Why OU football named Curtis Lofton general manager and what it means for Sooners' future (2024)

ARDMORE — The new six-year, $51.6 million contract for Oklahoma head football coach Brent Venables was the obvious headliner of athletics items approved by the OU Board of Regents at its June meeting on Friday.

Also of note were the extensions and raises for two of Venables’ assistant coaches, DeMarco Murray and Miguel Chavis, whom OU was able to retain despite the courtship of opposing programs during the offseason.

However, it was actually a third development pertaining to the future of the OU football program that was the most intriguing.

Regents authorized a massive $198,500 raise to a $300,000 annual salary for Curtis Lofton, who is now the Sooners’ general manager. That’s right — there are general managers in college football and Oklahoma is now among the schools that has one.

The board also approved a $40,000 raise for Woody Glass, the Sooners’ football operations administrator, to an annualized rate of $350,000.

Those moves firmly solidified the reshaping of OU’s infrastructure under Venables ahead of July 1, when the Sooners will officially join the Southeastern Conference, and in advance of their first season in the vaunted league this fall.

The regents’ approval Friday served as public notification of a “reorganization” process that Venables said in March had been ongoing for 16 to 18 months as OU tried to align itself with “where we feel like college football is going.”

Speaking to reporters after the regents meeting, Sooner athletics director Joe Castiglione explained in depth what he thinks a general manager role entails at the college level and why he and Venables decided to reshuffle OU’s front office as they did.

Castiglione also offered a glowing endorsem*nt of the newly-minted GM Lofton and outlined what changes could still be on the horizon even as Oklahoma has been proactive in adjusting to the rapidly-evolving landscape around it.

“Starting with the tenets of our program itself and how we look toward the pillars of our culture, the strategy that we have in place for a program to be successful, the bedrock of any program is the talent, the people,” Castiglione said. “And so from a position like Curtis is now moving into, we’re recognizing the dynamic world that we've experienced, but what we know will continue to evolve going forward in the area of talent identification, assessment, recruitment and retention.

“And so with putting Curtis Lofton in the position of General Manager to work side by side with Woody Glass in his administrative role — one being very focused on all the aspects of the talent and the roster build and how things are changing dynamically, and then all the administrative side — gives Coach Venables the right structure around him, along with his assistant coaching staff, to be in the best position to take on the world going forward.

"It does not mean that administratively and coaches (are being separated) — they're intertwined in a lot of the efforts, of course. But we just needed to create a much more targeted and focused approach to our whole roster and the way it's built and retained.”

What is a GM in college football?

As the ever-shifting world of college athletics grows even more professionalized, GMs are becoming all the more common.

In 2021, nine of the 130 Football Bowl Subdivision teams had a person with the title “general manager” in their employ, according to the Baton Rouge Advocate, and that number has undoubtedly increased since then.

OU was directly impacted by the increasing prevalence of the GM position in February, as J.R. Sandlin, the Sooners’ director of recruiting and player personnel for two years, left to become the new assistant athletic director and general manager at SMU.

Regarding the nomenclature of the role, some universities use the title “director of player personnel” or “associate athletic director of player personnel,” while some schools have both a DPP and a GM with some ambiguity in the division of their responsibilities.

The Split Zone Duo College Football Podcast considers “general manager” the best catch-all descriptor and offers a definition of the role, calling it “the person who is at the head of the snake of the personnel department.”

That characterization is synonymous with the delineation of an NFL general manager’s job. A professional GM is the head of football operations, responsible for commanding the franchise’s scouting department and spearheading free agent transactions and contract discussions with players.

Essentially, college football now has free agency, as players are allowed to transfer freely and are typically granted immediate eligibility at their new program.

They also receive some semblance of a salary through name, image and likeness allocations from collectives, the independent athletic fundraising arms of the schools.

So, how do these so-called general managers interact with college football’s open market for players? What are the similarities and differences between the established NFL player personnel departments and the emerging college model?

“It's no longer college as we once knew it,” Castiglione said. “But it's not quite a pro situation. We recruit, they draft. A general manager has — in most cases on pro teams — much more involvement in the talent acquisition, where coaches have a voice, but it's the general manager and the player personnel staff that has the vision for the team, gets the talent and provides it to the coach to coach. We're not in that environment as a pro.”

Well, if the coach still has the majority of sway on which players are acquired, why do schools like Oklahoma need a general manager?

In theory, college GMs share the load of off-field obligations with coaches. Their work makes the balance of talent evaluation and recruiting with coaching more palatable for coaches as they strive to focus on film study, practices and games.

GMs would help out by teeing up player evaluations and slotting both signees and targets for NIL salaries. As overseers of NIL and also the portal, they’re pivotal in addressing challenges that coaches didn’t have to combat five to 10 years ago, and that some, like Venables’ Clemson mentor Dabo Swinney, still haven’t figured out.

“You’re recruiting not just high school players, but portal recruiting is a huge endeavor now,” Castiglione said. “And it's not just something that programs can consider now and then. It is a part of the strategy, like it or not. We can talk separately about how the rules have changed. Not all of them for the good, but they are what they are. And that's the bedrock of our program. The quality of our teams and the coaches that are engaged in recruiting them. It's just not… it's not business as usual anymore.”

Ideally, even in the brave new world with GMs by their side, coaches would still be involved in and passionate about developing relationships with prospective players in addition to managing those already on their roster.

Venables certainly strives to be, as from day one he declared he wanted his program to be relational and not transactional, serving the players’ heart and not their talent.

As college football writer Alex Kirshner posited on the Split Zone Duo podcast, perhaps the environment one day will necessitate that college coaches outsource the relationship-building aspects of recruiting through their GMs. But for now, the GMs are less a conduit and more a complement to the relational elements of coaches’ recruiting efforts.

With that in mind, Castiglione and Venables believe they have hired precisely the right person to be OU’s new general manager.

Who is OU GM Curtis Lofton?

Lofton and his two brothers were raised by their grandmother, as Lofton’s mother was incarcerated and his father was not a part of his life.

His grandma worked two full-time jobs just to put food on the table at their run down house on the edge of town. The family typically spent the weekends visiting Lofton’s mom at the Mabel Bassett Correctional Facility, which was a four-hour round trip venture.

Lofton, though, stayed out of trouble and did all the right things. Aided by a pre-high school growth spurt, he became a stud linebacker and fullback for the Yellowjackets high school team, ranked a Top 10 inside backer by ESPN and Rivals during his college recruitment process.

Roaming Owen Field from 2005-07, Lofton developed into the Big 12 Defensive Player of the Year and an All-American under Venables, then the Sooners’ defensive coordinator and linebackers coach in his first stint at OU.

Lofton went on to be selected in the second round of the 2008 NFL Draft by Atlanta and played four seasons with the Falcons, three with the New Orleans Saints and had a cup of coffee with the then-Oakland Raiders. By all accounts, he was a respected leader on all of his teams.

Castiglione remembers Lofton’s OU playing career well and kept tabs on his NFL journey, too.

“Curtis was never a bashful player when he was here,” Castiglione said. “He’s very affable, outgoing. He understood his role, and he embraced leadership in the role that he was in when he was a player. And then if you watched his career in the NFL, he was a leader on the teams that he played (for). And I think, between his teammates and ownership, they all looked at Curtis's other skills (beyond) just the talent on the field itself.”

Lofton officially announced his retirement from football in 2017 and moved back to Oklahoma. His transition toward the family man stage of life had begun in 2015 when he married the former Jenny Nichols, an ex-OU soccer player with whom he now has two daughters.He went back to school in 2016 and graduated in 2020, finishing the degree he had started as an OU player.

When Venables returned to Norman in late 2021, following his decade of success at Clemson, to take over for Lincoln Riley at the helm of the Sooners, Lofton wanted to be more involved with the program and Venables had a role in mind that was perfect for Lofton.

A major facet of Venables’ culture is the behind-the-scenes work of the S.O.U.L. Mission initiative, the goal of which is holistic development of players into successful men on and off the field.

Working alongside fellow directors and former OU players Josh Norman and Caleb Kelly, Lofton has headed up the "life skills" part of S.O.U.L. Mission for the last two years.

By watching Lofton mentor the next generation of Sooners, Castiglione and Venables have become confident that Lofton is now the right man for the GM job.

“He brings a lot of perspective and I think his experiences have really helped position him to take on this new role. And he's got the moxie to handle all the different things that go into it,” Castiglione said. “But he'll be the first to say that, like any of us, you have to continue to be a lifelong learner, because this whole area is going to continue to evolve.

“He does a lot of work in trying to prepare, talk to people. He talks to NFL people. He's talking to anybody and everybody that has a good level of experience that he can draw from to try to bring something special to the job. You have to stay nimble and flexible and he has been good at that.”

Lofton’s secondary role within S.O.U.L. Mission was as “NFL liaison” which would suggest that he has quite the rolodex of contacts in both the college and professional football worlds.

But it’s the ability to relate to anyone and everyone he’s interacting with that will be Lofton’s greatest asset in his new job, Castiglione said.Lofton has been through everything that the players he’s working with might experience in life.

He ascended from growing up with next to nothing to wisely stewarding roughly $30 million in career earnings. He transitioned from starring in high school and college to being a high-round draft pick and establishing himself as a reliable veteran who never missed a game in his NFL career.

He’s a strong family man, a willing advisor for those who would like to follow in his footsteps and now he’s the face of OU’s restructured and future-focused player personnel department.

“He's a great relationship builder,” Castiglione said. “And he relates to everybody — coaches, players alike. We obviously are now engaging him in NIL aspects, so he's gotta be key in there as representing what's best for the roster.

“We have rules that are changing before us, so even the first couple of years or so we couldn't do certain things, but now the rules are changing, and we're going to have a court case potentially settled here in the next year. So we're just, again, trying to put ourselves in the best position to continue to help the program be successful and Curtis will be in a very important role for that jump.”

How will OU’s operations further evolve?

If there were a most significant challenge for Lofton in his new undertaking and the operation Oklahoma has now shifted into place around him, it would be this: under current NCAA rules, coaches and support staffers are not allowed to do NIL salary cap work in conjunction with their collectives.

So, Lofton, OU’s GM, presently cannot touch what is one of the main responsibilities of a professional GM — working with a salary cap analyst to decide where the money goes. The NIL slotting obligations are currently up to the collectives alone.

Jason Belzer is the CEO of Student Athlete NIL (SANIL), the company that owns what was OU’s main collective, Crimson and Cream, and several other schools’ collectives.

On the Split Zone Duo pod, Kirshner said the optimal future is one where the collective is simply telling the player personnel department how much money is available in the NIL salary pool and the general managers are actually deciding how to allocate the money themselves.

That is ultimately what OU is positioning itself for with its latest support staff moves: having a GM in Lofton who’s ready to work hand-in-hand with the collective to build and maintain a championship-caliber roster.

“Keeping a roster together has never been more challenging,” Castiglione said. “It never has, especially in the last several months where players can now transfer as often as they want. ... We've now seen situations where an athlete is going to a third school in one academic year. There is no way you can tell me that is healthy in the long run. Most likely, they will probably change schools at least one or two more times before the end of their career.

“But it doesn't do us any good at the moment to focus all of your attention on what (the current transfer portal system is) not doing. We've got to be competitive in the space. There has to be an intersection now that the actual opportunities for NIL are accessed outside of the program and the collective is engaged and involved in working directly with the athletes on each one of those.”

To help fill out the Lofton-led player personnel department, Oklahoma has hired Chuck Lillie, who was a scouting analyst at Kansas State, to be its assistant general manager. Castiglione said there are other player personnel hires that have already been made and more that OU is hoping to make.

He also hinted that Oklahoma would announce some significant news in the NIL space this week — another “refinement” of its strategy for talent acquisition and retention.

Castiglione said in a press release that 1Oklahoma is "a natural next iteration of how we create opportunity for Student-Athletes at OU. This unified entity further cements OU as a leader in the NIL space and helps us serve our Student-Athletes and fans in new ways."

As long as the world of college athletics keeps changing, the Sooners have to, and will, keep adjusting too.

“To say that we have every answer, have everything figured out to a tee — that's just not possible the way this world is evolving so quickly,” Castiglione said. “Even some of the ideas that we think are unique and haven't been tested out there, but we're ready to launch, sometimes by the time we get to the launch, the world has changed and you have to kind of pull the reins back a little bit and say ‘Maybe we need to create a little different tactical approach.’

“It's just the way the world is and we have to stay flexible and nimble and pivot just to give our program the best possible chance. So doing what we do to put our people in the right position is the biggest key of all. So all these moves that you've heard about are all geared toward positioning people for success.”

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