During his freshman year at the University of Michigan, Jim Nagy outlined his career goal to a guidance counselor: “I want to be the general manager of an NFL team.” 

The man chuckled, “Good luck with that.”

Nagy was stunned. “I remember thinking, ‘Aren’t you supposed to be encouraging?’ ”

He had no connections. There was no career path. Nagy had to find his footing on the rickety rope bridge that is a career in the NFL. After an internship with the Green Bay Packers, he became a scout for the now Washington Commanders on the West Coast. Then, in 2002, the team’s vice president of player personnel, John Schneider, and head coach, Marty Schottenheimer, were fired. 

Nagy was spared by the new regime, which offered a seismic requirement: return to D.C. That was not an option. He had moved to Phoenix with his fiancée, Lindsay, who had just found a job. Nagy scrambled for time, blitzed his contacts. The New England Patriots, in the middle of their dominant run, allowed him to stay in football without napalming his personal life.

Today, the Nagys have been married for 23 years and have two kids. 

Nagy spent 18 years scouting for NFL squads, including the Kansas City Chiefs and Seattle Seahawks, and was part of four Super Bowl-winning teams before becoming executive director of the Senior Bowl—the all-star game that showcases draft-eligible college football players. 

But Nagy, the University of Oklahoma Sooners’ first-ever football general manager, believes he has reached a new career high point. 

Others aren’t so sure. During his introductory OU press conference in March, Nagy, smiling and relaxed, dismissed the concerns of colleagues who’d cautioned that he was entering a world of hurt. Nagy didn’t detail the downsides, but they are apparent. There is the punishing work schedule, the expectations and the weight of history—Wilkinson, Switzer, Stoops, seven Heisman Trophy winners. 

His new position is a job without a past, a galaxy of possibilities and pitfalls. Nagy leads OU's roster management and talent acquisition, including player recruitment and compensation. He also manages such responsibilities as the impact of rules governing the name, image and likeness policy (NIL), the transfer portal process and eligibility requirements.

Months after the press conference, as he drove from a meeting with the day nowhere close to done, Nagy’s enthusiasm had not dimmed. He is all in. He always has been. 

“I mean, really, there was never a plan B for me,” he says. “There was never a fallback plan.” 

Nagy’s entire career has been a series of risks. What’s one more? 

NIL and the transfer portal have led major college programs to a daunting realization: The old way of doing things no longer works. College athletes now have agents, sponsorships and empowerment. A college football coach cannot handle everything. That makes the split-model structure of the NFL franchise—coaching on one side, front office and scouting on the other—a necessity for a college football program of OU’s size and ambition, Nagy says.  

“Today's evolving world requires skilled management of player contracts, multiple player acquisition pathways and the allocation of resources,” agrees Joe Castiglione, OU vice president and director of athletics. “All of these are new and vital functions within college athletics. I am convinced that great college football teams will be set apart by their ability to continually innovate to meet these massive changes. Part of that innovation means providing every tool that coach Brent Venables and his staff need to be successful.

“Jim Nagy brings great experience, relationships and perspectives that will mesh well with our staff in the drive for championships,” he says.

OU’s willingness to adapt is partially why Nagy was eager to take the job. 

“I think if you're trying to make minor tweaks here and there to what you're doing, procedurally, that's not good enough,” he says. “College football today is radically different in terms of structure and the pressure that it's putting on coaching staffs.”

Nagy says Venables “understands the value” of his role. Nagy and his staff have taken on evaluating potential players, which allows the coaching staff to focus on player development, game planning, in short, “all the stuff that coaches love to do.” 

“They're not going to be grinding through hours and hours of tape to find one or two guys who could eventually help OU football,” Nagy says. “We're going to be bringing them players who we know can help. It's going to be much more streamlined for the coaches.” 

He’s familiar with building something from the ground up. When Nagy started at the Senior Bowl in 2018, “there was just kind of one guy sitting in a room picking players or calling people in the NFL and getting their recommendations. We built a real football operation there.” 

Nagy—who has never worked for a college football program before—once again finds himself inventing an infrastructure. In mid-May, he was putting in a grading scale and rounding out his staff, some of whom hadn’t yet arrived due to NFL commitments, while also helping to run the football program.

“This change isn’t going to happen overnight,” Nagy explains. “But we believe in the process. The fun part is that, once we get the process completed, we get to see it work.” 

The OU job so far has been fun, he says—really. In the early months, a 12-hour day was light. He'd had maybe one day off. His life was in boxes. Nagy was living at an Airbnb, waiting for his family to arrive from Mobile, Ala. Staying at the office was more appealing than returning to a temporary space, greeted by nobody. 

Still, Nagy is excited. And he isn’t alone. 

“I think everyone’s really fired up about what we’re building,” Nagy says. “There’s a newness right out in front of us all the time. That energy makes it easy to come to work, because we're all kind of feeding off each other.” Frequently, the day features a promising development. Nagy, lost in building something from scratch, fueled by competition, will glance at his watch. “It must be 11 a.m.,” he thinks, only to discover he’s once again deep into the afternoon.  

He knows eyes are on him. Work for the OU football program in anonymity? Yeah, right. At the Senior Bowl, Nagy saw how OU fans commented on every social media post involving a potential Sooner pro prospect. “I understand how important this team is to people,” he says. “I do not take that lightly.” 

Every day, as he walks to his office at Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, Nagy sees Heisman trophies. He passes statues of Bob Stoops and Barry Switzer. “It’s certainly a driver,” he says. “It motivates me. I want OU fans to be excited about this football team and enjoy wins in the fall.” Another national championship wouldn’t hurt, either. 

“I put a lot of pressure on myself, I always have, to be successful,” Nagy says. Proving people wrong is a longtime theme. “I've had a lot of naysayers along the way, especially when I was younger, trying to start this path.”

As he embarks upon the opportunity of a lifetime, Nagy knows that achieving a dream is not the same as sustaining it. 

“You just want to get it right,” he says. 

Pete Croatto is a freelance writer living in central New York. 

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