SBJ College: Bringing cap management on campus

The NCAA earned itself a nice win in court Monday when a judge sided with the organization in the Charles Bediako saga. The NCAA has taken its lumps in court in recent years, and while this certainly won’t solve every issue, it’s another bullet point for those at HQ in Indianapolis that helps curb rampant eligibility issues threatening college sports and basketball in particular.

Cliff Stein spent a lifetime around the inner workings of salary cap management. Now he’s bringing his NFL expertise to college sports.

Stein, the former SVP and general counsel for the Chicago Bears, is launching Front Office 360, a cap management program designed for college sports’ front offices.

How does it differ from others? It focuses on evaluating players as much as organizing paydays.

“I really think the biggest opportunity is the evaluation piece because cap management is not just a spreadsheet with a list of players’ names and a contract,” Stein said. “That’s just your payroll. But cap management takes into account a very strategic process where you’re projecting values on players, not just now that are under contract where you know the number, but in the future.”

Over Stein’s two decades with the Bears, front office management evolved dramatically. Spreadsheets were eventually traded for more automated modes of ensuring accuracy in the numbers. The idea is to expedite that process on the college side.

“It became unnecessarily a very long process because of dealing with a lot of spreadsheets that had to talk to each other and making sure there was no mathematical errors or no cells wrong,” he explained.

In the time since leaving the Bears, Stein consulted for schools around revenue sharing and how to structure salary cap management. The operations felt familiar, a ground-up production where there was little infrastructure in place to efficiently manage the millions of dollars flowing to athletes.

Stein continued speaking with schools about either hiring developers to build their own software or if other service providers might fill the need.

Instead, he figured he could design something himself.

Front Office 360 came about through a partnership with developer RockDaisy, which already worked with NFL, NHL and NBA clubs on data management. Stein also brought on Charlotte-based lawyer Matt Kelly, who serves as an adviser of sorts to a number of athletic departments and ADs across the country, to help tailor the product to universities.

Deals with a slew of Power Four programs followed, including Michigan State, Wisconsin, Clemson and Cal, along with Miami men’s basketball team. Each pays an annual licensing fee for the software.

“An athletic director, a chancellor, a president, someone that’s responsible for the budget can see that, ‘Look, this is how we’re doing it. This is how we’re managing our cash,’” Stein noted. “Now it’s more accountability, run more like a business. Like an NFL front office that’s dealing with $300-$400 million versus $20-$30-$40 million. I mean, it’s nothing. That’s two or three players on an NFL team. But bringing that kind of mindset to how you budget and manage the money was really part of the genesis of having the system.”

Stein isn’t the first to enter the front office software suites for college programs. Teamworks, Dropback and Opendorse are among the handful of players already out there.

Yet Stein wants Front Office 360 used not just for football but any sport. The software is set up so that coaching staffs or GMs can adjust the program to statistics they deem the most important for talent evaluation. So far, that’s been applied to women’s basketball and volleyball and men’s hockey.

“We wanted to create a system that’s modeled after a pro grade model, but with your metrics, your data points that are important to you, and then assign a grade value to that, which ultimately you could assign a monetary value based on [that],” Stein said. “It’s kind of frustrating when someone says, ‘Oh, the quarterback market is $2 million.’ Well, is he a low-grade starter? Is he an elite player? Not every starter is made the same. So when you just start getting numbers based on the position and you ignore the evaluation, you’re missing out on the value.”

Clay Walker spent nearly 25 years with NFL Players Inc., the licensing and marketing arm of the NFLPA. So why jump into college sports now? Opportunity.

Walker, the new GM/athlete marketing and NIL at Playfly’s Virginia Sports Properties, was on the ground floor of the licensing deals that morphed into NFL Players Inc.’s work with EA Sports’ Madden NFL and varying other lucrative areas.

After a brief spell helping East Carolina, his alma mater, as its GM, he’s moving back toward his hometown to take on a new-look role.

I caught up with Walker about his new gig at Virginia and what opportunities might exist in the college sector.

Answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

SBJ: You’d obviously been at ECU, but why did this role at Virginia appeal to you?

Clay Walker: “It’s a chance for me to get back home into Virginia. Having been born and raised in Richmond, the opportunity to get to UVa., all of the family ties — father, uncles, my wife, brother-in-law — many connections to this institution.

“But the real value, the real driver for me was I looked at the University of Virginia as a sleeping giant. I looked at it as a great academic institution in a very robust marketplace, in a very dynamic growing region that if they had the right people to drive the athlete marketing business, then there’s a lot of upside here.”

SBJ: What are some of the biggest challenges or opportunities in college sports?

CW: “One of the early challenges, — and this challenge will fade to black over time — is that when the NIL marketplace opened, because there was no settlement, because the NCAA had appealed all the way to the Supreme Court and had lost it every step of the way, the NCAA wasn’t in a position to create rules, to create guidelines, to create parameters. Because of that, this new system just mushroomed, and the collectives were really buying players. ... When the House case settled in July of 2025, that practice got outlawed.

“The same thing happened with the NFL and the NFLPA, where there was this in-between period where even though the original lawsuit was about free agency, the commercial rights got pulled into the dispute because that was the only way that the NFLPA could generate revenue as a trade association, not as a labor union. When that happened, then the league went after those rights, and they split and divided the rights.

“... Some of that is happening now, where that’s a short-term challenge, but you’re going to have in a year or two, eventually, you’re not going to have anyone in the system that was part of that no-rule system. When that happens, I think then it levels out. And when that happens, if you want to compete, you have to have a robust athlete marketing program at your university. If you don’t, you’re dead in the water.”

SBJ: Outside of football and basketball, Virginia obviously has a long history of Olympic sport success. What kind of opportunity is there in the marketing space for those athletes and teams?

CW: “I think there’s something in those Olympic sports that are successful. There is local, regional sponsor interest. It would be very difficult for Playfly traditionally to unlock dollars for UVa. men’s golf or UVa. tennis. I think that this new approach involving student athletes will be significantly more successful.

“We have one of those Olympic sports that’s already on track to generate $100,000, and I’ve been here for not even two months. Last year they got zero. I’ve not made one sales pitch for that sport. The coach has done all of it. So, I think that for the successful programs, they’re going to find [a way to generate marketing dollars].”

SBJ: To that end, whether its video games, collectibles, etc., what in that space can be applied here?

CW: “The market for UVa. lacrosse cards or collectibles is not the universe. It’s UVa. alums. ... The audience isn’t everybody. The audience is people that have an affinity. They went there. Their son went there. Their mother went there. Their cousin went there. They might have a 12-year-old who wants to go there who’s a rising star in basketball. But there’s a database of those people.

“UVa. is one of a half-dozen institutions in athletics that have ever raised $100 million in a year. That’s it. There’s less than 10 of them. ... They are one of one in the ACC. If you’re doing that, then you have a database of committed alums. You have a database of committed people to the institution that still call it ‘The University’ or Thomas Jefferson’s University. Put those products in front of them.

“You don’t have to come up with a marketing plan, the way Topps would to sell a Tiger Woods autographed film or Scottie Scheffler film for everybody. This is for a select audience. ... I look at it as an untapped market. We’ve got to put together the products. We’re going to need to have support from Fanatics or Topps or Fleer, someone that will become the product manufacturer that will help pump those out. And then on the backside, the Virginia Athletics Foundation and campus to [help] get those products out.”

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