After years of the player representation business being infinitely difficult, it’s been a little easier to be bullish since the dawn of the NIL era. Of course, nothing lasts forever, and it’s gotten a lot tougher of late.

Here’s one example. I’m hearing lately that the new play is for four- and five-star high school players to let their parent/coach/attorney troll for deals, taking the low-hanging fruit offer and committing. Once this is done, here’s the pitch to the prospective agent: we’ll pay you a commission if you can go to the school we committed to and get a better deal. Oh, by the way, we also need you to go out and find us “traditional” NIL opportunities (signings, appearances, social media posts, etc.). So that means the agent has a choice: he can tell the kid to take a walk, or he can risk burning bridges and looking completely unreasonable to school officials.

This is hardly the only way NIL agents are getting abused. Here are a few more examples I’ve gotten from some friends in the business.

  • One interviewed with a player over Zoom with the player and his friend, the player’s parents, his ex-coach, his marketing director and the player’s wealth manager. The kicker: the agent had to hear the wealth manager — with whom he shares several clients — tell him he was billing at too high a rate. After the Zoom, the money guy then begged him not to be mad.
  • “We had one client sign with us, then try to get out of paying our fee, saying we signed the contract for him — when it was done on Docusign and had his own IP address and town he’s from attached to the location.”
  • “(An ACC head coach) called a dad of one of our clients saying we were asking for too much. Client later signed for $2M to play QB at another ACC school.”
  • (A Big Ten head coach) did something similar, but said we were lying about offers we had to the family. Then five months later, offered that same number we supposedly lied about (it was of course not a lie).”
  • “I had a dad of a 2027 high school player asking me if we do loans/stipends. When i said the kid is 16, what does he need it for? The dad responded with, ‘hey man, he’s gotta live.’”
  • “I had a player turn down two years, $2 million to go to Alabama after the 2024 season because he said he had ‘a dream that (Florida State) would go to the CFB playoff.’ They went on to go 5-7. Beat Alabama in Game 1, but guess who went to the playoff?”