Episode 5: Kyle Pollock • Day in the Life as Associate GM

Summary

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Kyle Pollock, the Associate GM for Personnel and Roster Management at Temple, joins today's episode of "Moneyballers: Inside the College Front Office." Kyle shares insights into his career journey and the evolving landscape of college football recruitment. He discusses the importance of building relationships with high school coaches and trainers, the impact of NIL and player compensation on recruitment strategies, and the collaborative dynamics between the front office and coaching staff. Pollock emphasizes the need for 'player compensation models' to foster accountability and cultural fit in player recruitment--and some other great advice for aspiring GMs and his long-term career goals.

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Our Takeaways

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• Building relationships with high school coaches is crucial for recruitment, even in a Post-House era.
• Player compensation models are becoming increasingly important in recruitment.
• Accountability is a key factor in player recruitment and development.
• Diverse skill sets within the 'Front Office' team enhances recruitment efforts.
• The recruitment process remains similar despite the introduction of new tools.
• Collaboration between the front office and coaches is essential for success.
  

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Full Transcript

Luke Bogus (01:07)
Kyle Pollock, Associate GM for Personnel and Roster Management. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, man. Really appreciate it.

Kyle Pollock (01:12)
Yeah, excited to be here. Thanks Luke, appreciate it.

Luke Bogus (01:14)
One reason I was really excited to have you on is just like your career progression over the last couple of years has been awesome. going from Ohio to fast forward in 2025, you're now the Associate GM at Temple. how's that journey been? obviously the industry as a whole has changed. when you were there like NIL really wasn't even a thing. And so you've

not only blossomed in your career, but the career in which you are growing in, the industry itself has changed a ton. So generally speaking for you, how has been your career progression and your changes over the last five years or so?

Kyle Pollock (01:41)
Sure, yeah, so I've seen a lot change. Kind of got my start as a, I was a student intern at Penn State for three seasons in recruiting. So, that's kind of how I found my niche in football recruiting. Got my foot in the door there and then started as an intern at Ohio during the 2020 season. That was a really interesting time to start. It was COVID, actually got hired out there in July, middle of my drive out there.

found out the season was canceled, had to turn around and actually go home. So, I ended up getting out there. October, we had a three game season that year. So, that was totally different. We couldn't have kids on campus when I first got there. You know, starting to kind of just build out our class, work through, okay, now all these guys have extra years. With COVID and whatnot, that's been something that's kind of been ever present the last five years or so, kind of finally starting to phase out of that.

But yeah, I worked my way up there, was an intern there for two seasons before taking over as our director recruiting, did that for two seasons, had some good success there, won 10 games back to back years, and then moved on to Old Dominion in last year, was the director of player personnel, did a season there.

A lot of good memories there. Head coach was at Penn State when I was a student, as well as a couple other people. So, was good to kind of get back with a lot of people I knew and then got off here to Temple in February as our associate GM, working a little bit more directly with our scouting and roster management side. So, been a journey, wore a lot of different hats starting at a Mac school helped with graphics, helped with ops.

You know, who's the guy that would order all the food for the team when I got started? Stuff like that. So, now to kind of be where I am, focusing more directly on building a roster is a lot of fun.

Luke Bogus (03:06)
And that progression to you from DPP to the specific titles, Associate GM for Personnel and Roster Management. But that's interesting when you dive into it, because your org structure is really unique. there's two associate GMs. You're one of them. The other one, Khalil, I think it's a personnel and recruitment. And then you both report up into a general manager, Clayton Barnes. walk me through how your role has changed from a DPP to what the role is now. And then what are the separations of concerns between you, Khalil, and Clayton?

Kyle Pollock (03:33)
Yeah, so I think more specifically, when you're thinking about it, the group of five level, a lot of these smaller schools, you you're the DPP at a smaller school, but you're basically almost a one man band with recruiting. So, you're the director of on campus recruiting. You're the director of scouting at Ohio. I was doing graphic design, had never done graphic design before. Whereas here at Temple, I'm able to focus more directly kind of on our scouting and our scouting infrastructure. So, Clayton was the GM at Sam Houston for our head coach K.C. Keeler. Think of him almost as like the

the VP of football, right? Where he's overseeing all our operations internally and externally, and it's basically an extension of our head coach. He's helping shape the vision and strategic plan of our whole organization. With me, I'm kind of implementing that structure specifically to our recruiting and personnel side. So, I'm helping organize our structure in terms of getting players evaluated.

I lead player identification and discovery. Khalil leads player acquisition. Khalil, there's probably nobody more plugged in in the Northeast than him with whether it's high school coaches, trainers, all that.

His ability to kind of gather information, get us in early on guys. You know, he'll get names from coaches, trainers, anybody he kind of knows across the Northeast and is able to help identify them for us and then work with me and Clayton to build out our roster from there on the high school side. And then Nick Griffith is our director of scouting, came over from Georgia and he kind of leads our college personnel department, helps as well with the high school side, but primarily focuses on the portal and the college scouting.

side of things. it all kind of funnels up into Clayton and one big umbrella where he's helping, you know, shape our roster with our head coach. Clayton kind of is in charge of everything off the field. And then me and Khalil kind of help him through that process of building our roster.

Luke Bogus (05:12)
So, Nick's really focused on kind of the portal aspect. Khalil's really focused on the, like you said, regional high school aspect or just general high school.

Kyle Pollock (05:16)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so

general high school, but specifically with us, we want to get back to the foundation of building from our region at Temple. If you look when Temple was good with Matt Rhule, Al Golden, I believe the number was about 80 out of 116 players were from New Jersey or Pennsylvania. we want to kind of get back specifically to building from within that region. And that's where he has a lot of those relationships and whatnot.

Luke Bogus (05:43)
The relationships of the past is like high school coaches, trainers, for the future, when you think about agents and stuff, do you feel like having that relationship with the trainers and high school coaches is equally as valuable or more valuable than an agent? what does Intel look like in a post-house era?

Kyle Pollock (06:01)
it's kind of split, especially for a team at our level, right? If we can have great relationships with guys in New Jersey and guys in Pennsylvania to where if they send somebody to Rutgers or Syracuse or Penn State and they recognize that they want to get somebody closer to home, having those relationships is invaluable, especially because a lot of kids around here.

One do like staying close to home and end up staying pretty tied in with their high school coach. There's not a ton of seven on seven teams or stuff like that. you really kind of run, end up through it running through the high school coach, whether it's public or private school. So, that helps, but same time we're going to recruit the portal.

While we want to recruit regionally and build through high school there's gonna be guys from outside our region in the portal that we have to Build relationships with and get in on early. the agents are kind of invaluable with that and that was kind of where Nick comes in Having been in the SEC for a couple years at Georgia and Florida have in the background with the agents those relationships And then me and Clayton kind of have a similar background of running things at the group of five level wearing a lot of hats So, being able to kind of tie it all in with the information both those guys provide

to build a deeper board than you would usually be able to.

Luke Bogus (07:05)
Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. You're kind of getting all facets. It's like you have like the college portal Intel side, you have the high school Intel side, and you said to your folks, do they have player identification? Is that very data driven then? like beyond the relationships, where do you kind of slot in for identifying folks?

Kyle Pollock (07:20)
It's a mix. I oversee all our recruiting services and whatnot. we have plenty of different services that we use to help identify players. Of course, our coaches end up going out on the road for travel and whatnot as well. we're a school that has area coaches and whatnot. We're going to kind of be a blend of area and position recruiting just as needs dictate. I oversee all our travel and building out areas for our coaches as well. we'll get different lists from when coaches are on the road, they'll see you guys, body type them.

fit what we want from a player identification standpoint. And then from there, I'll run through guys. We have our kind of pipeline process that we use to identify players and work through that so that we get enough eyes on a guy before we feel comfortable offering him or taking him. then same thing with the portal, whether it's Nick finds a guy or our students, whoever's kind of helping us with that college scouting process, we'll work our way through our organization

in terms of who needs to get eyes on a guy. And I'm kind of help building out and implement all that structure.

Luke Bogus (08:11)
Yeah, that's awesome. And so maybe like walk me through the structure a little bit as far as, obviously no secret pre-NIL, the goal was let's get this guy an offer and let's try to get him to say yeah. And now it's like offers almost like step one. You have like so much more to go. Like, this fit in the budget? What are we asking for? What's the negotiation? What's our tolerance threshold? a lot of that stuff, has that affected your job at all? Is that something that like Clayton just takes on and runs with it? maybe walk me through folks in the past where

Kyle Pollock (08:21)
Mm-hmm.

Luke Bogus (08:37)
you'd offer and then you try to get them to say yes to your scholarship. is that process different now? do you think about stuff on the financial side before you even offer folks walk me through that pipelines change?

Kyle Pollock (08:46)
I think it kind of varies by where you're at in the stage of recruitment, right? So right now we're, you know, early April. So, if we're recruiting a high school guy in early April, odds are for us let's say we offer a player, odds are he might already have other offers or bigger schools might come in, right? So it's kind of, we got to get to December and actually sign the kid and then after that get him on campus. So, right now for high school, it's not necessarily something that's front of mind, right?

It's more so with those portal guys and whatnot. We're building out like our player compensation model for the guys currently on campus as spring balls wrapping up and then kind of going from there with the portal. really it's just whatever the life cycle of the recruitment is, the further along that is, the more likely it is to come up. It's definitely something that's on our mind, but in the high school side, it's not something that's front of mind, right? We want to kind of out a player that's a fit for us academically, athletically

that we can project them to grow into, body type wise, the kind of athlete that we look for. to answer your question, yes and no, it just kind of varies by what sort of player we're recruiting, portal versus high school, that sort of thing.

Luke Bogus (09:51)
Totally. And you piqued my interest when you said the word player compensation model. Then soon after that, you said academics, athletics. Is that very rooted in what you want players to look like to fit the culture and the scheme of your program? how much of that is intangible versus tangible?

Kyle Pollock (10:07)
we want to be able to to trust you with whatever we're going to be providing you. So yeah, that it definitely is something that's

kind of baked into it is the accountability factor, right? Of knowing that we can trust you to one, be accountable with what you're providing you and two, continue to be accountable once you've kind of started earning something. we don't want you to get complacent and go from there because ultimately our goal is to win games.

And this can obviously be an avenue to help with that, it can also introduce a lot of new challenges with that. So yeah, the accountability factor is something that's definitely factored in.

intangibly, it's something that kind of Coach Keilar, our head coach, is very big on. It's something that, you over the course of his career he's won multiple national titles. I think he's got a pretty good feel for it, for what a player in his program looks like culturally. the more they kind of fit what we're looking for that will only help them with what they end up earning.

Luke Bogus (10:58)
Maybe like switching gears a little bit. So, this is a lot of like what you're doing day to day today. Do you envision anything majorly changing July 1st? there's all this buildup and all this prep and all this planning for what revenue sharing could look like, how revenue sharing plus NIL plus other opportunities for athlete earnings could look like. does that substantially change your role at all? Do you have any idea? Does that change your organizational structure? are you pretty much locked and loaded with your process and

starting July 1st, that's just more to play with, so to speak.

Kyle Pollock (11:25)
We're pretty locked and loaded with us being a new staff and kind of getting in here right after the season. We were kind of able to build our staff around the changing landscape. I don't think there'll be some new major change on July 1st, just because every day something new is changing, right? So, it's that incremental change that builds up over time. eventually it just becomes now we're paying guys. that's

just sort of the reality of the situation, reality of the world we live in now. and everybody kind of understands that. So, I don't think it's gonna be a switch gets flipped all of a sudden and life looks really different.

These past couple years, having to adjust on the fly as time goes on, as all these big changes kind of hit at once and then come together to form a new landscape has all kind of built up to this moment. So, I don't see a lot changing with my role specifically or how we structure things just because we've been able to sort of plan for it to an extent because you can only plan for so much with how much things change. But yeah, I don't think things will change drastically for us on July 1st.

Luke Bogus (12:17)
And you set things up like really ready for scale too, which is fascinating. I think like your front office structure, if I can call it that, it's very structured, it's there. And I think a lot of other schools from what I've seen on the other side has we got our GM, great. Problem solved, like onto the next problem in college sports. It's like, that's the beginning. Like installing a GM is a start and then you have to bring in people they trust like you all and have those different separations of concerns. And one person's focused on portal, one person's focused on high school.

Maybe generally speaking, the whole GM, multiple associate GMs, is that a structure you'd recommend for other teams? Like maybe like what are some pros and cons that you've seen of a structure like that versus maybe a team that just has the GM and that's just a new title added to the normal structure with the DPPs and stuff like that.

Kyle Pollock (12:59)
You know, I think it's been great. I think one thing that's been big for us has just been there's a lot of different skill sets we have, right? So, I've been at smaller schools. Clayton's been at smaller schools. So, we have a lot of overlapping skill sets. Whereas someone like Nick Griffith has been at a couple of SEC schools and exclusively done college scouting. Khalil was a high school coach in New Jersey. He was the youngest high school head coach in New Jersey history

And has worked at Rutgers, Syracuse, Penn State, all these regional powers that has allowed him to have so many relationships in the area. That Clayton coming from Texas or Nick coming from Florida. I'm a Jersey guy originally, but I've been in Ohio and Virginia for each of the last five years.

all those overlapping skill sets is really what makes our structure work. the job titles are the job titles, but it's putting together a team that has different strengths. So, that way all the strengths can work together and create the best roster for us. So, you know, I think that was really the thing we looked for. Clayton sold me on, hey, I want to put together my dream team. he's, but he was the director of football operations and the director of player personnel and everything under the sun at Sam Houston. So, now he actually got to build out a staff of

that he wanted to work with. So, finding those different skill sets that fit Temple specifically were really important to him because it's not going to be a cookie cutter situation at every school, right? There's a lot of different challenges to every school, whether it's academically, regionally,

I look at the Mac, there's seven other G5 schools in Ohio. That's kind of a unique landscape relative to other places. So, there's going be different challenges for every school. And that structure, I don't think it's cookie-cutter to anywhere, but the big thing would be having variety of skill sets so can play off everybody else's strengths.

Luke Bogus (14:31)
So, that's on the operational side. what about like the systems side? Has there been anything that's you've introduced into your process over the last three or five years because of the changing landscape and because how recruitment processes have changed? Or do you find that you're the main tools and the main processes and the way that you think about scouting, like the identification to scout to offer workflow? is that relatively the same as it was for you when you started or what about that has changed if any?

Kyle Pollock (14:55)
For me, the whole workflow of the offer process is pretty similar. there's been some different tools introduced over time. I think one thing that we use now

both here and when I was ultimately more than we did in the past is and we try to rely on the miles per hour data a little bit more than just a normal 40 time there's ways to go about actually capturing that data whether it's off film or you know kids come to camp having them wear those those catapult vest and that's been really valuable for us because we can compare our roster to what a high school player actually is so we've done studies on that that's been helpful for us but the actual

school offer process, I don't think has changed much. I think some schools have gone about the model of having the front office offers everybody, the coaches recruit. That's not something that

we're necessarily doing right now. we have kind of at our discretion every now and again the ability to do that. But for the most part, if we're the ones executing the offer like we've communicated with the coaches beforehand and gone through that process I think at bigger schools where you have a little bit more of a bigger and built out scouting staff that can work. But, for us we still do need to focus on what our coaching staff is looking for directly because they're going to be the ones coaching them. And I think at

the G5 level too you also are getting more players that are projects developmental players so it's really picking the two or three traits that you want to know a guy has and allowing the coach to maybe develop or scheme around those deficiencies that they don't have obviously you'll have that at every school just to a different level but you know those higher-end schools are gonna have more ready-made guys naturally so

i don't think the process is changed a ton but overtime as more data gets introduced and you know everybody sees kind of either

What's working both for them personally or kind of across the landscape of football generally, right? the Eagles drafted a bunch of D linemen last year. I'm sure you'll see in this new roster limit world where there's 105 scholarship guys that some schools might start carrying more D linemen just to have those extra bodies. Things like that will kind of just change naturally over time, but I think the overarching process has been pretty similar.

Luke Bogus (16:48)
Yeah, and I love what you said too about just some people install this front office and the front office is purely acquisition and they hand it off to the coaches. that's what you pretty much do in the NFL. But, at end of the day, college is still different. You can't just fully copy and paste. Yes, it's becoming more professionalized. Yes, there's a lot of tools and tech and processes that you can be inspired by, but you know, this is still a very different ballgame. You are going to take bets on those projects in a way that maybe you wouldn't in the NFL. And so there's so many other nuances and one nuance is exactly that. Or it's like if you're, the developmental is big part of your

but game in your scheme, which it seems like it is, you can't just have it be completely siloed. Front office does acquisition, coaches do the coaching. Having that still be collaborative makes it where everyone's bought in and the culture's there. And so that's a good point to bring up.

Kyle Pollock (17:28)
I think that's really important to remember, especially at like the group of five level where you're not going to have a ton of freshmen playing right away. You might be taking a 250 pound offensive lineman as a junior in high school. He probably won't touch the field for 36 months from the time he commits. Right. So that's a long lead up. I think there's kind of there's the identification and scouting side. There's the development side and there's the deployment side. Right. That's kind how I look at how people

work rosters and ultimately the coaches are developing and deploying the players. So, it's important to keep them in the loop with what you're looking for because they'll be the ones developing them and then ultimately deploying them and scheming around them out on the field.

Luke Bogus (18:05)
great way I think to tie a on it. One last question is your last five years has been awesome career wise. I know you just got this role like two months ago, but like what are your career goals? And I guess like, would you say to aspiring associate GMs and GMs that are listening to the podcast right now that inspired you to come into that into that role? what are some tips and tricks that you'd give for the folks listening?

Kyle Pollock (18:23)
Yeah, I think never be above any level of work, right? Everybody's gotta start somewhere. I think the more you kind of learn, more hats you wear in your first couple jobs, once you end up moving up, the better appreciation and understanding you'll have for how the entire organization works. Kind of knowing the organization in and out, whether that's people outside of the

Recruiting a personal office at a smaller school for me that was always pretty easy, right? I knew the strengths of what our athletic trainer was when I was bringing recruits around and having him talk to him or the strength coach. I knew which coaches might be weaker recruiters versus which coaches might be stronger recruiters. I knew students that were knew a lot about campus are very personable, but I also knew which students were organized maybe

more back office students that sort of thing so knowing the whole organization personally and then not being above doing any sort of work it'll get you pretty far and then long term I would like to be a college GM that's kind of the ultimate goal is being able to to run the show you know to an extent I had the ability to do that at Ohio and Old Dominion that was the only game in town.

So, coming here, it's great having more hands so I'm able to kind of be more focused on the scouting side of what I'm looking for. You know, so kind of able to hone in on that. But, ultimately once things I think do pick up and kind of settle, a lot of these college GMs will kind of have

maybe not carte blanche but it be more the NFL model where they're in charge fully off the field helping fully choose the roster. Maybe they'll be hired before head coaches someday. Not sure if that's coming anytime soon but I could see it happening. Getting to do something like that would be great for me long term.

Luke Bogus (19:55)
Yeah, well, I'm pumped for you and I'm sure that that's definitely in your future. Seriously, this was such a insightful podcast. Thanks for taking the time, Kyle. Appreciate you.

Kyle Pollock (20:02)
Yeah, appreciate you having me.

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