February 26, 2025 may very well be remembered as the day Oklahoma became a professional football organization in earnest, not simply in attitude. For more than 75 years, that’s how the Sooners have been coached and how they have played. With respect to the Oklahoma City Thunder, pro ball was played in Oklahoma before it achieved statehood. By the time Dr. George Lynn Cross figured out that just winning football games resulted in uplifting the citizens of Oklahoma and brought the kind of acclaim the Sooners had been chasing for years, Bud Wilkinson was recruited to create what Barry Switzer would call “the Monster.”
The Sooners have won seven national titles and have had seven players win the Heisman Trophy. But that was the past, and the future at Oklahoma has looked bleak as of late. A program that set the standard for consistency and excellence, never suffering a losing season for the first 22 years of this century, has seen two in the last three. With a move to the most competitive league in the sport, the SEC, Oklahoma was handed one pop-knot after another. Head coach Brent Venables was forced to run off his offensive coordinator, sit his five-star starting quarterback for multiple games and saw his protégé and defensive coordinator bolt for the mines in West Virginia rather than help dig the Sooners out of red mud next to a Red River that looked like drowning the Sooners in the wake of an unprecedented amount of change in the sport.
Now, Venables has found a new offensive coordinator, bought in a new quarterback and, after swinging and missing on hiring away the best defensive coordinator in the sport, he settled on the next best option for his Sooners. He gave himself the title and the challenge of coordinating Oklahoma’s defense in addition to that of head coach. Still, it wasn’t enough.
With college athletics likely just months away from changing its business model to one that’s forced to share its revenue with players and name, image and likeness (NIL) collectives — which have graduated from glorified booster clubs into marketing firms accepting and raising millions of dollars to distribute to players — evaluation in the transfer portal and in high school recruiting has become one of the last market inefficiencies for programs to exploit. It’s why Venables made it a point to hire one of the greatest talent evaluators of the last decade to become Oklahoma football’s general manager in former Senior Bowl executive director Jim Nagy.
The move was more than shrewd. It’s the most cutting-edge hire in the burgeoning role of general manager the sport has seen and is the best support-staff hire made this offseason. Nagy’s résumé is paramount. He spent nearly two decades in the NFL as a scout for six franchises that made appearances in the Super Bowl and four that won the whole thing. In 2018, he took over as the head man in charge of the Senior Bowl and returned it to its place as the preeminent college football All-Star game each January with his ubiquitous presence across digital and television platforms. In seven years, his Senior Bowl has produced results. Last year, it had a record 110 players selected, including 45 in the top 100 and 10 first-round picks. That’s more than 40% of the 2024 NFL Draft class selected and as many or more first-round picks than every school but Michigan and Texas.
That comes down to Nagy’s evaluation, extending invitations to players across the FBS and FCS, and his relationships with all 32 NFL teams and most college football programs. There might not be a single individual in the sport who has a notebook on players and a Rolodex as deep as Nagy. He is one of the most connected men in football right now, and he’ll get to work using it right away at OU, where he leads the program in talent acquisition, recruitment, development, retention and compensation. He’ll do what most general managers at the NFL, MLB and NBA levels do — at a college.
“The work required to manage a roster, including contract negotiations, player evaluation, strategic planning, recruiting, and retention, requires full-time focus and skill sets,” Venables said in a release. “Nagy’s high-caliber, extensive experience in scouting, recruiting, and retaining top talent will pay dividends across our roster and ultimately on the field.”
If he had added “right now” to the end of that sentence, I would’ve called Venables’ assessment of who he hired and what he’s asked him to do to be perfect, but that’s not going to be the job even five years from today. Nagy is how Oklahoma plans to compete in 2025. The question now is: How will the Sooners compete in 2035, and what will the next Nagy look like?
For now, college football programs are content to reorganize themselves into NFL replicas. They’ll begin to practice that way, with many eschewing the traditional spring football model for one that resembles the closed nature of minicamps. They’ll pay players handsomely for what they’ve done in the past and as little as possible for the potential of what they could do. They’ll turn over rosters, and they’ll be taskmasters for injury prevention and recovery to protect their financial investment in players.
But that won’t hold for long. The money in the sport continues to grow and so do its rewards. Not long from now, expect to see a program outside the Power 4 adopt a “Moneyball” approach to the sport. Expect to find out that more general managers don’t come in the form of film junkies who learn to negotiate contracts on the fly, but instead with an MBA from a small liberal arts school or a name-branded Ivy League school. One whose best skill is spotting market inefficiencies and exploiting them. There will be a Billy Beane in college football, and that person will find a way to do what most good hedge fund and private equity firms do: squeeze every bit of value possible from an asset.
College football’s version of the shift in baseball, limiting starting pitchers to just five innings or prioritizing on-base percentage over batting average, is coming because it has to for programs without the budget to hire the next Nagy. Those programs will look to create a competitive advantage where others have not yet thought to look because they are not yet desperate enough.
We’re just getting started, but with TV networks willing to shell out more than $8 billion for the rights to a 12-team College Football Playoff, programs are going to do things they never dreamed of to earn a piece of it. If that means a group of analytical geniuses without a coaching background can turn a team into an orthodox winner, then that is exactly what programs will do.
RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports and the host of the podcast “The Number One College Football Show.” Follow him on Twitter at @RJ_Young and subscribe to “The RJ Young Show” on YouTube.
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