Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Kevin Draper
I am an investigative journalist, focusing on sports.
Tomorrow, Notre Dame and Ohio State will meet in the National Football Championship Game. After the final whistle, the winning writers will be paraded across your television screen. You hear from the head coach, the quarterback, maybe the athletic director.
But what you may not hear about is the one who built the winning team: the CEO.
The general manager, who is already a professional sports field, takes over college football. In today’s newsletter I will explain why.
Enter the GM
Managing a roster of over 100 players and dozens of staff is always a difficult task for a coach. Now this is impossible.
This is because the sport has changed dramatically in recent years. Players can get paid — for some, more than they would in the NFL — without sacrificing legitimacy. And they can move to different schools every season.
“The job is too big for a college coach,” said Andrew Luck, the former Stanford quarterback who recently returned to his alma mater as the head football coach. “The role has changed. The system has changed a lot and is still changing.”
Luck, like most general managers, is responsible for securing money and signing players, many of whom have expressed their desire to change schools by entering the gates of the sport.
The portal was recently opened from December 9 to 28. This happened not only during the holidays, but also when dozens of teams competed in football games. Without a general manager, coaches must prepare for a big game and also evaluate thousands of potential players to build next year’s roster.
“The portal was powerful,” said Luck, a college football expert who stayed at Stanford to finish his degree in 2011, despite being projected as the first overall pick in the NFL draft. he. “If I had a romantic idea about the thing, the commercial side, it got lost there.”
On the field
The general manager’s influence will be evident tomorrow night: the quarterbacks for both teams are transfers. Notre Dame will be coached by Riley Leonard, who spent the past three seasons at Duke, and Ohio State will be coached by Will Howard, who spent four seasons at Kansas State.
Of course, not all players transfer. Most of the players on both rosters were recruited from high school, as usual. The big difference for these players, however, is that they get paid to go there.
Ohio State coach Ryan Day said in 2022 that his team will cost $13 million to keep. Four months ago, Ohio’s athletic director revised that number and said $20 million was spent on the team’s roster.
Looking to the future
Notre Dame and Ohio State are both strong. But the College Football Playoff — the 12-team tournament leading up to the championship game — also featured top-ranked rivals like Boise State, Arizona State and Southern Methodist University.
Will the changes in college football further reinforce the dominance of the blue bloods, the few programs that can collect and spend $20 million or more on a roster? Or will they allow lesser-known teams to strategically spend their dollars poaching players who might end up in the big leagues? Luck, whose Stanford Cardinal program hasn’t had a winning record in seven seasons, hopes it’s the last.
“I still want to believe there’s room for improvement in the world of college football,” he said, “but with enough good grades, any program has a chance to succeed and win championships.”
For more information: Read my story about how general managers are making the college game more appealing to some coaches, including the new coach at the University of North Carolina, Bill Belichick.
THE LATEST NEWS
Stop the war in Gaza
Another great story
THE SUNDAY DUTY
Should Trump enforce the TikTok law?
Yes. If Trump does not enforce the law, he will show weakness in national security. “His duty as president is to enforce the TikTok law, not flout it in hopes of cutting a deal with China’s dictator,” wrote The editorial board. Wall Street Journal.
No. TikTok is too important to our culture and politics. “A ban would destroy a unique historical and cultural ecosystem, silencing millions of people in it,” Senator Ed Markey wrote for The Boston Globe.
“The Residence,” by Kate Andersen Brower: On the eve of the inauguration of the 47th president of the United States, why not take a stroll through the 132-room, 55,000-square-foot mansion that the first family calls home? Brower, who covered the Obama administration for Bloomberg News, takes readers behind the scenes with waiters, chefs, ushers, engineers, electricians, carpenters and florists as guides. One might wonder how exactly the White House staff can change the furniture in just six hours on the first day of a new administration. They are fueled by sweat, stress and teamwork, according to Brower, whose (cheap) source spilled the tea on former residents and their feathered friends. Fans of “The Residence” (2015) can look forward to the Netflix adaptation — a mystery drama starring Uzo Aduba and Giancarlo Esposito — this March.
The subject of this week’s The Interview is political blogger and computer engineer Curtis Yarvin. His radical anti-democratic views found a receptive audience among powerful conservatives, including Vice President-elect JD Vance.
So why is democracy bad?
Democracy is not bad; but very weak. And how weak it is can easily be seen in the fact that unpopular policies such as mass immigration continue even though the majority opposes them.
What you haven’t addressed is why strong people are better in people’s lives. Can you answer that?
Yes. I think it is better for people’s lives to have an effective government and an efficient government. When I ask people to answer this question, I ask them to look around the room and point out everything in the room that the monarchy did, because these things called corporations are really little monarchies. You look around and you see, for example, a laptop, and that laptop is made by Apple, which is a monarchy.
Why do you have such faith in the CEO’s abilities? Most startups fail. We can all point to CEOs who failed. This seems like a simple way of thinking.
It’s not a simple way of thinking, and having worked in a salt mine where CEOs do it, and being a CEO myself, I think I have a better understanding than most people. If you took one of the Fortune 500 CEOs, pick one at random and put him in charge of Washington. I think you will get a lot, much better than what is available. It doesn’t have to be Elon Musk.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes magazine, Emily Weinstein pays tribute to a dinner warrior: chicken. She recommends making 15-minute ginger-lime chicken and fish tikka with spinach.
