5:15 a.m. on a Tuesday in February. Chalk dust and cold iron and the hum of fluorescent lights. The strength and conditioning coach is already warm, already moving, prepping stations with velocity sensors and iron plates spec'd to each player. Through the winter he's stacking weight on their frames. By spring he's converting bulk into strength. Summer is the transformation phase, conditioning in the heat, where the guys who cut corners get exposed. By August he's turning all of it into speed and power. Once the season starts his job is keeping everyone healthy into late November, and December if the team goes to the postseason.
The NCAA caps football programs at eight hours per week with players during the offseason. Coordinators and position coaches get a fraction of that, two hours of film and two hours of skill instruction. The strength coach gets the rest of the required time. But every voluntary workout, every open gym, every early morning lift that isn't on the official schedule, the S&C staff is the only group allowed in the room. The offseason is seven months of the year. For most of it the weight room is the only room that's open.
In a Tennessee athletic department study on how players spend their time, eighty-six percent went to the strength and conditioning staff. Not with position coaches. Not with the coordinator drawing up the scheme that gets all the attention on Saturday. Everyone else's access is seasonal. His is year-round.
Nobody spends more time with the players than the strength coach. At Indiana, Curt Cignetti's first hire wasn't a coordinator. It was Derek Owings, the strength coach who followed him from James Madison, where the two of them went 38-7 with five conference titles. At Michigan, Jim Harbaugh promoted Ben Herbert to Associate Head Coach at approximately a million dollars a year. Five-star recruits told reporters they chose Michigan because of Herbert's program. At Ohio State, Mickey Marotti has trained four national championship teams across two programs. Ohio State hired Ryan Day partly because it meant keeping Marotti. At Indiana, David Ballou and Dr. Matt Rhea took the roster from 6 players who could sprint 21 miles per hour to 34 in a single year. Saban hired them for Alabama and called them "light-years ahead of others." The S&C staff carries a lot of weight in the building.
Five years ago, $500,000 was an elite S&C salary. Owings signed with Tennessee for $1.2 million in January 2026, the highest publicly reported S&C contract in college football history. The titles are restructuring too. Marotti's reads "Associate Athletic Director for Football Sports Performance." The person with 86% of the player time is finally getting priced like it.
There's one place his work is visible to everyone: the fourth quarter.
The 4Q Index: 136 Teams, Two Seasons
I pulled every fourth-quarter score from every FBS game across the 2024 and 2025 seasons, 136 teams, net Q4 scoring margin per game. I'm calling it the 4Q Index. It's crude, with no adjustment for opponent strength or when the starters sat down. But it asks a simple question: when the game reaches the last fifteen minutes, who's winning that stretch?
I also track a score-adjusted version, the clean finish delta, which only counts fourth quarters in games still within two scores (14 points) entering the period. That strips out garbage time and tests only the minutes that could have gone either way. The two metrics tell different stories about the same programs, and both matter.
Indiana. Plus 6.86. Number one by more than half a point. The program that was a Big Ten afterthought three years ago, the one that won the 2025 national championship, the one whose strength coach just signed the highest publicly reported S&C contract in college football history. They own the fourth quarter and it's not close.
The Leaderboard Has a Fingerprint
James Madison is 2nd. Read that again. The programs Derek Owings built as S&C coach went 65-9 (JMU 38-7 under Cignetti, Indiana 11-2 in 2024 and 16-0 in 2025). FootballScoop's 2025 S&C Coach of the Year. Every program he touched climbed. Now look at who just wrote the check. Tennessee's clean finish delta is minus 8.14. Dead last, 136 out of 136. The program worst in the country at closing football games hired the guy whose programs own the top two spots, and he didn't come alone. Owings brought assistants Josh Huff and Carl Miller with him. That's not one hire. That's a conditioning infrastructure transplant.
Georgia's Sinclair
Georgia sits 11th at plus 3.89. Close-game record: 9-2. Their first-quarter margin is essentially neutral: plus 0.15, right in the middle of the pack. They don't jump on you. In the fourth quarter, the other team can't keep up.
Smart said it after the game on September 13, 2025. Georgia trailed in the fourth quarter at Neyland, came back and won 44-41 in overtime. At the postgame mic: "We thought our advantage was our conditioning level, we thought we were the better-conditioned team." After a road overtime win against a ranked SEC rival.
The man who built that conditioning is Scott Sinclair, MSCC certified (the highest credential in the profession) and FootballScoop's 2021 S&C Coach of the Year. His offseason is a curriculum: Finish the Drill, Throwdown Thursdays, Squatober, the Hunger Games, Sanford Stadium stairs. October 18, 2025, Georgia trailed number-five Ole Miss 35-26 entering the fourth quarter then outscored them 17-0 in the final fifteen minutes to win 43-35. One team still had legs. The other didn't.
What the Scoreboard Owes Us Next
Indiana replaced Owings with Tyson Brown from Colorado State. The question nobody can answer yet: does the 4Q Index follow the man or the program? If Indiana stays at the top without Owings, it's Cignetti's culture. If they drop and Tennessee climbs, it's the weight room. Either way, the scoreboard will tell us.
Tennessee's $1.2 million check doesn't look strange anymore. It's the highest-leverage personnel decision in college football.
Related Analysis
- Why Predicting College Football Is So Hard — How our model weighs performance data including fourth-quarter splits
- What Is a Coaching Imprint? — How coaching philosophy shapes the systems that produce these results
- Understanding SP+ Ratings — The efficiency foundation that contextualizes fourth-quarter margin data
Based on 2024 and 2025 FBS regular and postseason data. 136 programs, all fourth-quarter scoring in our database. "Clean finish delta" counts only fourth quarters where the pre-Q4 margin was 14 points or fewer.