Maybe you are wondering What college basketball general managers actually do. So do many other people, including some general managers. The position is evolving and evolving differently from school to school. That one thing not so But not what you expect. An executive who dresses for the job and makes executive decisions, like a GM in professional sports.
In college basketball, general managers report to the head coach. They tend to wear polo shirts or pullovers with team logos. (A dry cleaner recently asked Wojnarowski’s wife why she no longer brought her husband’s suits.) They can also negotiate contracts or identify potential recruits. You can also pick someone up from the airport. “The title ‘general manager’ typically means one job in the NFL or NBA,” says John Currie, Wake Forest’s athletic director. “In college sports, everything is on the map.”
When Rachel Baker joined Duke’s men’s basketball team in June 2022, few schools had a football general manager. Baker now spends a lot of time helping athletes develop their personal brands, which makes sense since she’s worked at Nike for nearly a decade. Butler’s general manager, Tony Bollier, has worked in NBA offices twice and ran the Milwaukee Bucks’ development team. Now he helps oversee men’s basketball finances, participates in practices and sits on the bench during games. Alex Kline, a former talent evaluator for the New York Knicks, now serves in the same role at Syracuse. Baker Dunleavy is the son of a former NBA head coach. One of his brothers is an NBA general manager and the other is an agent. He was the head coach at Quinnipiac when he resigned in 2023 to manage the transfer portal and NIL for Villanova’s men’s and women’s programs.
What these GMs have in common is that they are heavily involved in the recruiting process, which has become much more tumultuous than in college football. The entire roster may change from one season to the next. Additionally, the potential for chaos is much greater than in professional sports, where teams can draft great players and sign them to contracts for years. In college basketball today, everyone becomes a free agent every season. If a Bonnies recruit is All-Conference one year, he will almost certainly be off to somewhere like Syracuse or Kentucky (or even the NBA) the next year. Even recently, NIL funding in basketball has reached college football levels. Last December, a Massachusetts high school forward named AJ Dybantsa chose Brigham Young over North Carolina and Kansas. His deal will be worth $7 million next season.
The situation for all but the wealthiest programs will soon become more complicated. NIL money does not come directly from the university, but the coaching staff typically decides who gets the money. However, schools will also be able to pay salaries to athletes as early as this fall. The funds will be distributed under a revenue-sharing structure that is expected to be limited to about $20 million per school. But not every athletic department can afford to spend an extra $20 million, or even $1 million, on athletes. The existing financial advantages of large school teams would increase significantly. “And at some point it’s going to show up on the court,” Wojnarowski said. “It just is.”
