User:Cmanning5/General manager (American football)

In the National Football League, the general manager (GM) of a team typically controls player transactions, bears the primary responsibility on behalf of the team during contract discussions with players, and leads the scouting department of the team.

The general manager is also normally the person who hires and fires the coaching staff, including the head coach. The owner of the team has a say in this decision as well.

The general manager will in many cases have oversight of the entire football department, typically reporting to the team president/CEO and/or owner. However, some teams have the GM act in advisory role with the head coach having oversight of the football operations (including the GM).

Some teams do not have official general managers, but instead have a de facto GM. Similar positions include President of Football Operations. Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots is an example of a coach who is the de facto general manager ; he has never been officially named or granted the title of general manager but he has the final say in football operations.

Responsibilities
The general manager typically will typically lead the scouting department of the football team. The scouting department’s role is to scout college players who are entering the NFL Draft each year. Many general managers start their tenure as a low-level scout in the scouting department and work their way up the ladder to either be promoted or hired to a different team as a general manager.

Regarding the NFL Draft, general managers, along with the scouting department and coaching staff, will attend college games, the NFL Combine, and pro workout days to gain more knowledge on college players. During the NFL Combine, players will interview with the general manager and his team and are typically asked difficult questions to find if the player does well under stress. The NFL Combine is also a place for general managers to meet with other general managers of other teams to discuss potential trades of players.

The first step to take in becoming a GM is studying business and management to determine whether or not you exhibit the interpersonal skills required for such a job. Being the GM of a football team is essentially the highest prestige in a football program. Moreover, the GM has final say over the head coach if the head coach does not also play the role of GM.

The GM is also responsible for negotiating contracts and deals with a salary cap. This means that regardless of a player's value to the organization, the general manager has a limited amount of money to pay the player. Determining how much of the salary cap to spend on each player is a near-constant concern for an NFL general manager. The salary cap is an accounting system that the NFL uses to pay their players. In NFL contracts, there is language that is stated on how the player will receive their compensation. The money can be in base salary, signing bonus, guaranteed money, and incentives. Those forms of cash flow can be counted differently according to the salary cap. General managers must have the financial literacy and investment knowledge in order to make smart decisions working with limited, yet such a large amount of capital.

Along with the general manager, football teams usually have assistant coaches specifically for coaching certain positions. It is not feasible for the general manager to maintain close relationships with all of the assistant coaches, making it essential he work amiably and intimately with the head coach. Although the general manager has more authority, it is the head coach whom players generally look up to and who is most often in the public spotlight. This can create tension between a coach and general manager and has caused instability for some franchises. General Managers must attend meetings with the media and make statements on behalf of the team. Although general managers only have to work for about eight months out of the year, they work around 100 hours a week or more during the season.

Being a general manager is a very profitable job, averaging salaries for general managers vary between $500,000 and $2 million annually.

Being able to maneuver draft picks in the NFL Draft is an important aspect of being a general manager. A general manager can will use draft picks in the draft to select players, or they can trade the draft picks away for players who already play for the NFL and vice versa, and also trade up or down the draft to either select a player they believe they will not be able to select at their current position, or they see gaining more picks later in the draft to be more valuable.

Occasionally, the owner of the team will override the general manager on which players will be selected in the draft. Owners in the past to have done this are Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys and Dan Snyder of the Washington Commanders.

Letting free agent players sign with other teams during the free agency period is a big part of the NFL Draft and team building as well. If a team allows players to sign with a different team, sometimes, depending on how lucrative the contract the player signed, the team that allows that player to walk will receive a compensatory pick in the next season's NFL Draft. Compensatory picks were introduced for the 1994 season. These picks range from the third round to the seventh round in the draft. The determination of these picks is an unknown system created by the NFL, even to NFL general managers. However, teams and the general public have a general idea of how it works. How the compensatory picks are determined is by the size of the contract the leaving free agent receives from another team. The larger contract, the higher the compensatory pick. It is also determined by playing time and postseason honors as well. However, if a team signs a different player for a similarly sized contract, those contracts will offset and the team will not a receive a compensatory pick. Introduced for the 2017 season and going forward, the NFL allowed teams the ability to trade compensatory picks. Using compensatory picks to build the team through the draft, rather than giving out large contracts to free agent players is a strategy many teams employ, such as the New England Patriots, the Baltimore Ravens , and the Los Angeles Rams.

In the NFL, there has been a lack of diversity in the coaching and managerial side of football. Introduced for the 2020 season and going forward, in order to rectify that problem, the NFL introduced an effort to change that by creating an incentive for teams to develop minority coaching and managerial candidates to become head coaches and general managers of other teams. The incentive is two third round compensatory picks in the NFL Draft for the team that developed the candidate. One is received the year the coach or manager is hired away to a different team, and another is received the year after.