The power afforded to college coaches is fading drastically and in a hurry

The idea that the head coach runs the entirety of a college basketball or football team is so ingrained in our collective psyche that it is hard to shake. Of course the head coach is the top dog in the food chain. Who else would it be? Sure, he technically reports to the Athletic Director, but it is the head coach who runs day-to-day operations. He has full autonomy on who to recruit, who to hire, who to schedule, and everything else in between. That is just the way it is and why selecting a head coach is so vitally important. They hold tremendous power, which garners all of the prestige that comes with winning and the blame that comes with losing.

It is a sharp contrast with professional sports, where a team’s head coach is nothing more than a cog in the wheel of a much larger machine. The NBA and NFL often treat head coaches as disposable commodities, changing them year in and year out without the slightest hesitation, even after they “led” the team to a successful year.

For professional organizations, the owner, president of operations, and the entire executive team create a culture that far outweighs the power and influence of the head coach, whose job is specifically to coach and not much else. As collegiate sports drift more toward a professional model, head coaches may not wield the same level of power to which they are accustomed.

There is simply too much on the head coaches’ plates right now

Putting together a roster has always been a tall task, but one that head coaches were happy to manage. After all, it was primarily a sales pitch to high school kids and their parents about why their school was the best choice for them. But recruiting no longer only involves the kid, their parents, and maybe an AAU coach or two. Now there are agents, people pretending to be the kids’ agent, and a plethora of other figures in the kids’ sphere who want a piece of the NIL pie in some way.

On top of that, the pool of players to recruit has widened significantly outside of the upcoming high school class. The transfer portal creates pure chaos of student athletes teleporting all over the country, which in turn creates the need for schools to recruit every player on their team. On top of that, the international pipeline has never been more active. With potential players going from mostly American high schoolers to every 18 to 22-year-old on the planet, you can understand why coaches treating the roster construction process like the old days can easily get overwhelmed. Throw in newfound, often complicated compensation negotiations, and old-school coaches admit they don’t know where to start.

It is as if every single player in collegiate sports is on a one-year contract. Could you imagine the anarchy that would create in the NBA or NFL? And there are only 30-some odd teams in those leagues. The NCAA has 365 Division I basketball teams and 265 football programs. And yeah, every player on every team is a free agent every year with the exception of seniors, but even that might change if the NCAA grants a fifth year of eligibility across the board.

It all creates a world that is far too much for one head coach to navigate. There needs to be a team to create the team.

Coaches will just be coaches at some point

When the Golden State Warriors miss out on a free agent signing, fans don’t blame head coach Steve Kerr. The thought of that is ridiculous. However, if a portal player who Kentucky is interested in signing commits elsewhere, the blame falls squarely on Mark Pope’s shoulders.

The more collegiate athletics become professionalized, the less fans will blame or credit the head coach for every good or bad thing that happens. Coaches will eventually just be coaches, similar to the NBA or NFL. This is not a bad thing. After all, coaching basketball is a different skill set from scouting, which is a different skill set from contract negotiations, which is a different skill set from high school recruiting, which is different from fundraising, which is different from scheduling…you get the idea. The list goes on.

Sure, some of the most successful coaches overlap in some of these skill sets, but you would have to be some kind of unicorn to be able to execute on all of the above job functions at a high level. Even if you did possess each skill set required, you would also need to clone yourself because the one thing that isn’t changing in college sports is that there are only 24 hours in a day.

We are starting to see that shift now, with some programs hiring general managers (GM), but that still comes at the discretion of the head coach. For Kentucky, Will Stein has hired a GM, an assistant GM, and, according to his KSR interview, he has an entire team of volunteers actively scouting players all day long. Meanwhile, Mark Pope has chosen a Director of Roster Management while still maintaining a lot of the traditional team-building decision-making.

In the pros, this is inverted. The GM does not report to the coach; it is the other way around. Similarly, almost every team in the NFL and NBA has the same or similar job positions. One team doesn’t have a GM, while the other has a director of roster management. As college sports continue to grow, this level of organizational management continuity will no longer be at the whim of a coach but at the direction of university leadership.

Kentucky’s AD selection is vitally important

This next phase in collegiate sport evolution makes Kentucky’s selection of its next Athletic Director that much more important. NIL and the transfer portal were the earthquakes that upended college sports, but the landscape will only continue to shift. A school’s Athletic Director will effectively become the equivalent of a professional team owner. This is unfair to an extent, considering the sheer number of teams he or she “owns,” but they will be responsible for hiring the head of operations for each sport, and that person may not be the head coach.

We could see a separate President of Basketball Operations and President of Football Operations. With it, the athletic director will lead the shaping of culture across the entire university. Whoever fills that role for Kentucky will have more influence on the Wildcats’ football and basketball success than any AD in history.

Of course, college sports won’t mimic professional leagues outright. The element of convincing 17 and 18-year-olds to come to a school remains. Calipari always emphasized how important it was to win over the mother and convince her that he was the right hand to entrust her baby with. That aspect simply doesn’t exist at the professional level. That and other unique peculiarities will always set college sports apart from the professional ranks, but gone will be the days of the AD simply hiring a head coach and letting them run things from there.

We’ve started to see some of this already with Mitch Barnhart’s long-term partnership with JMI for all things NIL, the school’s acquisition of local business real estate, and the plan for an entertainment district. The newfound need to generate revenue will only continue to perpetuate, but internally, there will soon be a revamped org chart with new job descriptions never before needed in college sports. And for better or worse, the head coach will be just that: a head coach and nothing more.