Tennessee Volunteers Football Coach Explains Why He Hasn’t Jumped on GM Craze

The college sports general manager craze is bringing sweeping change to many sports including football and basketball.

Some of it looks cosmetic and can drive program interest, recruiting and fundraising. For instance, Sacramento State just named NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal as its general manager. It’s an unpaid, voluntary role. His son, Shaqir, also goes to Sac State. The elder O’Neal played his college basketball at LSU and has no connection to Sac State otherwise.

In other cases, there are general managers being hired to act as pseudo-NFL or NBA leaders. In this model, the GM is there to help manage recruiting, the transfer portal, name, image and likeness (NIL) and other functions.

The role is new, and many coaches and athletic departments are embracing the role, given the consumption of time between coaching, recruiting and monitoring the transfer portal. Plus, there is the upcoming implementation of revenue sharing, thanks to the House vs. NCAA settlement, which is still pending approval.

One coach that isn’t embracing the role — at least for now — is Tennessee football coach Josh Heupel.

Last month, Heupel had to manage some of the biggest drama in college football — the transfer of quarterback Nico Iamaleava. He wanted more NIL money from Tennessee. When the Vols said now, Heupel released him and he transferred to UCLA.

Heupel won universal admiration from his fellow coaches for the decision. But could a GM have helped him mitigate that problem before it became one? Heupel isn’t so sure.

He told attendees at the Big Orange Caravan on Wednesday in Nashville that he believes he has what he needs in-house to manage everything.

“We’ve got really good people that handle everything that goes into the recruitment process — our personnel side of it, what we’re doing on the high school side of it and portal side of it,” he said, as reported by the Knoxville News.

The idea isn’t dead. Both Heupel and athletic director Danny White say they’ll revisit after revenue-sharing begins. It could be a matter of keeping up with the rest of the conference. In the report, it was revealed that 11 of the SEC’s 16 teams have a GM for football.

It also doesn’t solve every problem, as two west coast schools have learned.

The GM is usually not the football coach’s direct report. But that’s the case at Stanford, where Cardinal legend Andrew Luck is the GM. He fired coach Troy Taylor earlier this year, who was under internal investigation for alleged bullying of members of the Stanford athletic department.

Also in California, another legend, Cal’s Ron Rivera has taken on the GM job. While he is not the boss of head coach Justin Wilcox, some boosters want him to be — and are willing to withhold NIL money to make it happen.

Frustrations with Iamaleava aside, it’s better for the Vols to know what they need before they dive into hiring a GM.