Georgia offensive line coach Matt Luke unexpectedly resigned this month in order to spend more time with his family. That’s not a euphemism, by the way. He reportedly really is just burnt out and ready to recharge with some quality time.
Luke can afford to do it. He is well regarded as an O-line coach, so his career can survive some time off, and he has a boatload of buyout money from Ole Miss. It foolishly promoted him to head coach following his 6-6 showing as the post-Hugh Freeze interim, and then it fired him two years later after declining in win count in each season.
Maybe “foolishly” is overstated. It’s possible he was the best they were going to get with NCAA questions hanging over the program. Either way, recruiting plunged even before Freeze got the boot once he could no longer bend the rules with impunity. The program was a zombie, already dead but shambling along with the last quality recruits of the cheating era. Luke’s salary on his four-year deal was entirely guaranteed, though, meaning he got a full two years’ worth of salary to go away despite literally no one else making a run at him for a head coaching position when he signed the deal.
Anyway, I bring this up because Billy Napier is still hiring. In the last week he brought in another creative media staffer and football analyst. He’s like a collector with an eBay addiction, completely unable to keep his finger away from the Buy It Now button every time he finds something interesting.
The point is partially to assemble as many sharp minds as possible. Another point, though, is to avoid burnout within his figurative army of staff.
There probably is a point of diminishing returns to effort poured into college football operations, but it’s increasingly hard to get there.
There has always been an advantage to having plenty of eyes on recruiting. There are literally thousands of prospects with at least a 3-star rating across junior and senior classes, and of course you want to be as early as possible. So, you need to be watching out for promising freshmen and sophomores too, and a good part of that task is sinking loads of time into networking with high school coaches.
You definitely need plenty of people working on communications with recruits. Coaches will need to do a lot of it personally to maintain authenticity, but staffers have their roles too. And in this day and age, everyone needs “edits” — prepared graphics, especially personalized ones with posed shots in uniform after visits — to put out on their social media profiles.
And then with the advent of the transfer portal a few years ago and now the one-time transfer rule, you have to have eyes scouting more or less everyone in Division I and not just future opponents. There is real value to being the first team to reach out to a star transfer with a committable offer, but also you want to be sure a guy is a good fit before extending such an offer. It’s easier to be first, or at least quite early, if someone has already assessed the guy. And as there may be some gems in FCS looking to move up, you have literally hundreds of programs to keep tabs on.
Don’t forget that NIL is a major new job, as schools will have to function a lot like agents to match up their players with businesses and “collectives” looking to hire players for promotional work. This means lining up and attracting companies to put up the money for NIL gigs and then contract work to ensure everything is above board and fair.
It’s all enough to make someone burnt out and decide to enjoy his kids while they’re still at home, especially if it can be financed by the SEC’s unparalleled #BuyoutLife.
The demands on the on-field coaches are huge, there’s no way around it. At the top of the sport where UF and UGA sit, the salaries are huge too. If you can’t handle the workload, or don’t want to, there are plenty of other options.
But even as I hold no sympathy for the people whose ambitions lead them to these jobs, I do understand that they’re people too. From a purely ruthless effectiveness perspective, anyone will be better at their occupations if they’re not overstretched.
Plus in theory the coaches who are good enough to get a job at a place like Florida should be among the best of the best. The more UF can offload the drudgery onto staffers, the more the coaches can apply their highly differentiated skills to the specific tasks where they make the most impact. No on-field coach should be grinding tape of high school sophomores unless he just really happens to enjoy it.
Napier gets all of this, which is why he has hired so many people. It’s a proven tactic too, given that Alabama and Georgia have enormous staffs and are annual Playoff contenders despite being in the cutthroat SEC.
It won’t solve everything for everyone; the Bulldogs’ massive payroll didn’t save Luke from needing a break. However, keep in mind that the staff is there for many reasons, one of which is to keep the main coaches as fresh as can be managed in this day and age.