DALLAS — College football’s great transformation was already well under way by the time Brent Venables returned to OU in December 2021.
But though Venables acknowledged the changes and the way they’d affect the way he managed his football program, the Sooners coach also repeatedly said he wanted to make sure his relationship with his players never became transactional.
“This isn’t the NFL,” Venables said last week at SEC Media Days. “We don’t draft players. It ain’t the same, and two years ago we talked about this. It ain’t the same. There are some things that are the same. This is 17, 18, 19 year olds that you recruit and have long relationships with. You don’t draft them. There aren’t contracts. We don’t have a salary cap. So a lot of things are different. … Finding great people to put in that locker room to protect our culture is my job and all of our jobs together.”
That line of thinking brough Venables to quickly bring Curtis Lofton aboard as part of the SOUL Mission.
It’s also a big reason why Lofton was recently named the Sooners’ first-ever general manager. He’ll partner with Venables to build and maintain OU’s roster.
“He’s an alpha, Curtis is, in all the right ways,” Venables said.
For most of college football’s history, the head coach was the primary point person for all things football related.
And the head coach, Venables in this case, is still the final decision-maker.
But more and more programs have decided to have a position primarily dedicated to roster management and talent acquisition and retention.
Austin Thomas was college football’s first general manager, being named to the post at LSU in 2016.
But the roles had started evolving about a decade before, when Geoff Collins — now North Carolina’s defensive coordinator — was hired as Georgia Tech’s “director of player personnel,” another college football first.
Before Collins had been with the Yellowjackets for even a season, Alabama and Nick Saban came calling.
Since Collins led the charge, the floodgates have opened as directors of payer personnel gave way to general managers.
Those roles have continued to shift with the landscape of college football.
While NIL remains a hot topic, open transfers have made things even more complicated and roster-management limitations are almost sure to come to the sport at some point.
“Don’t know where it’s going to land but we’re going to have to do more with less when it comes to roster sizes,” Venables said. “It’s going to shrink, not expand. As we sit here at 127 members on our roster and where that lands exactly, we don’t know. But there will be, at some point, a salary cap if you will. So this gives us the ability to be agile.”
Venables expects even more changes sooner rather than later.
“Thankful for the forward-thinking position of … President (Joseph) Harroz and Jos Castiglione, our administration, of being proactive and understanding that things have dramatically changed and, you know what, it’s going to continue to change,” Venables said. “Every couple of days you turn around and it changes again, so setting up systematically or … putting systems in place that have flexibility, the ability to be agile and pivot along the way as things continue to change but also put us in a position of strength that allows us to be in a really good position of talent evaluation, talent acquisition and talent retention.”
In his SOUL Mission role, Lofton’s primary focus was life skills, educating Sooners’ football players on everything from financial literacy to conflict resolution to how to tie a tie and plenty in between.
Linebacker Danny Stutsman said he hasn’t noticed much difference yet when it comes to Lofton’s role with the team, but knows things are shifting.
“Everything’s new,” Stutsman said. “Where NIL’s going, he’s kind of swamped. He’s a great resource. He’s a guy that, one of the best linebackers to ever play at the university, and to have a guy like that has been huge for me. Anytime you need something, it’s always great to go to Curtis. If not him, then Caleb Kelly. There’s so many linebackers that are in that system right now, it’s an amazing resource.”