by Stanford President Jonathan Levin to lead the football program, essentially giving him an equivalent role of a football-specific athletic director. Luck has a tall task in front of him. Stanford’s storied history as a football powerhouse has taken a backseat, as recent struggles for the program have put the Cardinal in a tough position. Additionally, Stanford was noticeably late to allow sponsorships and NIL student athletes. Luck’s presence has made up for the university’s slow adjustment to NIL, as donors and companies have approached him about student-athlete and program sponsorships in a way never seen before at Stanford.
The real appeal of Luck as program GM comes through the connections he can forge with current and future Cardinal athletes. Having a GM who had the ideal experience as a student athlete in the program helps possible recruits understand the best outcomes of what the program can do for them, and Luck as spokesperson puts the cherry on top. While the success might not be present right now for Stanford, Luck’s hiring has certainly put other California colleges on notice, as the University of California’s football program boosters began making more demands of their team with Luck and the Cardinal on the horizon. Luck seems to have started on the right track with Stanford, and we’ll see how they look under Luck’s direction in years to come.
The most intriguing version of college program GM is the former coach. This has occurred heavily in basketball, as dozens of schools have essentially transformed some of their assistant coaches into GMs. For example, Villanova University basketball hired former assistant coach of their men’s basketball team Baker Dunleavy as General Manager of Basketball Operations in April 2023. Dunleavy oversees both the men’s and women’s basketball teams, taking over the program known for its strong basketball program and recent men’s titles in 2016 and 2018. It’s particularly rare for a GM to be overseeing both men’s and women’s basketball, since they are less prevalent in women’s college athletics programs. The appeal of the strategy of hiring a former coach is the ability to recruit and develop talent like a coach, but it also requires some adjustment to the NIL market and transfer portal success. This is likely why Villanova has seen a downturn in its production from their basketball programs, highlighted by the recent firing of Kyle Neptune as the men’s head coach.
This approach in college football has yet to be realized. The University of North Carolina (UNC) hired Wesleyan alum and football coaching legend Bill Belichick ’75 to be their next football head coach. Belichick, who was without a job this season after 24 seasons with the New England Patriots, enters the college football fold for the first time since he played for the Cardinals in 1975. From 2001–2019, he served as de facto general manager for the Pats, and with the GM role becoming more popular in college football, it would make sense for Belichick to assume the role of GM at UNC. However, Belichick hired former NFL general manager and football pundit Michael Lombardi to be GM, opting to focus on the coaching aspect of his job. The college football world is certainly interested to see how Belichick will fare in this new environment, and whether he can take UNC to new heights in 2025–26.
Belichick’s decision to delegate the GM role exemplifies one of the biggest concerns with the position becoming more popular. Belichick, one of the greatest football minds in history, both on the sidelines and in the front office, saw the opportunity to enter the college football world and took it. However, in the face of managing the NIL market and the transfer portal, he decided to hire someone else to handle that. The gravity of that decision cannot be overstated. Even though Belichick was the GM of an NFL team for two decades, he delegated the responsibility of managing a college football program to someone else.
It speaks to the growing professionalization of college athletics. Long gone are the days where college athletics’ primary purpose was to prepare athletes to compete professionally. Now, with student athletes getting paid—not only through NIL deals, but also by their own universities—and swapping teams wherever the best opportunity to succeed is located, college sports look more like the pros than ever before. GMs are hired to manage this growing professionalization, and in the NCAA’s most popular sports, football and basketball, GMs are encouraging this change by maximizing the opportunities of the new system for their student athletes. It’s becoming almost as taxing and burdensome as a professional team.
The emergence of general managers in college basketball and football display how much NCAA sports are beginning to look like the professional leagues. While the success of programs with GMs has varied, the number of GMs hired has skyrocketed. College athletics may soon need to take a look at itself and recognize the gravity of the transition it has made from a truly competitive, collegiate environment to something much larger than that. But it likely won’t.
Max Forstein can be reached at mf*******@******an.edu.
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