Today in the Friday Wrap (register here), we conduct a long-awaited deep dive into Power 4 front offices. It’s something I’ve wondered about for a long time, and it mirrors our actual breakdown of NFL front offices, which will come later this fall (here’s last year’s if you’re interested in geeking out).

Anywhere, here’s our big board if you want to see what we found out (sorry, pay link). Before you dig into tonight’s Wrap (which comes out at 7:30 p.m. EDT), in which we make our observations and insights about the current state of football front offices, I wanted to set the table a little.

• Lots of teams have scouting analysts and scouting assistants that they list on the team’s website. However, we didn’t count those positions as true executive-level positions. We only counted GMs/AGMs, directors and coordinators.
• Though we didn’t actually count the number of chiefs of staff, that position seems to be far more necessary than GM these days. Obviously, some of those chiefs of staff are doing some amount of evaluation and scouting, though it’s nearly impossible to guess which do and how much.
• Though it seems like every program has a general manager these days, at least at the P4 level, that’s not true. Not even close. We only counted 59, and that’s with eight school officials that seemed to act as GMs even if they didn’t hold the actual title. Where we had to guess, we did it based on our conversations with NIL agents and other college staffers during our ratings posts in the Wrap and on ITL.
• When it comes to scouting, some schools cleave up their departments based on offensive and defensive evaluation. Others do it based on the portal vs. high school personnel. I don’t know which way is right, and if there’s a majority on how most do it, I didn’t see it.
• Analytics is a hot topic, especially on the NFL side, but on the college side, it’s still not a primary focus. There are a handful of schools that have analytics staffers, but for the most part, that seems to be farmed out to the various software services that are such a big part of how colleges work.
• Incidentally, a conversation I had with a P4 GM last week led me to believe that more and more teams (about 12, by my count) are looking to build their own proprietary tech structures that give them even better access to the information they have, which might mean they start to move away from subscription services. But that’s a conversation for another day.
• Even fewer schools have staffers assigned to artificial intelligence, though I expect that to change. USC, of course, is the exception, though there are probably a half-dozen schools with a football technology staff member, and those jobs could have an AI component.

Anyway, if the changing face of college front offices interests you, and it probably should if you work in the football space, make sure to check out the Wrap later today and today’s post at the mother ship. It’s a fascinating and quickly-changing part of the college football universe.