A roster is a stack of bets. Grade the one who placed them.
Recruiting, the portal, NIL, funding, and valuation are the tools. The general manager is the person operating them, and every commit, every portal add, every NIL renewal, every departure allowed is a bet. The engine points the same evaluate-the-evaluator lens it uses on players at the college roster-builder and scores the track record on five pillars, everything read against the level and against expectation, so a blue-blood earns credit only for what it beats its expected pull by. In college football the operator is usually the head coach himself, and the money is a thin non-revenue pot, both of which the engine reads honestly. It is a read on the operator, never a change to a player.
The tools do the work. This grades the hand that runs them.
Recruiting, the portal, NIL, valuation, and scholarship funding each have their own page, because each is a tool the front office operates. This is the scorecard on the operator: how well the person actually ran those tools, scored the way the engine scores a professional sporting director, as a residual above what the job expected.
five pillars, read against the level
This is evaluate-the-evaluator, the same honesty the engine turns on a player turned on the executive who acquires him. A track record of bets can be scored, and it is scored as a residual, so a manager who out-recruits a shoestring budget can rate higher than one who signs a great class exactly as his brand-name programme should have. The bet is not the class rank. The bet is what he did with what he had.
Illustrative engine read on the real College Front Office rating (the college re-scoping of Sporting Director Intelligence, five pillars, residual above an expectation-and-level baseline, 50 = average). Composite operator, demonstration figures.
Most college-football programmes have no front office. The head coach is it.
In the professional game the sporting director is one clean entity. In college football the norm is that the head coach runs recruiting, the portal, and the roster himself, so the module reads the roster-construction authority and its department as one unit, and resolves who it is actually rating.
This is the honest college structure, not a copy-paste of the professional org chart. Where the coach is the front office, the engine says so out loud and refuses to score the same person twice; where there is no real collective, it declines to conjure one. The rating adapts to the messy, emerging reality of the college role rather than pretending it is a clean professional one. Rate the person who actually builds the roster, and say plainly who that is.
Illustrative engine read on the real entity resolution (coach-as-front-office as the default, the same-person flag preventing double-count, the two constraint layers with the collective usually absent). Composite programme, demonstration figures.
The professional structure, corrected for college football's actual reality.
The five pillars keep the professional shape, acquisition, retention, financial commitment, player treatment, and navigation, but three of them carry corrections specific to college football, and acquisition leads because that is where the college skill lives. Each is a residual above expectation, 50 is average, and confidence does more work here because the record is thinner.
Navigation is lifted above the professional weighting, because winning any revenue-share for a non-revenue sport, when the money is claimed by American football and basketball, is a bigger part of the college job than spending freely under a flush operation. And navigation credits winning resources upward, never talking the administration into easier targets, which is the opposite of the skill. The pillars are the professional ones, told the truth about college football.
Illustrative engine read on the real five pillars (ACQ, RET, SPEND, CONDUCT, NAV) and their college corrections (the international pipeline, the leaving-up rule, the thin non-revenue pot), plus the read-only governance lane. Composite operator, demonstration figures.
Recruiting, the portal, NIL, funding, and valuation are tools, and the general manager is the person who operates them, so the engine points the evaluate-the-evaluator lens at the roster-builder and scores his track record on five pillars, every one a residual above what the level and the brand expected, because the bet was never the class rank, it was what he did with what he had. In college football it reads the reality honestly rather than the professional org chart: the operator is usually the head coach himself, so the engine says so and refuses to score the same person twice; the collective is usually absent, so it declines to invent one; and the money is a thin non-revenue pot, so where the signal is faint it lowers its confidence rather than manufacturing a number. And it never lets any of this touch a player, because rating the person who signs the roster is a read on the operator, not a change to what the roster is worth. Grade the bets. Never the title, never the budget he was handed.
Grade the roster-builder. On the bets, against the level.
The General Manager read scores the college roster-builder on five expectation-adjusted pillars, resolves whether it is really the coach, reads a thin non-revenue reality honestly, and never touches a player's rating.