Across college football, the ground has shifted under everyone’s feet. The pressures on roster management, compensation, donors, and internal operations have intensified faster than the systems designed to support them. Even well-run programs feel that tension.
And when the environment changes this quickly, the familiar markers of stability and performance start to lose their signal. You can win one year and feel like you’re holding everything together by thread the next. You can invest in areas that used to create separation and see the return flatten. You can feel like the pace of change is outrunning the pace of decision-making.
In my experience operating inside competitive environments, this usually means the underlying scoreboard has stopped matching the realities of the game being played. That is what’s happening in college football right now. It’s not that people don’t understand the challenges. It’s that the old ways of interpreting progress no longer capture what matters most.
The financial landscape is one example. The wide range in resources across Power 4, Group of 5, and FCS programs has always existed, but the impact of that gap has grown. Budgets differ by tens of millions, but more importantly, the pressure placed on those dollars has expanded. Compensation expectations have grown faster than revenue. Retention carries new costs. NIL requires operational discipline that didn’t exist a few seasons ago. Staff bandwidth has become stretched across more responsibilities in less time.
And because each program is navigating its own combination of institutional support, donor reliability, compensation needs, and roster volatility, the idea of a single, shared definition of “success” no longer fits. Everyone can feel that shift, even if nobody has fully articulated it.
This is why wins and losses no longer tell the full story. They reflect the outcome, but not the conditions that shaped it. A program can overachieve relative to its realities and still fall short on the scoreboard. Another program can win, but in a way that masks instability that shows up later.
What actually determines competitive stability now lives in the inputs programs manage long before the season starts:
• The ability to retain key players
• How well compensation aligns with positional markets
• How consistent and predictable donor support is
• Whether NIL operations can deliver expectations cleanly
• Staff capacity to manage portal cycles and development
• The continuity or disruption inside systems and schemes
• The speed at which decisions can be made when circumstances change
These inputs drive outcomes, but they’re harder to measure and often sit across multiple parts of the department. Many programs are already working on these areas. Others are building the capacity to do so. Everyone is trying to interpret the same set of pressures with different levels of resources, constraints, and organizational alignment.
When programs face pressure without a clear scoreboard, decisions become harder to calibrate. Coaching changes feel like the most direct lever, even though many of the issues coaches face are shaped by external factors. Budget adjustments feel reactive instead of strategic. Donor engagement becomes inconsistent. Internal alignment wavers because each group sees different parts of the challenge.
None of this points to failure.
It points to a system transitioning faster than the tools used to manage it.
A more modern baseline for evaluating program health isn’t about replacing the scoreboard. It’s about adding context. It’s about building a shared understanding of the variables that shape the environment so decisions can reflect what’s real instead of what’s familiar.
From where I sit, the programs that navigate this period most effectively will be the ones that treat clarity as a competitive advantage. They will build internal agreement around their tier, their constraints, their strengths, and their pressure points. They will look at retention, compensation, NIL maturity, donor reliability, and staff capacity not as separate issues but as connected drivers of stability. They will make decisions that reflect the realities of the model, not the assumptions of the past.
And when they do that well, the scoreboard starts to make more sense again. Wins and losses become meaningful because they sit on top of a system that is aligned with the environment, not fighting upstream against it.
The win is still important. It always will be.
But it is now the confirmation that the system underneath it is built for the world we’re actually in.