What College Athletics Can Learn from the Evolution of Professional Front Offices
Over the past two decades, professional sports front offices have undergone a dramatic transformation. What were once lean operations focused largely on scouting, coaching, and logistics have become expansive, interdisciplinary teams designed to gain competitive advantages in player evaluation, development, and game strategy.
In Major League Baseball, for example, some organizations now employ more than 300 baseball staff - roughly double what most teams had just a few years ago.
Growth in Response to Complexity
This growth isn’t just about scale - it’s a response to increasing demands.
As the game has evolved, so too has the information required to stay ahead. Modern front offices rely on specialized experts to collect new data, generate actionable insights, and execute against a cohesive plan.
Strength coaches and sports scientists monitor physical performance.
Analysts build models to evaluate players with greater precision.
Operations teams ensure day-to-day logistics run smoothly.
Systems developers create internal tools that give coaches and decision-makers real-time access to key data.
Coaches still coach. Scouts still scout. But more and more, each role operates as part of a larger, coordinated system.
Strategy Requires the Right Structure
That coordination is what defines the modern front office: aligning diverse skill sets and responsibilities around a shared strategy.
It’s not just about hiring smart people - it’s about building a structure where each person contributes in the area where they’re most impactful. Just as importantly, it means ensuring people aren’t asked to take on responsibilities outside their core expertise. Players win games, but it's the staff that puts them in position to succeed.
Consider this: a coach’s primary responsibility is to build team culture, develop players, and optimize game strategy. If that same coach is also expected to negotiate NIL contracts or manage transfer portal activity, it doesn’t just dilute their impact - it places them in a role they may not be trained to handle.
In professional sports, these functions are clearly divided to ensure both efficiency and effectiveness. College programs must begin thinking the same way.
Why This Matters for College Athletics
College programs are facing their own inflection point. The emergence of NIL, the transfer portal, direct player compensation, and evolving NCAA regulations have created a more complex, volatile, and demanding environment than ever before.
In this new landscape, traditional staffing models and legacy processes are no longer sufficient.
Athletic departments don’t need to replicate the size of a professional front office, but they do need to rethink their structure. Importantly, the goal isn’t to add people - it’s to add capabilities. Solutions can and should be tailored to fit the scale, budget, and ambitions of each program. What matters most is building systems that meet the actual needs of the organization and enable smarter decisions, better alignment, and long-term success. That starts with asking:
What systems are in place to support decision-making in recruiting, roster construction, and performance?
Who is responsible for aligning departments and turning strategy into action?
How do we evaluate talent—not just on the field, but on our staff?
Building a Sustainable Advantage
College programs should be investing in infrastructure that drives long-term sustainability. That means hiring new types of staff, building flexible processes, and committing to systems that can withstand coaching changes or player turnover.
Programs that do this well will be more adaptable, more resilient, and more competitive.
The evolution of the modern front office offers a blueprint. College athletics should take note - and get ahead before they fall behind.