Everything Mississippi State's General Manager said at Tuesday's press conference

College football fans don't need to be reminded that the current landscape is constantly shifting. With those changes has come other changes that more closely resemble a professional team than a college.

Most major college athletic departments are hiring General Manager to help their respective school adjust to the new landscape. Mississippi State's GM isn't as well-known as some others (like Andrew Luck at Stanford), but Marc Votteler is already on-the-job and in full swing with the House settlement now in effect.

ICYMI: Everything Mississippi State defensive coordinator Coleman Hutzler said Tuesday

Votteler joined some of the Mississippi State football coaches Tuesday for a media availability session. Here's everything he said:

So, we all think we know what a GM does in college football. You tell us what your job is.

It changes daily as you can probably tell from all these uh executive orders and changes in the rules. But no, it's all-encompassing with roster management. That's everything from high school recruiting to transfer portal to everything with the rev share now and everything that goes into that. And so just trying to manage and oversee our entire recruiting department, which we have a great staff of nine other guys and girls that help me with it, but just overseeing everything with roster retention, roster management, high school recruiting, all that. So it's a little bit of everything. You kind of change by the day with all the new rules they put in place. And it's day by day. It truly is. But it's a new job per se in college sports, but people have been doing similar stuff to this for years. It's just now you add the rev share and the payments and all that in there. But really roster management, high school recruiting, all that.

Along with the revshare piece of it too, how does it work from a budgetary standpoint? Like I mean who makes the decisions? Okay, we're going to allocate x number of dollars for this position group and how much flexibility do you have in all that?

Yeah, I mean it's with the rev share, that's a piece that we really have internally flexibility with to adapt to it how we need to and decide who needs what. And if we have a bunch of seniors in one position group, you know, they're probably going to be a little higher up because they've paid their dues and worked their way up. So that's kind of how we've approached it. But obviously every school has that 20.5 million that was part of the settlement case and then you divvied up by sports and so you have your number and then I kind of went through NFL just because it's so new to college — NFL breakdowns, how they've kind of broken down their position groups in years past just to get a kind of a baseline for it. But that's probably the most challenging part in all this stuff right now — it's so new for everybody. Each year you're feeling it out and it's the first time you have 105 on your roster. So you're always constantly adjusting and adapting to it. But that's probably the fun part, too. It's just like NFL. If you have a really good quarterback, you need to pay to keep him. You then kind of got to adjust other places to make it work. But once you have your money, you can divvy it up how you need to.

How has that first month of the revenue streaming gone?

It's been good. You know, I think we were set up well. Before we kind of just transitioned from the collective to the university. So it didn't change a ton for us. It just now the checks are coming from the university instead of our collective and all that. But it's been business as usual. It wasn't — some schools had to have new contracts and all that stuff. We didn't get into any of that. So kind of transitioned over, but it's been a smooth transition. So again, just adapting to all the new rule changes and not a ton of difference for the players here. We tried to make it as seamless as possible so they didn't have to sign a bunch of new stuff and think about a bunch of new things. But it's been good so far.

You worked with a lot of different people, a lot of great programs, a lot of legendary coaches, things like that. What's it been like working with coach Lebby?

Well, look, I was with Coach Lebby in 2018 at UCF for a year. So, I knew that we had said back then if he ever got a job like this, I'd follow him. I love working with him. His vision, how he approaches everything, his passion for it, how the players respond to him. You would never know that’s a first-year head coach. So we got to keep building on it but he's an incredible guy to work for. I've said it a bunch of times talking to the media and who else — I'm with him until he kicks me out, till he doesn't let me stay here anymore. So I have been fortunate to work with some good ones. I mean, Coach Lebby is right up there with the best. Big things in his future. But he's awesome to work for and I think the players and staff would all reciprocate that.

Is it fair to say part of your job is just taking a lot of heat off the actual head coach and position coaches and you're the target now when somebody has something they're unhappy about?

Yes. And that's a lot of it — is “Hey, go talk to Mark about it.” I think probably the biggest piece is the agent stuff. Dealing with everyone who has an agent now and talking — so the coaches don't need to be dealing with that, position coaches. So come talk to me and I'll handle a lot of that stuff with our kind of off-field staff. But yes, it's a lot of just don't let the small issues get to him. Take it from me and let him focus on coaching ball. Obviously, we work hand in hand and there's nothing that happens with me that he doesn't know about, and we have a great working relationship with that. But yeah, that’s a big part of it — keep some stuff from him so he can focus on the bigger picture.

On top of this GM role and all these things that have been coming in college football, the staffs have expanded and you're seeing more and more people work underneath you. What's your staff like?

Yeah. So a lot of them were here when I got here and I think we've adjusted. Courtney Williams we promoted to kind of an assistant GM title, however you want to say it. That was a big piece just going through that first year of really preparing for this revshare world — just another person that is tuned in with the salary cap and what we're paying and how it's all working. So kind of giving him more responsibilities with that and he earned every bit of that. Then we have Lee Will Banks, Andrew Lutz, Ryan Robert, Rod Gibson, who handle a lot of the high school recruiting — making sure we're getting everybody evaluated, constant evaluations, constantly digging for new names. And then on the on-campus side, really Andrea Hollis, Haley Golden, Kaylin Robinson, who handle a lot of the visits, setting up the visits, organizing everything on campus for when these guys get here. But it's really shifting to where it used to just be, I mean, you’re just worried about watching film and handling. Now you need people that are focused on the — you're almost grading your current team, and then guys that go into the portal you have grades on them to see, hey, can we pay for that guy, do we need to retain this guy, do we need to look somewhere else for this guy? So it's constant changing and you can't do what we do without a phenomenal staff and we have good people in place here. It’s just continuously evolving with these rule changes I keep mentioning, but we got good people in place.

You said that you're doing kind of an NFL model in terms of distributing the payments and stuff — why was that the approach you guys are going with?

And I wouldn't necessarily say it's an NFL model. What I did was just kind of look at the percentages of how they broke down each position. That’s what I was meaning by that — just to get a baseline of where they've been at. Now obviously roster numbers are a lot different in college — you have 105, you have 52 in NFL — so it’s not all going to correlate completely, but my thought was: okay, see where the best teams — I did playoff teams too — kind of broke down positionally how much they were doing. If running backs were 5 to 7% of their total budget or quarterbacks were 10 to 15%, O-line was 18 to 22%, just to kind of get a baseline. You're not always going to be in those — like I said, if you have a bunch of seniors maybe you're top heavy in a position that year — but just to give you a baseline. We want to stay between these percentages for each position to kind of just give you a range to work with.

Do you think we're coming to a point in college football where we can say these are the rules, we're set — in perpetuity for now anyway — instead of having to… it seems like it changes week to week. Do you think we're getting to a point where there can be some permanence?

Man, I hope so. I hope so. I think we're close. I think every offseason you kind of get a little bit closer to it. Some of these rule changes — everything's a lawsuit now though — and you get so much, you're never going to make everybody happy. But I think — I'm hoping within the next three to five years we do have it. But it's funny. You get on Twitter, or X now — whatever you want to call it — and just find out the new news and what the new executive order is, the new who's the new oversight committee, whatever it is. But we're getting closer. It'll get there soon. But for now, you just keep rolling with the punches. But I hope we're close.

You all have had some time to prepare for this era. How much did those preparations actually go through in implementation? Was it smooth? Was it difficult?

Yeah, we spent — especially when I got here in January of ’24 — we were preparing for this kind of the whole time. And the tough part with all these rule changes is — I hate to keep harping on that — but you plan for something and you think it's going to be this, this, this, and then there's a new rule that goes into place and it tweaks everything you plan for. So you go back to the drawing board and adapt what you had. But no, I think the planning of it and the foresight of our administration and just kind of putting everything in place to allow us to do this was huge. And again, you get the plan in place and you just adapt with the punches when things adjust. You at least have the general oversight of what you want to do and then based on the little changes here and there, you make your necessary changes and keep moving forward.

I don't know if you had a chance to cross paths with a guy named Ron Polk, but baseball coaches could probably tell you something about roster management too.

I went to their model and all that stuff. So this is nothing new there.Sure. And I met with our track coach, Coach Woods. I've talked to people in baseball, just 'cause — I mean, we have partial scholarships and stuff now in football that you can do. So I tried to meet with everybody on campus that has done something similar. This is new to football. It's new to a lot of people. But just trying to pull some knowledge from whoever's done something similar. And we obviously have a much bigger roster than those sports, but I've tried to speak to as many people on campus, at other schools, wherever, that have some knowledge with some of this — just to help out.

How do you balance keeping people happy monetarily, but also being fair for everyone else — trying to avoid situations like we saw at other schools like Tennessee?

And that’s one of the biggest challenges. Because everyone sees what's on social media as factual and a lot of times it's not. But everyone thinks you should be the guy getting two, three, four million dollars — or whatever it may be — and those numbers a lot of times aren't truthful or not real. So you have to lay out some facts. This is production-based. But every situation is so different. So you have to just approach — and there's times that “no, I want this much money” — well, we just can't do that. And the player decides to leave or whatever it may be. That happens at every school across the country. But you have to trust your evaluations, trust why you're saying where you're at, why your numbers are at. And there's people that don't understand it yet just because it's so new to this world — just why things happen a certain way. But it's no different than the NFL. There are cap casualties every year. There are guys that don’t necessarily get the money they want on one team, so they test free agency to see if they can get it. It’s the same kind of thing here. The difference is it’s every year here. There’s no four-year contract. It’s year after year — you're trying to retain everybody. But it’ll take a few years before everyone understands what the market actually is and what people should and will be making.

Are you saying that social media exaggerates some of this stuff?

Um, maybe a little bit. Maybe a little bit.