College football GMs, recruiting staffers see salaries balloon as job duties expand in NIL, portal era

Few people have seen the rise of the personnel department up close like Matt Lindsey, the first general manager in Ole Miss history and currently the Director of Recruiting at powerhouse agency Athletes First.

Lindsey attended Alabama as a student and began working with the football team in 2009 as a strength and conditioning intern under Scott Cochran. That didn’t last long as he quickly transitioned to recruiting under the direction of Crimson Tide Director of Player Personnel Ed Marynowitz.

At that point in time, Cochran and Marynowitz made around the same amount of money in the low-six figure range. But Lindsey remembers tracking those salaries over the years and noticed an issue.

 Cochran made $595,000 annually in 2019, his final year with the Tide. Alabama’s director of player personnel, Bob Welton, made $210,000.

“That was the big gripe for all of us years ago,” Lindsey told 247Sports. “Why haven’t these salaries gone up commensurate with everyone else?”

As college football transitions into a new era dominated by the transfer portal and the advent of name, image and likeness deals, the role of DPPs and General Managers on college campuses has taken on a critical importance.

There is still the grinding of tape and the evaluation of prospects. But some department heads now oversee double-digit employees. There are operations staffers, on-campus recruiting personnel, scouts who plan ahead for the portal and, in some cases, consultants to help schools manage what is now a pseudo salary cap; whenever the House settlement is completed and revenue sharing comes to college football, programs will be responsible for allocating upwards of $15 million annually. 

Managing a roster means juggling offers to ninth graders and negotiating NIL with super seniors, players who are nearly 10 years apart in age. It’s a domain that can no longer be handled by just an 11-person coaching staff. It’s a professional operation much like the NFL. 

The sweeping nature of the job, with salaries that haven’t always matched up to the demand, has often led to major turnover in the profession. 247Sports national analyst Cooper Petagna, a former Director of Player Personnel at Washington and Director of Recruiting at Oregon, exited the industry in 2021 in part due to the strain of the role. It’s not something he noticed earlier in his career, but as the years wore on and all of his days working holidays stacked up, it’s something Petagna began to consider. 

“It’s more of an all-encompassing job than people tend to think sometimes,” Petagna said. “It’s what people sign up for, and I’m not making any excuses. But when you’re trying to rationalize it in your head: Is this making sense with how much I’m investing of my life into this and what the payout is financially?”  

That’s what made Alabama’s new contract with general manager Courtney Morgan, valued at an average of $825,000 annually, such a watershed moment in the industry earlier this August.

Morgan isn’t alone in seeing his salary soar. A bevy of staffers are making more than $300,000 a year, according to public data and Open Records requests.