For ACC teams, adding an NFL-like front office is the new norm for transfer-portal recruiting

New Boston College coach Bill O’Brien wanted to build a pro-style approach to handle the growing demands of recruiting in the transfer-portal era. North Carolina State’s Dave Doeren saw the same need in his 12th season.

For coaches old and new in the Atlantic Coast Conference and nationally, there’s been a push to bolster staffs for a wildly different landscape with players able to move freely between schools and cash in on their own fame within the past four years.

That includes athletic departments building their own NFL-esque front offices, which can prepare for candidates who might potentially change addresses and do the advance scouting work before the portal window opens and teams are clear to race in with official pitches.

“We’re continuing to grow,” said California coach Justin Wilcox, whose Bears are in their first ACC season. “I think that’s the one area where you’re going to really see teams continue to grow, personnel-wise. The recruiting department, call it whatever you want, the personnel department — absolutely.”

Coaches no longer lean exclusively on recruiting the high school ranks and developing talent over time to strengthen a program, thanks to the readily available stream of experienced college talent ready to move from one campus to another.

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The 68 schools in the Power Four conferences — the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten and Southeastern — along with Notre Dame, added 1,063 transfers ahead of the 2024 season at an average of 15.9 per school, according to data from 247Sports. Roughly 17% of those (179) were considered four-star prospects and six were five-star additions.

In the ACC specifically, schools added an average of 14.8 transfers, with 2.2 of those being four-star talents, with Clemson as the notable outlier as Dabo Swinney largely passes on the portal.

The right fits

A school’s target could be a player lost in a close recruiting battle out of high school. Maybe it’s a talented prospect from the region who isn’t playing much or off to a slow start at their current school, raising at least the possibility they could be looking to move back closer to home. Tracking all of that is now part of the job of running a major college program — part predicting what pieces might become available, part assessing which of those will fit the roster puzzle — as players jump in and out of the portal sometimes weeks before schools resume classes for a semester.

Miami coach Mario Cristobal said working ahead can only help when facing that tight window, which opens Dec. 9.

“There’s not enough work done on the front end,” Cristobal said. “Players and families don’t know enough about a program, and programs don’t know enough about players and families. If there’s more investment on the front end, I’ve got to believe the back end is going to look better, like any business model.”

At N.C. State, Doeren hired Andy Vaughn — with previous stops at Arizona State, Miami, Arizona and Nebraska — as general manager before the 2023 season. Vaughn oversees a player-personnel department that has doubled from three full-time staffers in 2022 to six.

“We have write-ups on guys that we think fit our program, if they go into the portal, then you already know this is a yes, this is a no,” Doeren said. “It is an NFL model and I think most schools at this level are in that. It’s really hard not to do it that way. We tried a few years back. it’s just, you feel like you’re chasing your tail. Guy goes in the portal, you don’t know anything about him, you didn’t do any research and you don’t have enough time to figure it out. And you can make some really bad decisions.”

League-wide steps

Florida State has gone from seven full-time staffers making a combined $615,000 for the 2020 season to 14 staffers this season with a budget that has nearly tripled ($1.81 million), according to data from a public records request.

North Carolina has gone from three football personnel staffers in 2020 to seven for 2024, according to a public records request That group is led by general manager Pat Suddes, hired in 2022 after stops that included Georgia Tech, Auburn and working under Nick Saban at Alabama.

For O’Brien, a former head coach of the NFL’s Houston Texans in his first season at BC, the NFL structure of having a general manager, a director of pro personnel and a director of college scouting made sense for the Eagles. The tweak for college was instead having groups for high-school and transfer-portal recruiting, complete with undergraduates pursuing potential future football front-office careers working.

“You interview and train them,” O’Brien said. “You’re not just going to listen to them right away. They have to earn their stripes a little bit.”

Fellow new coach Fran Brown at Syracuse found inspiration from his time as a top recruiter at Georgia under Kirby Smart and has personnel staffers sitting “right next to my office.”

“Go Dawgs,” Brown said. “Followed that. It works. Kirby’s an amazing head coach, and I just followed that.”

SMU hired general manager J.R. Sandlin away from Oklahoma to oversee a growing department as the Mustangs entered the ACC.

“We already had enough coaches, we already had enough everywhere else,” coach Rhett Lashlee said. “We had to not only bulk up, but we had to put better systems in place to be more efficient, more organized. And that’s where J.R. has been really beneficial.”

More to come

There is no telling how much these setups will evolve in what is still a new world.

NCAA rules don’t limit the size of support staff within a program, and schools can decide how much to spend. And that’s another example of where Big Ten and SEC revenue advantages over the ACC and Big 12 could loom large, particularly in post-realignment TV deals and growing future revenues from the expanded College Football Playoff.

“There’s probably not a limit,” Wilcox said of the number of staffers a team could add. “I’m sure there’s some teams testing that.”

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