The Future of College Football Looks Like an NFL Front Office

EPISODE 160: Edges.

When Jake Rosenberg started working his way up to vice president of “football administration” for the Philadelphia Eagles, there weren’t a lot of Jake Rosenbergs in the NFL.

Jake was a finance guy — a trader — for almost 15 years before Eagles general manager Howie Roseman hired him in 2012 to sniff out big edges and market inefficiencies across the NFL. At that point, quants were largely outsiders to front offices. The NFL was still trying to suppress its own Moneyball revolution.

Predictably, though, those big edges and market inefficiencies dried up: picked over by the swarms of data-driven, probability-obsessed financial experts who became the norm around a cash-rich league.

But there is a parallel market — by far the biggest component of PTFO’s ongoing series on the transformation of college sports — that is suddenly ripening. And it just happens to be the second-biggest sport in the United States. Even though the most famous figures in college football, the head coaches, don’t quite grasp what’s about to happen to them.

Which is why Jake, just a few months ago, left the Eagles and launched a consulting firm, called The Athlete Group, whose clients now include big-time football programs like the University of Florida and the University of Oklahoma.

The latter of which hired him to take everything he learned about NFL money and NFL players and design a college football front office that is ready for that scariest of things: the future.

DKN/YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:

Nostalgically,

Pablo