How does college football roster building compare to NFL? Nebraska GM Pat Stewart explains
SOURCE:The Athletic|BY:Sam Khan Jr.
The Athletic chatted with Stewart about his path to Nebraska from the NFL, the learning curve and differences between college and pro ball.
Editor’s note:This article is part of ourGM Spotlightseries, introducing readers to general managers who occupy a relatively new and increasingly important job for college football teams.
Nebraska general manager Pat Stewart and head coach Matt Rhule go back 20 years, but Rhule’s wife, Julie, may deserve at least some credit for bringing them together.
The story, as told by Rhule and relayed by Stewart, is that when Rhule was the offensive coordinator at Western Carolina in 2005 and sought out a graduate assistant, Julie picked out Stewart’s resume from a stack of applicants. “This guy’s from Ohio,” she said, according to Stewart. “We need more northerners down here.”
After a stint as a student manager at Ohio State, Stewart packed up and headed to Cullowhee, N.C., where he joined a staff that included Rhule, Geoff Collins (former Georgia Tech head coach), Clayton White (South Carolina defensive coordinator) and Marcus Satterfield (Nebraska tight ends coach). But it wasn’t the coaching bug that bit Stewart; it was personnel. He loved the strategy behind constructing a team, and, in 2007, he got a job as a scouting assistant with the New England Patriots.
For 17 years, Stewart worked his way up the ranks in NFL front offices, including 13 with the Patriots (11 during their heyday), two with the Philadelphia Eagles and three with the Carolina Panthers, where Rhule was the head coach. This year, Stewart returned to college football as the Cornhuskers’ GM, bringing his pro personnel expertise to a sport that’s resembling Sundays more each year, at least in terms of roster construction.
The Athletic recently chatted with Stewart about his path to Nebraska from the NFL, the learning curve, the differences between college and pro roster building strategies, preparing for the transfer portal and more.
Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
So what made you want to move into college football?
After doing this for a couple of decades in the NFL, at some point you have to put into practice what you’ve learned, and this was an opportunity to do that. Now that we pay players and there’s different types of strategy in the team-building process that kind of mirrors the NFL, there is a market in college for people like me.
I talked to a couple other schools that reached out to me, but after those phone calls, I told my wife that I didn’t feel like those schools knew what they wanted. They seemed to want an NFL guy just to say they had an NFL guy. I was only going to do this if it was with a head coach that I knew and obviously Matt’s one of my good friends, so it made a lot of sense.
Is it safe to say you and Rhule see eye-to-eye on personnel and roster management philosophies?
We have a lot of similarities and we also have a lot of discussions that can sometimes get loud. But it’s because of our relationship that we can do that, nothing gets held in. We see eye-to-eye on a lot of the core principles. After that, it’s what do you value positionally, because it’s going to be a lot different from the coaching side than the personnel side.
I don’t have to coach these guys. I could put seven knuckleheads in a room and say to a coach “figure it out,” but you have to weigh the person and all that stuff with it, too.
How different is that part from the NFL? Because in college, the head coach usually has the final say on roster decisions and the coordinators and position coaches have input, too.
It does differ a little bit. The head coach is the face of the program in college football. A lot of times in the NFL, it’s going to be a couple of players plus the head coach. And none of this works if there’s not a collaborative effort of everybody to see things the same way instead of “my guy versus your guy.” In college or the NFL, it’s not gonna work if one guy gets his way all the time. No team is going to be successful if the GM gives the coach a bunch of players that he doesn’t want to coach.
Personnel is all about opportunity and belief. It’s the opportunity the player gets and the belief the coach has in that player that makes them good.
What was the biggest learning curve for you when you arrived at Nebraska?
Definitely recruiting and the game of recruiting, like how many guys you’re targeting at different positions. To build a team, you don’t just collect talent, but at the same time you do need some difference-makers. In college football, you pay the premium for a running back that in the NFL maybe you wouldn’t. There’s a little different positional value.
The other thing — and I still struggle with it — is the infrastructure of college football right now is severely lacking. The fact that players go into the portal and there’s no one clearinghouse to reconcile your rosters with. You have to do that manually and just figure it out. You have to designate who your 10 coaches are on the road (recruiting), but you can’t go anywhere and find who the 10 coaches are for everyone else. So if I come across someone on the road, is that person supposed to be out?
The lack of infrastructure has been the biggest adjustment for me, because in the NFL it’s black and white, there’s not a lot of gray. You know what players’ contracts are coming up, you know who’s going to be a free agent, you know who’s eligible for the draft, you do the work and you pick it the best you can. In college football, you just have to be ready for everything.
So how challenging is it that anybody on your roster can pretty much become a free agent annually, via the transfer portal?
Really difficult and frustrating. You try to plan and take as many precautions as you can to make sure guys are under contract. But at the end of the day, if they want to go in, it could be something where you lose guys that you were planning on having be a big part of your team next year.
What’s your primary day-to-day focus? Are you mostly evaluating, managing payroll, managing the personnel staff, negotiating with agents?
It varies based on the time of year. Right now, it’s a lot of negotiating with agents on our current players. We have a bunch of guys who are up after the season. That’s the other thing that’s kind of crazy: The season ends in January, but the fiscal year doesn’t end until June 30. So some players’ contracts expire now, some expire June 30, so you’re trying to weigh who you’re re-signing and all that stuff.
We’re watching guys and getting ready for the portal. Our scouting staff does a great job: Keith Williams, Anthony Johnson, Matthew Pearce, Taylor Richards, Kyle Fisher, Devon Hike — they do a great job of watching not only the high school kids but also doing some cross checks on the portal side. We have a team of five remote scouts this year that I hired, most of them with NFL experience, and they’re just watching a position in the Group of 5 so we’re ready in case any of those guys pop out.
During the season, it’s a lot of evaluating our roster, because I think that’s the most important thing. If you don’t know your team, you don’t know the holes that you have. So I spent a lot of time this year watching our team.
With agents, how different is it dealing with them on the college side versus the pro side?
Again, it’s the transparency that we lack in college football. There’s no market. I don’t know what any other school pays their starting left tackle, but I’m supposed to believe an agent when he tells me how much somebody is offering. That’s very different.
In the NFL, we would just differ over who the (comparison) is. That’s really the only discussion point, because what they’re paid is what the market is. Somebody is going to reset it every year, then everybody else falls in line behind that. In college football, it seems like 20 guys want to reset the market at once and just because that guy got it means I should be getting it. People don’t really know their spot in line at this level.
A lot of times, though, when I talk to agents that I have dealt with in the past and have NFL experience, we talk through some things and we find common ground much faster than I do with other agents. So yeah, that’s been a challenge in its own right.
You guys just lost a starting quarterback (Dylan Raiola) and it sounds like the market for a starting QB in the portal is going up. Is that what you’re hearing?
Yeah, I think it is. But I also think there are probably a bunch of guys at the top who the agents aren’t budging on the fact that one guy is going to set the market, then everybody else falls into place. Everybody wants the high number. I think that’s why we’re hearing the numbers that we’re hearing because the portal isn’t open (yet).
In the NFL before free agency opened or before the draft happened, we had silly season about trades and who’s going to go where, you’re trying to throw smokescreens and that kind of stuff. I think there’s some silly season type of stuff happening, but it’s also what the market is. So you kind of have to do business as it’s being done, whether you like it or not.
As the opening of the transfer portal (Jan. 2) approaches, how are you preparing for it?
My day-to-day is constantly talking to agents and our guys that work for us. They’re also talking to agents and trying to piece together the market and what it’s going to look like. We have five to 10 guys at every position that we’re really interested in. … I do a lot of sketching out who we would take where at different price points to fill our needs and hope that things fall out that way.
Where does high school recruiting fit into your strategy?
It’s still going to be a big piece. In the NFL, you draft well and fill your needs in free agency. In college, I think you need to recruit well and fill your needs in the portal. It’s certainly not fiscally responsible to go into the portal for every single position every year, because you’re going to pay a premium. You have to have homegrown talent that can get you through so that you’re not paying that premium price at every single position.
When you’re scouting players, what does a Nebraska player look like and what are your nonnegotiables?
Tough, smart, competitive. Good people that want to be process-driven and are willing to buy into how we want things to run from a big picture standpoint. You don’t have to be a great player to be a good teammate. We want a lot of good teammates. We want guys who are buying into something bigger than themselves and understand their role within that team to become as good as we possibly can.
The GM Spotlight series is part of a partnership with T. Rowe Price. The Athletic maintains full editorial independence. Partners have no control over or input into the reporting or editing process and do not review stories before publication.