A roster is a stack of bets. Grade who placed them.
It points the evaluate-the-evaluator lens at the roster-builder and scores his bets on five pillars against the level.
The tools do the work. This grades the hand that runs them.
Recruiting, the portal, NIL, and funding each have their own page, because each is a tool the front office operates. This is the scorecard on the operator: how well the person actually ran those tools, scored as a residual above what the job expected.
five pillars, read against the level
This is the same honesty turned on a player, turned on the operator who acquires him. Scored as a residual, so a coach who out-recruits a shoestring budget can rate higher than one who signs a great class exactly as his brand-name programme should have. The bet is not the class rank. The bet is what he did with what he had.
Illustrative engine read on the real College Front Office rating (the college re-scoping of Sporting Director Intelligence, five pillars, residual above an expectation-and-level baseline, 50 = average). Composite operator, demonstration figures.
Most college programmes have no front office.
In the professional game the sporting director is one clean entity. In college football the head coach usually runs recruiting, the portal, and the roster himself, so the roster-construction authority is read as one unit, resolving who is actually being rated.
This is the honest college structure, not a copy-paste of the professional org chart. Where the coach is the front office, that is said out loud and the same person is never scored twice; where there is no real collective, none is conjured. The rating adapts to the messy college role rather than pretending it is a clean professional one. Rate the person who actually builds the roster, and say plainly who that is.
Illustrative engine read on the real entity resolution (coach-as-front-office as the default, the same-person flag preventing double-count, the two constraint layers with the collective usually absent). Composite programme, demonstration figures.
The professional structure, corrected for college reality.
The five pillars keep the professional shape, but three carry corrections specific to college football, and acquisition leads because that is where the college skill lives. Each is a residual above expectation, 50 is average, and confidence does more work here because the record is thinner.
Navigation is lifted above the professional weighting, because winning any revenue-share for a non-revenue sport, when the money is claimed by American football and basketball, is a bigger part of the college job. And navigation credits winning resources upward, never talking the administration into easier targets, which is the opposite of the skill. The pillars are the professional ones, told the truth about college football.
Illustrative engine read on the real five pillars (ACQ, RET, SPEND, CONDUCT, NAV) and their college corrections (the international pipeline, the leaving-up rule, the thin non-revenue pot), plus the read-only governance lane. Composite operator, demonstration figures.
Grade the bets, never the title or the budget he was handed.
Grade the roster-builder. On the bets, against the level.
The General Manager read scores the college roster-builder on five expectation-adjusted pillars, resolves whether it is really the coach, and never touches a player's rating.