Monthly Archives: January 2017

Week 3: A Final Road Roundup

27 Friday Jan 2017

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I came off the road this week after spending Sunday through Wednesday in Lower Alabama for the Senior Bowl, one of the best weeks of the year if you’re in the football profession. It’s football with a side of Mardi Gras in a friendly town reminiscent of New Orleans.

Here are a few thoughts from the road.

  • Most bizarre/sadly funny/semi-tragic plane flight story of the week comes from Jeff Jankovich, an agent I’ve profiled in this space before. Jeff took off from Reagan Airport on Monday morning. About 10 minutes into the flight, the pilot comes over the intercom to say that there’s a mechanical issue and they’ll have to land. That’s the bad news. The really bad news is that they had too much fuel, so they had to circle for two hours before it was safe to put down. Of course, they landed not back at Reagan, but at Dulles. By the time Jeff had deplaned; traveled an hour-and-a-half (through traffic, by bus) from Reagan back to Dulles; then waited in line to be re-ticketed, it was 3 p.m. and there were no more flights to New Orleans. His best option was to go home, then take an early flight the next day to Atlanta, rent a car and drive (about five hours from Mobile; New Orleans is about two). It was not a banner day for American Airlines. Incidentally, big congrats to Jeff for having his first Senior Bowl invitee, West Virginia OC Tyler Orlosky.
  • We all know the expression ‘it’s a small world.’ It came to life for me this week as I sat and watched North Carolina receiver Ryan Switzer catch passes and run routes as a member of the North squad. Ryan’s dad, Mike, was a senior offensive lineman at St. Albans High School, about 20 minutes south of Charleston, W.Va., when I was a sophomore. In 1985, we’re two guys on the practice field in a small town in southern West Virginia. More than 30 years later, we’re two guys at Ladd-Peebles Stadium congratulating each other on making it to Mobile, though in completely different ways. Weird, and kinda cool.
  • I love going to practices because it’s one of the best chances I get to see and say hi to clients and friends. The only drawback is, because I’m there, I always get asked who’s looking good out there. First of all, I’m so engrossed with catching up with friends that I rarely get a glimpse of the field.  But second — and I know this pretty much goes against everything you’re going to read over the next four months — I just don’t know how much all the hubbub about who’s having a great week and who’s not really matters. Scouting is just entirely too subjective, and most of what you read online about whose ‘stock’ is soaring or falling is really questionable. I’ve been coming to these games so long that I can remember several players that ascended after a strong week (North Carolina DT Ryan Sims in 2002, California QB Kyle Boller in 2003, Arkansas’ Matt Jones in 2005 and Louisville DT Amobi Okoye in 2007 are just a few), then went out and had nondescript NFL careers. I’m sure you could name players that had awesome weeks, then went on to football stardom (Oregon State’s Chad Johnson in 2001 was one), but I just don’t see a strong correlation anymore. That makes it hard to really get excited about what happens here. There are just too many variables, too many unknowns. I know that’s not sexy and not really connected to what you find on the Web these days, but I believe it’s true.
  • In keeping with that theme, I’m pretty excited about our coming ITL Combine Seminar set for Wednesday, March 1, at 7 p.m. We’re going to have former Saints and Browns scout Matt Manocherian speak, but not really because he’s a former NFL evaluator. Instead, it’s because he’s now with Sports Info Solutions, a firm that Bill James founded to develop the analytics ideas that have taken hold in baseball (and been featured in Moneyball). I’m not sure analytics translates to football the way it does baseball — just too messy, too much integration between players — but I’m willing to listen with an open mind. I look forward to them discussing how their methods apply to football.

Week 2: More Sights, Sounds and Notes from the Road

20 Friday Jan 2017

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It was another week on the road for me with two all-star games, the Tropical Bowl (played in Daytona Beach) and the Shrine Game (St. Petersburg) played in Florida. Here are a few things I thought interesting from this week.

  • I got to tour IMG Academy in Bradenton on Tuesday. In many ways it gave me a chance to see the future of athletics; it was an unbelievable place. You might have seen my tweet, which included an attempt at a panoramic shot of the place. The picture doesn’t do the place justice anyway. By next year, it will include 700 acres of  fields, stadiums, classrooms, parking lots, auditoriums, cafeterias, scenic ponds and lakes, weight rooms, roads, pathways and green space. Yes, even with all of this, there’s plenty of green space, in addition to hundreds of students from literally all over the world dressed from head to toe in IMG-logoed, Under Armour attire.
  • There are two things I’ll remember most. One, when a draft prospect arrives, the first thing IMG officials do is test his sweat to measure the electrolytes he loses. Then they design a concoction at the Gatorade Sports Science Institute (which is right there on the grounds, one of three in the world) and voila! He’s got his own specific Gatorade blend, and it’s available whenever he wants it. That’s pretty cool. The other thing was that IMG has developed a combine — for e-sports. Yes, the good people at IMG have even figured out a way to make money off the nerds who aspire to go from their mother’s couch to a stadium somewhere, where other nerds will pay money to watch them play video games.
  • One thing I always hear from scouts is how disappointed they are in the lack of talent at the various all-star games. The older scouts, especially, lament the fact that fewer stars play in the Senior Bowl, Shrine Game and lesser games. There’s a good reason for that — most of those would-be seniors are already in the NFL — but the fact remains that some of these games have grown a little stale. That’s why it was so refreshing this year to see the Shrine Game involving assistant coaches from  all over the NFL as the assistants for this week’s game. It brought a new energy to this week’s workouts.
  • Here’s another big plus: referees were on site to throw flags during the team portions of the drills. It made everyone sharper and gave every workout a game-like intensity. This was one of the better Shrine weeks in recent memory.
  • One longtime friend told several stories about former Miami (Fla.), Oklahoma, Louisville and Florida Atlantic head coach Howard Schnellenberger, who has also coached several all-star games. As the story was told, Schnellenberger was not so adept when it comes to pop culture, especially the music scene. One time, he proudly announced to his coaches that “one of the hottest band in music” would be playing at the stadium at a future date. The band? “Trickshot!” he proudly exclaimed. When he got blank stares from his staff, he excoriated them for living closed, uncultured lives. “You guys gotta get out more and live life,” he urged them. Of course, the blank stares were warranted, as the band was really Cheap Trick.
  • Another time, the Rolling Stones were playing Louisville’s football stadium, and shortly before the show, Schnellenberger found a member of the band’s entourage checking out the school’s trophy case. “Hold it! Hold it! Hold it!,” said the coach with outstretched arms. “If you’re with the band, back in the visitors locker room!” When the band member obliged, another coach chided him with, “Coach, do you know who that was?” When Schnellenberger was told it was Mick Jagger, he responded with, “well, he didn’t know who I was.”

Notes From The Road

13 Friday Jan 2017

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Every year, when I travel to all-star games, I get to talk to the people that make up the business. Scouts, agents, financial planners, trainers, players and their parents — they all have different perspectives on the game. That’s part of what makes football so fascinating.

Here are a few things I found of interest this week:

  • I had a long talk with a scout who’s been in the game for more than 30 years. In the course of our talks on the business of player evaluation, he talked about how busy he is from August to November, and how, even when he’s home on the weekends, he’s mainly finishing up reports. He told me the secret to driving four hours after a full day of work (without falling asleep) is to adjust your seat so the backrest is at a right angle to the seat. It’s not so comfortable, but it keeps you alert. Makes sense to me.
  • He also said his ‘laundromat’ during a two-week trip is usually the hotel sink. So let’s see: 12-hour days followed by four-hour drives; washing your undies in the sink; and staying so sleepy that you have to drive bolt upright in your seat. Still want to be a scout?
  • One school that takes agent registration, prospect education, and the selection process very seriously threatened to bar one of its players from its pro day when he signed with a contract advisor who’s not registered with the school. I’m not sure if I’m in favor of that, but I do know that if all schools had that policy, and followed through with it, the recruiting process would be a lot more orderly.
  • I’ve always been a guy who believes teams should cover every all-star game of every stripe, no matter how low on the food chain. They should also make sure they’re keeping tabs on all the other leagues, like the CFL, Arena League, etc. However, I had an interesting conversation with a scout this week who disagreed. He looks at a scouting department as a tablecloth that’s a little too small. You have to make sure the biggest part of the tablecloth  is covering the key parts of the ‘table’ (mainly the FBS teams and the better FCS teams), and accept that there may be a few crumbs left here and there. You have to play the odds, basically. Even when you’re an NFL team with 10-12 area scouts. There’s just too many players.
  • We had one more (friendly) disagreement. He likes the idea of the Pacific Pro Football League, and thinks it will attract a number of talented players that have no interest in attending school and who are willing to spend their three post-high school, pre-NFL eligibility years making $50,000 per year. My feeling is that most players worth considering for such a league will still see colleges as their best path to NFL riches, even if it means they’re essentially indentured servants for three years.

Those are the highlights from Week 1. More next week.

My Son, and a Draft Prospect’s Mindset

06 Friday Jan 2017

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This week, I had an epiphany on why so many draft prospects (especially projected late-rounders) struggle to see the game as a business and fail to see their place in it. It sprung from an experience I had at a hometown eatery with my wife, son, and his swim coach.

My oldest son, 14, plays pretty much whatever’s in season, but basketball, swimming and track (long jump) are his passions, and what he’s best at. He’s long and lean, with a perfect swimmer’s build, and at 6-foot-3 just an inch shorter than I am. But he lives in suburban Houston, a place where young men start being groomed for the pros at second grade. He’s also captivated by Michael Phelps, and aspires to the Olympics. So there we were at lunch with his swim coach, wanting to know what it might take for him to realize his dreams, however impractical they may be.

In the space of an hour, my son’s coach talked about his decorated career as a high school swimmer under one of the best coaches in the state of Texas. He talked about giving up summer vacations and holidays; about two-hour swim sessions early in the morning followed by two-and-a-half-hour sessions in the afternoon; about having only one month (August) off from that routine every year; and about giving up all other sports in junior high to focus solely on swimming. His sacrifices and devotion to life in the pool produced a scholarship to an excellent Division II school in the Midwest, where he swam four more years and earned an engineering degree. To me, or any other adult, that’s an incredible success story. At the same time, it came at a stiff price, and despite his excellence, fell far short of Olympic glory.

 

The coach’s story of sacrifice and work gave my wife and I pause. I’d heard pretty much all I had to hear, and to me, the path was clear: swim, yes, but also play as many sports as possible, whatever’s in season. Have fun. Let life play out, hoping to play basketball in high school but also trying to swim and maybe even continuing his long jump career. And as the competition stiffened, he could withdraw from sports, but it would all happen organically. In short, something less than total devotion to one sport in a probably fruitless Olympic chase.

That’s the reaction I expected from my son. Instead, he turned to the coach and said, basically, when do we start?

There’s a postscript. That evening, coming home from youth group at our church, we had a long talk, and he admitted his tension about what lay ahead. The commitment to swimming was daunting and he didn’t know if he could do it. “I just want to make you and mom proud of me,” he said. Though I assured him that my wife and I love him and have no expectations, and that we would support him no matter what, the next day he sent me a text a few hours before the afternoon’s basketball game. “Still nervous,” it read. Not about the game. But about swimming.

I take two things from this. One, when you’re young, you believe everything is possible. I mean, everything. With the right amount of effort and the necessary training, you’ll get to your goals. I think this is why so many aspiring NFL players feel combine prep is so absolutely critical.

But the other is this. Many of these young men feel overwhelming pressure to get to the NFL. A lot of it is internal, because they know it’s ‘put up or shut up’ time. However, a lot of that is external. Their whole identity has already been associated with their status as a football player, and when their NFL dreams die, they become someone else, not just to themselves, but to their friends, family, the people back home, everyone. That produces desperation, and it’s probably why it’s so hard for that dream to die.

As a 47-year-old, it’s so easy to forget what it’s like to not be established, and how difficult it is to grapple with the weight of expectations. But I think I understand it a lot better now.