Monthly Archives: March 2024

More Notes on the Transfer Portal from the Experts

28 Thursday Mar 2024

Posted by in NIL, Transfer portal

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This week, I got a chance to sit down with the transfer portal team at a mid-major school. Over an hour-long conversation, the half-dozen members of the personnel department had some interesting things to say. Here are a few highlights.

  • There is no ceiling for offensive tackles in the portal. If they’re healthy and have starting experience, there is almost no limit to what schools will pay. This is probably the one recurring theme.
  • Facilities are important, but less important than they were in the pre-NIL days. It will be interesting if schools stop beefing up their locker rooms and field houses and start pouring it into player compensation. “There are fewer kids asking if there’s a barbershop and a waterfall in the locker room,” is how one official put it.
  • Also, players still care about things like food. You better be doling it out if you don’t have mountains of NIL cash. I’ve heard of one West Coast school that feeds all its athletes — from gymnasts to football players — in one cafeteria. Once the food runs out, it runs out, and it doesn’t matter if someone on the rowing team went back for seconds while football practice ran long.
  • One other thing — if you’re at a mid-major and can’t match others’ offers, you better have pretty liberal admissions policies. 
  • There are still no NFLPA-licensed contract advisors — or even non-certified ones — cornering the market. The DPPS and GMs I speak to say they are still not seeing the same faces every time. Reps are also not (yet) common on official visits. This is a tremendous area of opportunity for an NFL agency. 
  • If you’re at a school in Florida or Texas, you have a tremendous advantage, even if you’re not at a P5 school. Players who leave and don’t get what they wanted usually want to return home.
  • Coaches are getting more aggressive about contacting players at other schools. That’s especially true if they have a prior relationship, i.e., the coach leaves one school for another one, then starts trying to lure the kid at his old school to his new school. That’s becoming more common. The problem is, if a school tried to make a fuss about this, the player’s not normally going to go against his coach.
  • Here’s a fun fact. Texas Roadhouse is headquartered in Louisville, Ky. I know this because the Cardinals aggressively court their corporate sponsors, which is one reason they have a well-stocked NIL budget. The school offers naming rights to the film room, the weight room, everything. For almost 20 years, Cards fans have been able to purchase bottles of Maker’s Mark with the Louisville logo. There’s even a Texas Roadhouse Student Center at Louisville; I’ve also heard the chairs in the meeting room have the TR logo.

If this topic interests you, make sure you check out last week’s edition of the Friday Wrap, in which I talked to 10 college personnel directors to get their respective takes on the abuses of the transfer portal. It’s here. To register for future editions of the Wrap, click here.

 

Here’s Why Getting Drafted is Harder Than You Might Expect

22 Friday Mar 2024

Posted by in Agents, NFL draft

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I think there’s a perception that there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of possible draftees in each draft class. I think the copious NFL Draft coverage and the NFL’s encouragement of the media hype surrounding the draft just feed this perception. It’s one reason why so many players feel like they have an NFL shot despite not being regular starters, even at the sub-FBS level, in college. That puts a real strain on a lot of well-meaning contract advisors.

This week, I wanted to test my theory by getting a better sense of how many players are seriously considered by NFL teams. To do this, I asked several friends in the industry this question: Typically, my impression is that the typical team puts “draftable” grades on 100-120 players each draft. How many of those usually made it to the UDFA process? My goal was to illustrate how many of the players teams rated as good enough to help a team nonetheless got pushed down the board all the way into the UDFA process.

The answers I got were mostly on par with what I expected. Some teams cast a wider net, or perhaps had a lower bar for being considered “draftable,” than others, but most boiled the board down to a limited number. For example, one scout said his team had “about 20-30 (undrafted prospects) every year” — I think he signed off on my 100-120 number — and those slid due to “a medical issue” or it “could be an off-the-field issue.” Another team was very comparable to the first team. “Maybe five” didn’t get drafted among the 140 the team valued as worthy of being selected. Those five had Day 3 grades.

Another friend’s team clearly cast a much wider net. He said each area (I’m presuming  areas would be West Coast, Midwest, Northeast, Southeast, Southwest and Midlands) had about 300 total reports, with around 40 percent of each area going undrafted. I felt that was a lot of players who made that team’s radar, which translated to a lot of players leaking into the undrafted pile. He also said “a good chunk would have their final grade dropped to a UDFA grade” prior to the draft. I got the sense those players were downgraded at some point in the weeks leading up to the draft.

A third friend said his team set up a “hot list” of around 100 players, depending on the team’s number and quality of picks. The team held strictly to that list and only 4-6 would slip through to the UDFA crop. I got the sense that this team made it a priority to sign that small list of undrafted-but-legitimate prospects (“we’d recruit the (crap) out of UDFAs, starting a week or more before the draft”). 

Every year, about 1,500-2,000 players sign with agents. Though I want to be encouraging to the players hoping to be drafted, the truth is that though 250+ players get drafted each year, even that number is probably on the high side of which ones are really prospects. Remember that when your favorite draft pundit runs down the “best values” in the waning minutes of the broadcast.

More Updates, Tidbits on the NCAA Transfer Portal

15 Friday Mar 2024

Posted by in NFL draft, NIL

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At Inside the League, we’ve been focusing a lot of our attention on the college football transfer portal. We had a widely attended symposium at the NFL Combine and we discussed it in the Scouting the League podcast with guest Oscar Monnier (former portal boss at five P5 schools) last month. It’s one of the hottest topics in the player representation industry, but it’s still mostly a mystery, at least among the bigger agencies.

It’s got me thinking about the fundamentals of the transfer portal, starting with how, exactly, it all works. As near as I can tell, there’s a process.

  • Player enters the portal.
  • A director or member of the personnel staff, knowing which position(s) the school is targeting, does a preliminary evaluation of the player.
  • The personnel staffer submits his evaluation and any game film he can round up to the relevant position coach, who then makes a determination on whether to pursue him. This normally takes less than 24 hours.
  • The team decides if the player is worthy of an offer. If the offer is made, a visit is scheduled. 
  • At some point, the coaches huddle with the collective (if the school has one) to determine how much money, if any, can be offered.
  • Once the player accepts an invitation to visit and shows up on campus, his height and weight are recorded. At the end of the visit, a formal offer is made, often by the head coach, personally. 
  • The player is not official with the school until he is enrolled and attends class, by my understanding. 

This led me to more questions. For example, we’ve got a portal window opening in April. It’s a shorter one (only two weeks), but will still be a popular one, I’m sure. How will it work, given that there will only be a few short weeks of school left and no chance for transfers to actually enroll? 

I posed the question to an expert on the process, and his response was: “Spring transfers take summer classes 99% of the time, so that triggers it being finalized. It’s also the worst possible time to transfer, which is a big deterrent on its own, not to mention there’s no portal window for undergrads at that time.”

After a week of speaking to portal specialists at schools big and small, here are a couple more notes and takeaways:

  • More progressive schools are using flashy graphics — yes, similar to the ones splashed all over social media when a player gets an offer — to recruit portal players. The only difference is, the schools pass these along via text rather than social media. Like it or not, communicating in this manner is the way to attract today’s top prospects.
  • One school has 16 volunteers committed to doing nothing but evaluating players once they hit the portal or preparing their board with players they anticipate entering the portal.
  • Some schools with big war chests but limited personnel departments simply wait until players get multiple offers, then make their own. 
  • We had several other interesting tidbits in Tuesday’s Rep Rumblings report, including the ratio of dollars spent on retention vs. acquisition for one school, the going rate for a middling QB prospect, how schools of varying size prepare for the portal and more. 

As always, we’ll be chopping it up on the portal and other football business matters in today’s Friday Wrap, which comes out at 7:30 p.m. ET. Register for it here.

 

 

Why It’s So Hard to Measure Scouts’ Performance

08 Friday Mar 2024

Posted by in NFL draft, Scouts

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Last week, it was my pleasure to hand plaques to 27 NFL scouts who were voted by their peers last fall to the 2023 BART List, our honors system for the best evaluators working in the league these days. It’s the only way I know to recognize the best people in the scouting industry.

Some, however, may wish there was a more objective measure. I’m one of those people. I’ve even seen that some teams, apparently, do just that for their own scouts. I really like that teams are working to identify the best members of their staffs. 

I’ve often thought of how to measure the effectiveness of scouts across the league. People who believe in analytics feel you can put a number on anything, right? But I keep bumping up to the following reasons that evaluating the evaluators is next to impossible.

Each team scouts for its team, not the league: We would have to have complete records of the grades given by each scout to players drafted and signed, every year, to even get a baseline of his effectiveness. Even at that, we could only hope to determine the best scout for each team, not for the league. Until every team runs the same defense and same offense, this is impossible.

A player’s success is not solely based on where/when he was drafted: To some degree, a draftee is a lump of clay. That lump gets shaped by the team’s coaching staff once he’s drafted. Some teams develop players better than others, and some teams have more “rope” to develop them for various reasons (usually, prior success). Therefore, just because a player worked out doesn’t necessarily mean the scout did his job.

Hungry players play better: If Tom Brady gets drafted in the second round instead of the sixth round, does he still wind up the same player? Maybe. Still, it seems to me unmistakable that players selected lower than they expected tend to play harder, while sometimes, players drafted earlier take the game less seriously. Obviously, this is hard to measure, but seems evident, nonetheless. Either way, it has an effect on a player’s grade. 

Obviously, there are other factors. Teams that have great depth at a position might mean a good player never gets a chance to really prove himself. Players drafted higher than expected may nonetheless get multiple chances in the league due to their draft pedigree. I could go on. The point is, the NFL draft is hopelessly subjective. I guess that’s one reason it’s so fun.

Do you disagree? Feel like it’s easier than I’m making it look? Give me some ideas on Twitter/X at @insidetheleague. Make sure you’re also reading our newsletter to get more insights on scouting and how teams evaluate players. 

2024 NFL Combine Week: A Few Highlights

01 Friday Mar 2024

Posted by in ITL, Media, NFL draft, NIL, Scouts

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The NFL Combine is a major event for the entire football community and represents probably the biggest week of the year for us at ITL. Here are a few highlights and observations from the week.

  • There were so many highlights of our 15th annual event (the 2024 USI Insurance Services ITL Combine Seminar Presented by The Tatnuck Group) at the Indiana Convention Center, but two stick out to me. One was very selfish: Lions GM Brad Holmes, who accepted the Best Draft Award for Detroit, cited Inside the League for its commitment to the scouting industry, especially crediting the Friday Wrap for its focus on the community. That was really, really humbling, and unexpected.
  • Also humbling was the reaction of Broncos Senior Midwest Scout Scott DiStefano, who accepted the C.O. Brocato Memorial Award for lifetime service in NFL scouting. Scott had to pause to gather himself a couple time during his remarks. It’s awesome to recognize people in front of their peers. Equally awesome: Broncos GM George Paton and virtually the entire Broncos scouting staff showed up to cheer Scott on.
  • Another highlight was spending a little time with the co-winners of the Pro Liaison of the Year Award, N.C. State’s D.D. Hoggard and Illinois’ Jay Kaiser. Both of them are humble men who are deserving of their acclaim. D.D. flew in on his own dime to accept the award in person, which was a “wow” moment for me when he could easily have appeared via video. 
  • By the way, my partner in the presentation of the Eugene E. Parker Award for service to the agent industry, Peter Schaffer of Authentic Athletix, announced that he’s creating an online hall of fame for player representation Wednesday night. At this time, it’s not a brick-and-mortar place, but will live online. I will contribute to Peter’s efforts, and we’ve already got our first member chosen (to go along with the previous four winners of the award). We’ll have further communications about it soon. It’s a great idea and I’m pretty excited about it.
  • Also of interest: our award winners are starting to get social media graphics made about them. Check out this one that Duke University made for David Feeley, who won the Strength Coach of the Year Award as voted on by active NFL scouts. 
  • We also had our second annual NIL-oriented event Thursday. It was a pretty fast 90 minutes with guest speaker Oscar Monnier, who ran the transfer portal at Northwestern, Stanford, Oregon, Duke and Texas A&M. He spoke for an hour about his experiences and recommendations for exploiting this new part of the industry. We had about 80 guests, most of them from top NFL agencies and interested in learning how to get the most out of the portal process. What impressed me the most, however, is how 10-12 people lined up to talk to Oscar after his session, and none of them had questions about what he discussed. They all wanted to explore working with him. Oscar arrived to town a free agent, but there’s a good chance he won’t leave as one. I think the transfer portal is a space that has not been recognized for its potential in player representation, but I think it’s getting there. 
  • One scout I spoke to went on and on about how impressive Ohio State WO Marvin Harrison Jr. was in interviews. His comments came as part of a discussion on how so many players are coached by their agents in interviews. It’s unknown if Harrison has undergone interview prep, but it sounds like his natural personality made it pretty academic if he did. 

For a complete rundown of all the winners and more highlights from the week, make sure to check out the Friday Wrap, which comes out this evening. Register for it here.