Meet GM Ricky Ciccone, the mastermind behind WSU’s roster management, salary cap and more

PULLMAN — Ricky Ciccone hears a gentle knock on his office door and looks up. It’s Jimmy Rogers, Washington State’s head coach, sporting a dark gray sweatshirt. He’s wondering if his general manager is ready to do more of the work that has made him such a valuable asset for the Cougars.

Ready to go watch more recruit tape?

It’s a Tuesday afternoon in mid-May at WSU’s football complex, where Rogers and his coaching staff are working to fill out the rest of this fall’s roster, whose limits remain in flux. Both at this time and currently, the Cougs are over the limit of incoming roster limits of 105 players, but because neither side has settled the case that would set the limit, House vs. NCAA, coaches around the country are all in limbo.

Enter Ciccone, the mastermind behind WSU’s roster management, recruiting, salary cap and more. As the Cougars’ GM, perhaps the hottest emerging job in college football , he’s responsible for making the program’s roster tick, which means identifying and acquiring players that fit the coaching staff’s vision – and making sure everything stays under the team’s allotted $4.5 million in revenue-sharing NIL dollars.

Ciccone’s is an all-encompassing job, and WSU might not have fared so well this spring without him. So far, the Cougars have reeled in 13 additions, all of whom seem to suit their coaches’ new vision for the program – bigger, beefier athletes with the brawn to catalyze their run-centric offense and anchor their run-stopping defense. Up and down the list of WSU’s signings this spring, from veteran New Mexico State offensive line transfer AJ Vaipulu to experienced San Diego State transfer defensive lineman Darrion Dalton, the players fit this bill.

Thanks to all manner of factors – Rogers’ eye for talent, Ciccone’s coaching background and relentless recruiting efforts by the rest of WSU’s staff – that is no accident. The Cougars’ roster is beginning to look more like Rogers’ teams at South Dakota State, both with transfers from that program and players who align with the archetype, which is made possible by a structured chain of command. It begins with the program’s player personnel staff, then to the area coach, then the position coach, then to the coordinator, then to Ciccone and finally to Rogers.

A native of small-town Coshocton, Ohio, Ciccone credits much of his comfort with the role to his coaching background. He started as a prep assistant in Ohio, then made stops at Kenyon College, Marietta College and Division II Ohio Dominican University before landing at Toledo, where he spent his first two years (2016 and 2017) working as the director of high school relations, then coaching the Rockets’ nickelbacks in 2018.

After that, Ciccone moved to the administrative side of the program, accepting Toledo’s director of player personnel/recruiting coordinator job. The Rockets almost immediately reaped the rewards of Ciccone’s efforts, landing the Mid-American Conference’s top recruiting class five times in the past seven years, according to 247Sports.com.

Ciccone spent last fall at Louisiana, the home state of wife Tessa, where he worked as Louisiana Lafayette’s director of player personnel. That season, the Ragin’ Cajuns went 10-4 and made an appearance in the New Mexico Bowl.

But Ciccone’s connection to WSU and Rogers came courtesy of the Cougars’ new special teams coordinator, Pat Cashmore, who helped coach special teams at Toledo from 2016-17. That gave him a chance to overlap with Ciccone. After Cashmore worked as Rogers’ special teams coordinator at South Dakota State, he helped connect Ciccone with Rogers, who liked the idea of hiring Ciccone as the Cougs’ new GM.

Ciccone had already spent the past several years doing much of what WSU’s GM role would entail. He involved himself directly in recruiting efforts, in identifying the right players for the program. Some things have changed in big ways – “Over the last couple of years with NIL just continuing to grow and continuing to evolve, and it’s more dealing with agents,” he said – and new revenue-sharing policies have forced GMs to reshape the way they approach roster-building in some ways.

This is where WSU’s budget for fiscal year 2026 (exact numbers haven’t come to fruition) may affect on-field performance most directly. The Cougars’ 2025 budget was $74M, down significantly from $85M in 2024, a consequence of the traditional Pac-12’s implosion in August 2023. It’s unclear whether university brass and regents will approve an increased budget for 2026, but regardless, director of athletics Anne McCoy said the school has set aside $4.5M for revenue-sharing among this fall’s football roster.

That may be a fraction of the cap of $20.5M, which the biggest spenders across the country will have the facilities to distribute, but it gives Ciccone, Rogers and other officials framework with which to build a roster. As a baseline, all players will be on full scholarship, with NIL earnings distributed on top.

“All you’re doing is assigning a dollar amount,” Ciccone said. “It used to just be, he’s a one (scholarship), and you had 85 of them. Now you have a dollar amount. So you’re assigning a dollar amount to player X, player Z.”

That’s where WSU’s main NIL collective, the Cougar Collective, comes in. In what Ciccone called a “good working relationship,” he meets once every two weeks via Zoom with members from the collective – which helped raise around $1M to try and retain former quarterback John Mateer last winter. That went for naught – Mateer transferred to Oklahoma – but either way, it became clear the collective is building firepower as WSU alumni realize the importance of raising funds to retain key players.

“Other than that, it’s still working with young people,” Ciccone added. “Developing relationships and trying to identify guys that you feel are good potential fits in your program. In some ways, it’s apples to oranges, and some ways , it’s not. They’re still young kids, and you still gotta find the right fit. I learned a long time ago, it’s about the ones that you do get. You’ve gotta worry about those guys and make sure that they’re the right fit for the right reasons.”

To say WSU has a system in place for that would be to make the understatement of the century. To explain why, Ciccone grabs his computer mouse and pulls up a window on his computer, which shows what at first glance looks like a giant Excel spreadsheet. On the left-hand side, the graduating class, with drop-down menus that show names of players they’re targeting, and those have links to players’ information – weight-lifting numbers, sprinting times, heights, weights, you name it.

Ciccone prefers to keep the name of this service quiet — the truth is much of the GM job is shrouded in secrecy to maintain competitive advantages, especially in a world where deeper-pocketed programs can win key recruiting battles by making NIL offers other schools can’t — but no matter the name, it’s extensive and detailed. It helps Ciccone keep tabs on prospects’ vitals.

To Ciccone, the most important one is what he calls “ground-level video,” which is what it sounds like. It’s video at field-level, often only a few feet away from the recruit, showing them completing agility drills, moving sleds, finishing sprints. Sometimes the video is taken by coaches or parents, showing them measuring recruits’ heights and wingspans, giving WSU coaches a more accurate read on their measurements and what he terms “growth potential.”

Ciccone and the Cougars’ recruiting staff keep a file of game tape on each prospect, to be sure, including multigame cut-ups and traditional highlight tapes. But they rely equally, if not more, on video directly from the players at field level – to Ciccone , it can be more informative and predictive than game film.

To further illustrate his point, Ciccone uses his computer to call up an example. He navigates to a folder of targets at defensive tackle and linebacker.

“‘OK, they went through the pipeline as a linebacker. Whoa, he’s gonna be a defensive end based on the size, length and growth potential,’” Ciccone said. “And if you project down, you get bigger, longer and more athletic. So corners to safeties, safeties to linebackers, linebackers to D-ends, or outside backers – if you play with those guys – to D-tackles.”

But, Ciccone took care to mention, there are other variables to keep in mind.

“You have to know what their makeup is and what makes them tick,” Ciccone said. “Are they intrinsically motivated? Are they gonna take individual ownership of their own individual development? That’s the biggest part. You have all these restrictions. You have to be motivated, and you have to do things on your own, and you have to have and develop a process, and really become a pro.”

In some ways, Ciccone said, some of that is a guessing game with high school prospects. The same is true for players out of the transfer portal, he added, likening the sped-up portal process to speed dating. But that’s where Ciccone and Rogers lean on their foundation of archetypes and coaching connections, which they rely on to stay informed on details they can’t glean from a stat sheet.

But for Ciccone, at the heart of all this is his nature, his motivation. The same as the players he’s helping land are die-hard competitor, he feels the same way in his office, which is adorned with Cougar Collective hats on one shelf and other WSU memorabilia scattered around the rest of the space. Ciccone feels fired up, which fuels his drive to stay organized and connected, enabling the Cougs to compete in a college game changing by the day.

“I’m a really competitive person, and I like to compete, and I feel like this is an area that you can compete still with your peers and with your effort,” Ciccone said. “Honestly, having a vision and sticking to it … I like the part of helping to build a team in terms of the roster development and roster makeup. So that’s what I like, and I enjoy meeting young people and building relationships with them to hopefully make a positive impact in their life.”