Forgive me if this is a little self-indulgent for a couple of events that have already taken place. However, I’ve spent the last week thinking about how we could make our two Indianapolis events last week, the 2026 Ellison Kibler at Merrill Lynch ITL Combine Seminar and the 2026 Dropback ITL Symposium, even bigger in 2027. Here’s what I’ve come up so far.

More space: We were smart enough to increase our space for Friday’s symposium — and thank the Lord that we did, because we had a packed house — and increased our space for Wednesday. However, we probably need to expand our space even further for both events. Hopefully we can return to the first floor while meeting our needs, size-wise.

More imaging: We improved our social media game since last year, but let’s face it: we had nowhere to go but up. I’ve had a lot of the participants from Wednesday and Friday seeking photos of themselves from the events. I get it. When you work in the shadows, you have to find a way to let others learn who you are (or, at least, what you look like). We’ve done a good job with photos for the seminar, but not always got the pictures out. Friday, our photography was minimal. We’ll do better on both counts next year, and we’ll get shots out to people from Wednesday sooner this year.

Registration: I think we have to cut off signups earlier. We also have to level up our registration process. We’ll be giving this more thought before next year. Several people got into the symposium late despite registering days, even weeks before the event. That’s not fair to them.

Roundtables: Panelists (agents and GMs) had a really difficult job. We posed some difficult questions (they’re in this email in case you were wondering), and it’s not easy to respond when there are 400 people in the room. Some of the feedback I got was that they might be more comfortable sitting at tables with only a few people from the community. I’ve seen this done at previous symposiums, and it came together really well. However, they didn’t have as many people as we had, and it requires signups well in advance so you can kinda plot things out. We had a significant amount of walkup registration and that will probably continue next year with schedules in Indianapolis so volatile. I’m not sure if we can pull this off. But maybe we’ll try.

Promotion: I devoted three newsletters and 3-4 podcasts to promoting our symposium; I also put a ribbon on our website with all the details. Still, we had members of some of the top agencies who expressed disappointment that they didn’t know we were having it. I’ll admit I focused my personal texts, emails and DMs on college GMs and directors, hoping that agencies would participate if we had enough members of the college personnel community. Next year, I’ll be more aggressive about reaching out, personally, to people who have attended in the past.

If you were there, and you have ideas, I’d love to hear what you’ve got. I’m sure there are things I’m missing. I want to make both our events the place the football community comes to share best practices and meet key people. I won’t stop trying to improve both. DM me on Twitter at @insidetheleague.