Maybe you wonder what the general manager of a college basketball team actually does. So do plenty of other people, including some general managers themselves. The position is evolving, and at different schools it is evolving differently. The one thing it isn’t yet is what you might expect it to be: an executive who gets dressed up for work and makes executive decisions, as a G.M. in professional sports might.
In college basketball, general managers report to the head coach. They tend to wear polos or pullovers with team logos. (A dry cleaner recently asked Wojnarowski’s wife why she no longer brings in her husband’s suits.) They might negotiate a contract or identify a potential recruit. They also might pick up someone from the airport. “The job title of ‘general manager’ usually means one bucket of things in the N.F.L. or N.B.A.,” says John Currie, the athletic director at Wake Forest. “In college sports, it’s all over the map.”
A few schools had football general managers when Rachel Baker joined Duke’s men’s basketball team in June 2022. Baker spends much of her time now helping players develop their personal brands, which makes sense, because she worked at Nike for nearly a decade. Tony Bollier, the general manager at Butler, had two stints in the N.B.A.’s offices and ran the Milwaukee Bucks’ developmental team. Now he helps oversee finances for men’s basketball, attends practices and sits on the bench during games. Alex Kline, who was a talent evaluator for the New York Knicks, today plays the same role at Syracuse. Baker Dunleavy is the son of a former N.B.A. head coach; one of his brothers is an N.B.A. general manager, and another is an agent. He was the head coach at Quinnipiac when he resigned in 2023 to manage N.I.L. and the transfer portal for the men’s and women’s programs at Villanova.
What these G.M.s have in common is significant involvement with the recruiting process, which has become even more tumultuous than it is in college football. An entire roster can turn over from one season to the next. The potential for disruption is also far greater than in professional sports, where a team can draft standout players and count on having them under contract for several years. In college basketball today, everyone becomes a free agent every season. If a Bonnies recruit is All-Conference one year, he’ll almost certainly be gone the next — to somewhere like Syracuse or Kentucky (or even the N.B.A.). Lately, too, basketball’s N.I.L. money has reached the levels seen in college football. Last December, a Massachusetts high school forward named AJ Dybantsa chose Brigham Young over North Carolina and Kansas. His deals will be worth as much as $7 million next season.
For all but the wealthiest programs, the situation will soon get more complicated. N.I.L. money does not come directly from colleges and universities, though coaching staffs typically determine who receives it. As early as this fall, though, schools will also be permitted to pay salaries to their players. The funds will be distributed under a revenue-sharing structure expected to be capped at around $20 million per school. But not every athletic department has an extra $20 million — or even $1 million — to spend on athletes. The existing financial advantage for teams at big schools will grow significantly. “And at some point,” Wojnarowski says, “that’s going to show up on the court. It just is.”