CEDAR FALLS, Iowa — Owen Chandler might want to ratchet up his caffeine game.
Now a few months into his job as the first general manager for the football program at the University of Northern Iowa, the 2019 Ashland High School graduate opened spring ball last week mostly leaning on plain old water with a hint of lemon juice to boost his energy level.
But the tolerable, 10-hour workdays that led into April for Chandler are now being swapped out for a much more taxing schedule.
Sugar and caffeine can become a guy’s best friend in such situations.
For years now, working in the college ranks at Ohio Northern, Valparaiso and Ashland University, Chandler has shown that — for him — the game of football is a sugar-high all its own.
“I’ve dipped into a little bit of all of it, but I’ve never really been able to take the lead on it until now,” Chandler said of his new GM position and rapidly budding career. “I’ve got a lot of work to do, but there’s a lot of room for growth and I’m looking forward to seeing what this career looks like.”
There are plenty of people even in college football who are still trying to decipher exactly what the GM position should entail.
It’s a gig that has grown out of necessity in the sport due largely to the transfer portal and the inception of the Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) rights of college athletes, which allow players to control and profit off their personal brands.
A year ago at this time, Chandler said his long-term goal was to become a defensive coordinator somewhere.
But in January, about a month after former Drake University head coach and Shelby native Todd Stepsis was named head coach at UNI, he reached out to Chandler about joining him at the NCAA Division I FCS program.
The two have grown to know each other well through the years, as Stepsis — who played at AU in the 1990s — has long been close friends with Chandler’s father, Dan.
When Stepsis got to Northern Iowa, he was looking for a hard-working, organized, detail-oriented individual who loved football. He didn’t have to look very far.
“For him being young, some of the learning curves that he’ll have to face here these first couple months are no different than a lot of us that are new here,” Stepsis told the media after Chandler was announced at UNI. “He’s so sharp, he’s such a quick learner.
“I have a soft spot in my heart for the guys that started at the (Division III) level. That’s where I started. … You learn how to do it all and you don’t have a ton of help doing it.”
There’s no national database with a listing of college general managers. But at just 23 years old — and in a position many college programs don’t even have yet — Chandler is believed to be the youngest GM in NCAA Division I football history.
It’s a fast-forward evolution for someone who first began coaching in 2021 as a student assistant at Ohio Northern while recovering from an injury as a player for the Polar Bears.
He eventually went on to jobs at Valparaiso in 2023 (defensive quality control and assistant defensive backs coach) and Ashland (assistant linebackers coach, assistant recruiting coordinator, assistant director of football operations) last fall before heading west to Northern Iowa.
With the Panthers, Chandler will focus on recruiting, evaluating talent and searching for player prospects while also lining up campus visits, junior days and setting up travel schedules for coaches and the team.
If it sounds like a lot, that’s because it is.
“This will be my third year out of college,” Chandler said. “There’s going to be a little bit of a learning curve and (Stepsis) understands that, and we’re going to work together on that. There’s a learning curve for him being a new head coach here, too.”
Stepsis can’t wait to begin collaborating with Chandler.
“Owen is going to be a big piece in helping us architect the future of UNI football,” Stepsis said in a university release.
“Blending our vision with strategy, and turning our dreams into reality, Owen will build not just a roster, but he will continue the legacy that is already synonymous with our brand.”
Origins of the GM
There probably aren’t many assistant coaches in the entire country who understand the ins and outs of college football better than 2008 Ashland High School graduate Taylor Housewright.
A former star quarterback for both the Arrows and Ashland University, he recently was named the tight ends coach for Division I Jacksonville State.
It is the ninth different college staff Housewright has joined in the 13 years since beginning his post-player career as a graduate assistant at Miami (Ohio) University.
In that time, he has coached players at literally every position on the field, and has done it at every level of the college game — from Division III all the way to Power 5 ball at Oregon and Mississippi State.
Out of all the programs he’s been with so far, Housewright said the first to actually have a general manager as an official position while he was there was last fall at Georgia Southern.
“In the NFL, you have your scouting department for college, and they have a scouting department for free agency as well,” Housewright said. “Then the general manager was in charge of the entire roster, then they had these departments underneath them.
“In college, if you’re a general manager, you’re like an assistant to the head coach and you’ve got your hands in a little bit of everything.
“Boosters are way more involved, now you’re dealing with NIL money, now you’re dealing with the transfer portal, now you’re dealing with high school recruiting and even college recruiting a little bit with guys you think might go in the portal.
“It’s just a lot for the head coach, so the general manager has turned into this do-it-all position.”
Housewright said it’s a concept he heard began growing when legendary coach Nick Saban took over the program at Alabama nearly 20 years ago in 2007.
He said they started a recruiting department there where a coordinator had a huge amount of interns from the university helping out. For any player in the country who received a Division I football offer, Alabama had a profile on them.
From those early stages, the college GM spot today has morphed into something else entirely. Housewright said he’s even heard rumors that some Southeastern Conference general managers were making roughly $500,000 a year in the position.
“Everybody’s a little different, but it’s definitely a role that is growing like crazy,” he said, “especially at the highest level of college football, to kind of organize everything.”
Things will be a little less scrutinized for Chandler at UNI. While the Panthers featured Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner in the early 1990s, it is a smaller program with a sprawling schedule that includes FCS powerhouses like North Dakota State and South Dakota State while also featuring Youngstown State.
That said, he knows that every step in the college game is another notch in a football belt he plans to be wearing for many years.
“Being in coaching, you never know where you’re going to be,” Chandler said. “It seems like I’ve found a good spot right now, in this moment.”
A Different Football Mind
While the speed of Chandler’s career trajectory might be somewhat rare, none of the coaches who worked with him during his playing days are surprised.
Andy Tabler was his defensive coordinator at Ashland High School, where he said he could plug the undersized Chandler into multiple linebacker spots because he knew Chandler could process what he was seeing from the offense so quickly.
“You see some guys at the high school level who are able to play faster because they know the play before it happens,” Tabler said, “or they can just react to it quicker because they’re reacting to what they already know,”
While still in high school, Chandler would watch hours of film on upcoming opponents each week and then give scouting reports to Tabler in advance of the games.
The coach said Chandler would present things to him almost as if they were data.
“When we would talk about stuff, he’d (point out details he had noticed while watching opponents in preparation for games),” Tabler said. “He had a really keen eye for being able to retain what he saw.
“I told him one time, ‘You’ve got to get into coaching the way you see things.’”
That’s indeed where the road took him.
After considering playing college baseball as a 5-foot-10, 155-pound high school graduate, Chandler instead leaned into football with his long-term career in the sport in mind.
He landed at Ohio Northern, playing for 20-year Polar Bears coach Dean Paul and spending his first two years of college trying to bulk up enough to get onto the field as a linebacker.
But after tearing his PCL during spring practice in 2021, Chandler couldn’t help but stay involved on the sideline. Paul allowed him to work as a student assistant coaching with the linebackers.
In that role, Chandler said he could log up to 20 hours a week and was able to get a little bit of compensation via work-study money.
“I was like, ‘Hey man, we know you’re gonna coach at some point, so let’s just accelerate this process,’” said Paul, now an assistant head coach at John Carroll University.
He said he still remembers Chandler making in-game notes and relaying things to him between series. Still recovering from his knee injury, he was cleared to practice again halfway through the 2021 season — and he considered helping with the scout team — but he was hooked on the coaching aspect.
“As a student assistant, I understood a lot more than I did as a player,” Chandler said. “It was like, ‘If I knew this much as a player, I would have had a shot to maybe get on the field (sooner).’”
During his senior year in 2022, he helped coach the Ohio Northern safeties so he could learn a different position.
“He was still a student at that time, but if he wasn’t in class, he was in the office,” Paul said. “It’s pretty unusual for a young guy like that to have that hunger, that desire to be around the game and be involved — and then be professional enough to keep things we’re talking about in the coach’s meetings from some of his friends and classmates.”
Before he graduated from Ohio Northern, Chandler had an offer for a regular, paid coaching job at Valparaiso. He took a three-week break after graduation, then got to work at the outset of 2023 on staff for the Beacons.
A year later, he returned home to Ashland as a volunteer defensive assistant coach at AU, where he again linked up with Tabler, who since 2020 has been coaching defensive ends for the Eagles.
“In the coaching journey, there are so many of those jobs where you hear about coaches who had to be an RA in a college dorm,” Tabler said. “Or they’re not getting paid anything and they have to find an apartment and they’re just scratching by.
“Owen has been in three really great programs. It’s not like he’s been in a program that is struggling and doesn’t have leadership — he’s been in three good leadership programs at the college level.”
Chandler said he was excited to continue his college progression at AU, a program he said has a great history of forward movement for coaches in the game.
“I tried to soak up as much as I could in my time there and it was a great year,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of good things to say about that program and growing up around it.”
Chandler said Tabler has been one of the most impactful coaches he’s had and is one of the biggest reasons he wanted to stay in football as a coach.
A Whole New Ballgame
Now at Northern Iowa, Chandler spent the first few weeks of his general manager job beginning to organize travel for the team.
While he said Ashland didn’t fly to any of its games in 2024, the Panthers will be in the air for four of their six road games in 2025, including the road opener at Wyoming.
Chandler also has been spending time organizing things for spring football while keeping an eye on the transfer portal (he said 3,000 players enter it every year) and building out a prospect list for 2026.
It’s an exciting time in Panther football history, too. The UNI-Dome facility in which the team plays will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2026 and currently is in the midst of a multi-year, multi-phase, $50 million renovation.
For his part, Chandler’s to-do list is so steady that he won’t even be able to attend UNI’s spring game May 3, when he’ll be in Minnesota for a recruiting event.
“Recruiting, operations and roster management are great things for him to get exposed to,” Paul said, “because it could help him figure out which exact path he wants to take.”
Housewright said the general manager position is without a doubt the newest phase of college football. In the 1990s, he said, strength coaches took off for programs. After that, nutritionists began to filter their way into the game.
Now, guys like Chandler are becoming more and more essential every day.
“It’s a ton of stuff, with this being such a new position in college football — with the change of the landscape in Division I,” Chandler said. “It’s a great opportunity and I’m looking forward to what we can build here at Northern Iowa.”