Shane Beamer warns college coaches of dangers hiring a general manager can bring

Amid the burgeoning professionalization of modern-day college football, a growing number of Power Four programs have embraced the change by overhauling their front office under the purview NFL-like general managers.

Select programs have even dipped into the NFL to land their GMs. North Carolina and first-year head coach Bill Belichick made former NFL executive Mike Lombardi the sport’s highest-paid general manager at $1.5 million annually earlier this summer. Stanford followed suit by hiring former No. 1 overall pick Andrew Luck to take over at his alma mater with many of the same responsibilities as tradition NFL GMs.

SEC teams have also jumped into the fray, with programs like Alabama, Oklahoma, Ole Miss, Texas, Texas A&M and Vanderbilt, just to name a few, all adding GMs with various responsibilities from roster management to NIL. But as with any new trend, there are still some hold-outs that have refused to embrace the change.

Count South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer among those traditionalist coaches that still prefers to do it all themselves.

“We don’t have a person that has a title of general manager, because when I think of general managers I think of NFL general managers that are in charge of everything – (hiring) coaches, the equipment room, the training room, team travel, putting the roster together. And in a lot of ways, we have a lot of quality in this building that do all those things, but not one person that oversees all of it. In my mind, I’m the head coach and the general manager,” Beamer said Wednesday during the SEC’s weekly coaches teleconference. “I talk to some head coaches that don’t want to (handle everything), so they just hire a GM and he can put together the team, he can recruit, he can put together the roster, and (they’ll just) coach the team. I don’t want that. I love recruiting and every aspect of this program I’m responsible for and I’m in charge of,” Beamer continued. “So whether it’s recruiting, who we’re bringing into the program, or what we’re paying them, whatever it may be, I’ve got great people to help me, but ultimately I’m responsible.”

And in a season where five Power Four head coaches have already been fired in the first month of the regular season, Beamer also raised concern over the authority general managers can have when it comes to hiring and firing decisions.

“But you’ve got to be careful,” Beamer continued, “sometimes when you hire a general manager and all of a sudden you put another person between you and the athletic director and that GM is saying: ‘Well I put together a hell of a team for Shane … and we just didn’t get it done coaching-wise on the field.’ So you have to be careful doing that too, when you start hiring general managers to be a go-between is certainly a risk.”

Cynical or not, Beamer made it clear the Gamecocks won’t be going all-in on the NFL model like many of his fellow SEC peers already have.