LSU football senior associate AD for football administration Austin Thomas (essentially LSU football’s general manager) is constantly looking for ways to give LSU an edge in the personnel department. This offseason, that meant taking a trip with LSU athletic director Scott Woodward to visit the Seattle Seahawks.

“It was an incredible opportunity to go learn with the Seahawks organization. And, again, we were all ears listening to what they had to say and what they had to tell us in ways that we could maximize, really, our roster and the allocation of funding and kind of drawing parallels between the NFL salary cap and what we do here,” Thomas said.

Advertisement

As college football continues to resemble professional football with the introduction of a salary cap, collegiate programs are leaning on the expertise of NFL organizations. But despite the similarities, gaps remain.

“The NFL salary cap is about $280 million this year. Ours is significantly less,” Thomas said.

Last week, LSU head coach Brian Kelly said the Tigers spent around $18 million on the 2025 roster.

Another area where the NFL and college games differ is transparency. In the NFL, contract details are readily available. It’s not hard to find out the true market value of a player. That’s not the case in college.

Advertisement

“There’s a lot of transparency with the organizations. There’s none, right, in the college game. And so understanding that and being able to have kind of a matrix to launch from, I think, is really important. And what they did is they really backed us and made us feel sound in our judgment in how we were building it and how we were allocating our funding across the positions,” Thomas said.

Thomas’s approach led to LSU building its most talented roster of the Brian Kelly era in 2025. LSU signed the top-ranked transfer portal class, along with retaining key players like quarterback Garrett Nussmeier and wide receiver Aaron Anderson.

This article originally appeared on LSU Wire: Why LSU’s Scott Woodward and Austin Thomas visited Seattle Seahawks