I've been a long time player to the basketball season and I'm just now looking around the college football game. I downloaded the guide from 2022 since I figured that would be close enough for now. But I had a question concerning about setting up my coach at the beginning.

In the basketball game, you can generate "rookie ratings" which have a defined amount of points to dole out between your attributes. I was wondering what an equivalent number of points would be for a rookie coach here. Looking forward to really diving in.

when you create a new career game and get to the stage where you create yourself, there is a button called "randomize ratings (capped)", that will use not exactly rookie, but in the low end of coaches amount of points (corresponding to early career with lots of room for improvement). Cant remember what the number is, but you can hit it and then move points around if you want to stay at the spot.
(If you play on hard mode, the cap will be lower).