It was a problem when I worked in college football 6 years ago, and it's still a problem now. College Football personnel departments are building massive Google Sheets to track their recruiting and roster management, and I don't quite understand why. Although, I do have some theories.
Theory 1 - The software in CFB isn't good enough yet
Theory one essentially revolves around the idea that no software company has really nailed it. Here are the tools that are the most prevalent in CFB right now:
Are these tools not good enough to build teams' roster management and recruiting boards, not even one of them? Teams need something so unbelievably custom that they are forced to build these monstrous Google and Excel sheets that have little to ZERO automation? I don't know. I don't buy it.
Theory 2 - Teams are afraid to buy in to one software
The landscape in CFB changes drastically from year to year, NIL, Rev Share, Roster Caps, etc. - it's constant. Combine that with the perpetual change of head coaches and staffs, and you have a college football department that could be night and day different every 3-4 years. It's possible that all this inertia creates an environment that causes high-level decisions makers to stay away from investing in software, even though it could simplify and automate their day to day efforts.
Theory 3 - Paranoia
College football programs guard their data like it's classified intel. You’d think they were sitting on nuclear launch codes, not recruiting boards and roster management. I worked for multiple bosses at Auburn who wouldn't even let me access the main recruiting board file unless I had to make a specific update, in which case they would share it with me for a short time. Granted, this happened when I was a student worker. Eventually, I became the owner of the documents, once I was the longest tenured person in the department, but STILL - I found it maddening.
A few months back, I was speaking to a friend and former colleague about potentially building software that we could work on together, and the questions they asked about how the data would be guarded were bizarre.
"Is it possible to store the data locally on my computer?"
"Would it be possible for someone else to see our data?"
"How can you guarantee that someone else won't look in your database?"
Number 1: No
Number 2: Mostly no, but in theory yes?
Number 3: What are we even talking about?
I mean yeah any software could theoretically be hacked, but I promise Russian hackers don't care if you have Johnny Appleseed ranked higher than some other slappy on your recruiting board. Companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars get hacked every day. It's as if football people believe they are the only high functioning organizations on the planet, and someone else is going to steal their secret sauce. I mean, Google and Microsoft have both been hacked MULTIPLE times, and your football recruiting data isn't even in the 10th percentile of value to them.
Conclusion
In the end, I genuinely believe paranoia is the main reason college football programs resist going all-in on software. It’s not about capability or cost. It’s about control. Teams will use software for compliance and managing visits and other low-level tasks, but the high-level strategic stuff is rarely sourced from the software. It lives in a Google Sheet or Excel doc to which only a particular subset of people have access. All this at the expense of having student workers and full-time employees spend hours each week updating commits, logos, player pictures, etc.
What if you let that stuff be automated, and you spent more time scouting, evaluating, and prioritizing recruits? Then you might actually have some secret sauce.
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