Author Archives: itlneil

Your Life’s Work

31 Tuesday Mar 2015

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Yesterday I was meeting with a gentleman in the financial industry. He’s super-wealthy and has been able to accomplish more than probably anyone I know when it comes to creating financial resources. I think that’s great and I have tremendous respect for that.

Given the choice, who wouldn’t want to be wealthy? And who knows? Maybe I’ll be wealthy one day, too. It would be a wonderful way to make a positive impact on the people I love and a whole lot more people, too.

On the other hand, great wealth is not a priority for me. Maybe it’s because of my middle-class upbringing. Maybe it’s because I care far more about changing people’s lifestyles and attitudes. I guess I’ve always felt that money would take care of itself if I succeeded.

I don’t travel in the corridors of power that lead to true wealth. To do that, I would have had to map a very different path for my life. Maybe you did that at a young age, but my guess is that if you are reading this blog, simply making big money as quickly as possible is not your primary goal. Anyway, I hope that’s the case.

Here’s the thing. If you get into this business, whether on the scouting side or the agent side (the two paths I write most about), you’re going to have to be satisfied with the things I really value, the things that attracted me to the business. No. 1, it’s the game. Football is special to me. It offers the violence, aggression, passion, athleticism and other qualities that I want in my life. No. 2, and it’s a pretty close second, is camaraderie. The shared sacrifice, the blood and sweat of the game, is just something people in the business understand. There’s a shared respect.

What’s more, I’ve never seen the gaps in racial harmony in sports that I’ve seen in the rest of my life. If I roll through the names in my phone, it’s probably close to 50-50 black to white. I can’t speak for others, obviously, but I can’t think of one time my black friends (agents, coaches, scouts, players) treated me differently, talked to me differently, or otherwise treated me with kid gloves because we were different races. Can you find that in other businesses? Maybe, but I think sports comes as close to crossing that chasm as any other business does. It’s just a brotherhood.

No. 3 would have to be the direct impact you can have on lives. So many young men and their families have expressed deep appreciation for what I would consider little things I’ve provided — tips, advice, counsel, introductions, whatever. I’m fortunate enough to be able to make a living doing this, but it’s awfully rewarding to be able to help others in a substantial way.

So this is my point: if you’re going to go the distance in this business, great wealth may not come your way. Getting rich quick doesn’t usually happen in this business. Be ready to accept this, and value the good things that do come with it. At the same time, don’t apologize if you don’t value what the world may greatly value.

The End

30 Monday Mar 2015

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I get a lot of players and their parents who reach out to me this time of year. Many of them are seeking an agent who can help sell them to NFL teams. I tell them this week is a sort of ‘line of demarcation’ for NFL evaluation.

At this point, a draft-eligible player’s college career, all-star play and combine are long in the books. He may be working out for teams at his pro day this week, but most are done. That means there are no more opportunities to spark interest for scouts and NFL teams unless players are invited to do so. Now, some NFL teams hold their own local workouts for players who competed in high school or college in a team’s metro area, but the number of invitees is usually limited to 20-30 players, maximum.

This is why, even though I know they don’t want to hear this, I tell most players I speak to at the end of March that if they are NFL prospects, they will know it by now. They are getting calls from scouts, scheduling private workouts, getting invited in for visits, or at least getting some form of correspondence from people in personnel. If they are not, it may be time to move on.

If a player is willing to accept this and still wants to pursue his dreams, he probably needs to do something to spark new interest in his playing ability. Usually, this has to take place on the field. He has two main options. One is the Arena Football League, which started play this weekend. Arena teams are always looking for local players they can plug in when injuries strike, but they pretty much have to be local. AFL teams don’t have the budget to be able to bring in people from across the country for workouts.

The other outlet is the CFL. I generally discourage players from going to these cattle call-style open tryouts, especially before a player’s pro day, but if he has run the winter gauntlet with NFL teams and still not won anyone over, it may be time to see if there’s interest up north. Most of these workouts charge $100 (usually cash only), and there will be plenty of them all over the country in April. Most agents take a pretty dim view of these workouts because the chances of success are pretty minimal, and I’d agree with them. However, if a player makes it to the end of March without much interest from NFL teams, odds are long anyway.

Look, anything can happen, and the last thing I’d want to do is rain on a young man’s parade. At the same time, I think it’s important to be straight with people. As I always say, the NFL is not for the good, but the great, player. It’s rare for players to make it to college athletics, much less professional sports. Every young man doesn’t fit that profile, and there’s no shame in that. All you can do is give it your best shot.

Pro Day Thoughts

24 Tuesday Mar 2015

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Two or three times every March, I try to get out and hit pro days that are not too far from me in South Houston. Monday was one of those days; I attended the workout held by Packers scout Alonzo Highsmith at Lamar University in Beaumont, about two-and-a-half hours from me.

Here are a few things I found interesting.

  • Highsmith came to Beaumont to work out a handful of players, probably 10-12, who are far from blue-chip prospects. At best, two of them will be in camps, and it would be a real long shot if either get drafted. Still, Highsmith was there, doing his due diligence. That’s a real credit to him. He’s a true old-school scout who does his job the old-fashioned way, watching film and relying on his network to find undiscovered gems. He’s pretty much the antithesis of the modern view of scouting, which is moving way more to ‘analytics’ and a view of evaluation that is more related to measurables and less to what happens during a game.
  • This catch has made an indelible mark on players across the country, and maybe not in a good way. It’s become so bad that I saw multiple receivers yesterday catching the ball one-handed in warmups, as if this is supposed to impress Highsmith. One kid, a transfer from a bigger school who has had multiple off-field issues and didn’t even finish the season with Lamar, caught every pass thrown his way (warmup throws, drills, tosses from the ball-boy) one-handed, as if he thinks this will translate to the NFL. Want to impress a scout? Run good routes, put up good numbers, listen to your coaches, make plays, train hard and catch everything thrown your way with two hands.
  • Even though Lamar is a smallish school without a whole lot of tradition, yesterday was the school’s second of three pro days. The first was on March 10, which was run by scouts from the Texans and Chiefs. On Saturday, a Rams scout will have a workout for a handful of invited Cardinals. This is why, when it comes to college football and pursuing a chance in the NFL, geography counts. An FCS school that’s only been playing football for five years may not even have a pro day if it’s located in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest or even parts of the Northeast, but the Cardinals seniors almost have to prove they can’t play after getting three separate audiences with NFL scouts. Texas and the Southeast are different, special, when it comes to football.
  • There are some parents that overdo it a little. I know they are well-intentioned, but that doesn’t help a young man’s prospects. I’ll leave it at that.
  • On the way back, I stopped at a restaurant. I was wearing my ITL gear and a waiter (probably about 5-8 and wiry, around 150 pounds) noticed the logo. We had this conversation:

Waiter: “What’s that (gesturing at my shirt)? What do you do?”

Me: “I have a football consulting service. I work with agents, financial planners, combine trainers, some scouts, some coaches, some parents, lots of people who are in college and pro football.”

Waiter (eyes lighting up): “Oh really? I need to get an agent. I was supposed to play in college but I had an incident in high school.”

Me: “Where did you wind up playing in college?”

Waiter: “I didn’t. I was supposed to but I didn’t.”

Me: “Have you played since then?”

Waiter: “No.”

I recommended he attend an open tryout for a CFL or Arena League team. Which is to say, I probably didn’t practice what I preach, which is to tell young men like that to move on with life. I guess my strategy was for him to attend a workout, find out how long his odds are, and hope that he comes to his own realization.

Commodities

19 Thursday Mar 2015

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You may be reading this from a tablet, laptop or phone while sitting in a sports management class. You might even be a sports management major. Ever wonder what kind of company you’re in?

Based on this link, there are 471 schools in America that offer either an undergrad or masters program in sports management. Let’s say that, conservatively, each program dumps 20 graduates with either a four-year degree or master’s degree in this discipline every year. That’s just under 10,000 men and women vying for a place in the world of sports business.

Now, if you’re trying to get a degree in sports management, I applaud you. Based on my research, more and more young NFL scouts have just such a degree (some a master’s, even). It’s not as common a degree for young agents, most of whom were pre-law in college, but I’m sure the number is growing. What’s more, I’m fully aware that not all young folks in these programs have the passion for football that I — and maybe you — have.

Still, I think it’s fair to presume that many, maybe most, are at least open to a career in football. Let’s say half. That means whatever year you graduate, you have to be better than about 5,000 people every year just to get an internship or entry-level job with an NFL team.

That means, in the business world, you’re a commodity. Generally speaking, unless your last name is Rooney or Kraft or you’re Jerry Jones’ nephew, you’re not a Ferrari but more of a Ford Taurus. Your job is to make yourself unique.

Hey, that’s not impossible. This blog is about going for it and trying to beat the odds, and I’m hopeful that our daily read gives you an edge in that endeavor. But you’re gonna need to help yourself along by volunteering with a team, networking until you find that key mentor, or doing something that separates you from the pack. Here’s an interesting thought.

As I think I’ve mentioned in this space, I attended a conference on ‘EntreLeadership’ hosted by Dave Ramsey earlier this month. He said you don’t have to ‘kill’ the competition, or ridicule them, or even hate them to beat them. I’m paraphrasing, but he said you’re going to be smarter than about a third of your competitors, and you’re going to be able to outwork another 50 percent of them, so that leaves only about 20 percent of the competition that you really have to worry about. That really reduces the numbers. It doesn’t guarantee you anything, but your odds just got a lot better if you make that realization.

If you’re getting a sports management degree, good for you. I wish I’d had that chance when I was in college. But realize that attending the right classes and hearing the right lectures is a long way from guaranteeing you’re going to get where you want to go.

WSW: What Would You Pay?

18 Wednesday Mar 2015

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I think I’ve referenced today’s story before, but I thought I’d tell it in full in the words of my friend Miller McCalmon, a former scout with Washington, Houston and Detroit who also coached at several NFL stops. It goes well with our theme this week of pursuing jobs in March.

It details the lengths he had to go to in order to work for free as an NFL scout. Incidentally, if you’d rather watch him tell this story rather than reading it, click here.

“They didn’t know what to do with interns. It’s kind of interesting. Does anyone know who John Ralston (was)? He was head coach at Stanford University in the 70s, then he was the head football coach of the Denver Broncos (from 1972-76). Well, I was in high school coaching and I wrote him a letter . . . because I wanted to get into something besides high school coaching.

“I wrote him a letter and he visited with me, and I went down to his office, and we talked about it, and he was a great guy, great motivating coach and all that stuff, but he said, ‘well, we don’t have interns and graduate assistants like you have on the college level,’ so he kind of pooh-poohed it. But I still wrote (a letter to the Washington Redskins), because I remember in the Sports Illustrated article, (‘70s Redskins head coach) George (Allen) talking about (having an interest in hiring high school coaches as scouts).

“So I wrote the letter, and one of the stipulations of becoming an intern was my dad had to co-sign a letter of credit for me, because (Allen) didn’t want us to go there without any financial backing. . . What’s really interesting about the whole thing is that this was 1976, and I was the head football coach (at a Colorado high school), assistant basketball coach, and I taught history and earth science, and I was making $15,000 a year doing all those things. I went to the NFL for nothing, with a $10,000 line of credit, but they would give me $600 to go out on the road, so I actually ended up making more money working for nothing than I did as a high school coach, which tells you something about high school and public education and that sort of thing. Which is kind of sad, but it is kind of a commentary about it.”

You may want to be an NFL scout with all your heart. But would you be willing to ask your parents to go $10,000 into debt to make your dreams come true? And to work for free while they were taking on that debt?

It’s something to think about. There’s always a price to pay, and a risk to take. But if you succeed, as Miller did, it’s well worth it.

Opportunities

17 Tuesday Mar 2015

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From time to time, I see big events that appeal to the sports law crowd. Conferences, meetings, panels, seminars. They draw a lot of students and often have impressive speakers, by any standard. They’re a place to start if you’re looking at a career in football. But know the weaknesses of such gatherings.

There are a lot of people who regularly speak at these events that aren’t going to give you a lot of practical guidance. Oh, you’ll get ethics, and you’ll get people raging against the machine (the NFL, the NCAA, or whatever the perceived monolithic exploiter of the day is), and that’s all well and good, but are you getting practical guidance? Are you getting the answers to your questions? Are you in a setting where you feel confident seeking guidance on a specific area of the job search? Do you get closer to knowing what you really want to be?

Here’s one example. Every year at the combine, a company that is a semi-rival of ITL holds a big event for their clients. They bring in several people holding NFL jobs in evaluation, and they bring in a handful of agents and others from across the industry, and it’s a very impressive, star-studded list. For a day, all of those clients get to feel like big shots, hear war stories, tell their friends about who they’re rubbing elbows with, and maybe take a few cool selfies. But do they really directly benefit from this? The organization has lots of members, but I haven’t seen a record of success that indicates they’re giving any real value beyond entertainment.

I’m not discounting networking. That’s important, especially at an early stage of your career, and you’ll find no shortage of places to go if you want to wear an official-looking nametag, shake lots of hands, and sit in rooms with people with lots of Twitter followers. However, there is no substitute for actually working in the business.

As you attend these events, make sure you’re aggressive, direct, and mission-focused. You want to come away with leads, especially if you’re attending an event in the next 2-3 weeks. Make sure your goal is to go in without an opportunity, but to come away with one. If you are mostly sure there won’t be such opportunities at an event, maybe your time is best spent somewhere else.

Know Your Audience

16 Monday Mar 2015

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As this is ‘application season’ if you’re seeking a position with an NFL team or a football agency, I thought I’d give a couple more thoughts on how to best position yourself for the internship of a lifetime.

This weekend I was speaking to an NFL scout who’s been a longtime friend. I had asked him to speak to a young man I know who’s seeking to work as a scouting assistant this summer or next fall (I work with several young people of this status), and in the course of our conversation, this young man’s name came up.

Unsolicited, my friend told me the young man would probably not fit in with his organization. The student’s mistake had been that, in his zeal to sound intelligent and organized, he had come across as too refined and ‘executive-level’ for the tastes of my friend. Maybe because of the way he had spoken, the scout saw him as a person who would not be as willing to do the ‘dirty work’ of scouts, such as entering phone numbers into a database, calling agents to get contact information, picking up interviewees from the airport as well as returning them to the airport, and all the kinds of player engagement duties and basic information-gathering that are less than glamorous.

This is unfortunate, because I know he read the young man wrong. He may be refined, but he’s in no way too good for such duties. In fact, I think he’d relish them, but it doesn’t matter now. He hadn’t come across as enough of a ‘regular guy’ for my scouting friend. And because of that, he’d sealed his fate.

On the other hand, his style of communication would work perfectly for an agency. There, the people interviewing him might have a legal background or at least the kind of high-level professional manner that would expect a certain polish. And as it turns out, this young man did, in fact, land a place with a high-level firm that handles top athletes across several sports. He’ll be with them this summer.

I guess the moral of the story is to know your audience. By a wide margin, scouting assistants and interns are hired by scouts themselves who are a bit more down-to-earth. They are used to hanging around the locker room, talking to ‘little people,’ and maybe even have coaching backgrounds. They’re used to getting sweaty and dirty and they talk like it. On the other hand, appealing to an agency might take a smoother approach. They’ll want to see that you can handle life around a boardroom, a courtroom, or the like.

This is just something to keep in mind as you position yourself for career enhancement this summer. Best of luck in your search.

It’s Time

13 Friday Mar 2015

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Ever thought about being an NFL scout? Ever wanted to intern for a major football agency? If the answer to either question is ‘yes,’ consider brushing up your resume. Fast.

There’s a lot going on in the football world these days between free agency, pro days and the various combines the NFL will be holding in the next two weeks. However, behind the scenes, where we ‘live,’ there’s plenty of maneuvering for what happens after the draft, namely, making a few hires.

I’ve been working with a couple college students on their applications with NFL teams over the past month, trying to find a good fit for a scouting internship. Now is the time to really start bearing down on this process. NFL teams gather resumes in March, start sifting through them and cutting to a few finalists in April, then choose a few lucky winners in May, when the draft is over and things slow down. The application process is tricky, of course, but you don’t want to wait if that’s something you’re entertaining. And of course, it doesn’t hurt if you know someone in the game.

The same is true of agencies or sports marketing firms. If you’re looking to help out at a big firm this summer, now is the time to start looking for options. Look locally first, but if you don’t find many agencies, you may have to throw out caution and just go for it, applying with whoever will take you. The bigger the firm, the less your responsibilities, usually, but the better your chances of early success in the business if you decide to pursue it.

Today, I learned that one of my top interns landed a summer internship with a firm that could be representing the top pick in the draft next month. I couldn’t be happier for him or more excited that he’s getting this opportunity, but it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t started the process very early, applying this winter and interviewing over spring break.

It’s always tempting to put things off, but don’t make that mistake. Get rolling on making your dreams come true so that someone else who acted sooner doesn’t make them come true for them. And if you need help or have questions, and you’re serious about the business, let me know at nstratton@insidetheleague.com.

Quick Fix

12 Thursday Mar 2015

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What if combine prep could be distilled into a pill or a potion?

More specifically, what if you could take a tenth off your 40 time, just by drinking a couple ounces of a liquid or a handful of capsules?

I asked this question to Amanda Carlson-Phillips, the vice president of nutrition and research at EXOS, which today announced that it is launching EXOS Performance Nutrition, a new line of high-quality nutritional supplements. EXOS has long been a leader in the combine prep field and the company’s founder, Mark Verstegen, is one of the 2-3 men who can claim to be the ‘inventors’ of combine prep.

Perhaps to humor me, she didn’t laugh out loud when I posed the question to her. Indeed, she seemed to give it real consideration. She stopped short of saying significant athletic improvement could ever be as simple as ingesting a substance, but she did say that . . . well . . . she gave me a qualified ‘maybe.’

“How we see nutrition, when you’re training, or you’re working out and doing your position and skill work, you’re breaking down your body intentionally so it can come back stronger,” she said. “The body doesn’t magically fix itself, so if you can provide your body with something to heal that breakdown, that will help athletes recover faster.”

So maybe there’s something on the horizon that, though it would still require training and the right nutrition, could super-charge combine prep. Maybe there’s a pill that you could combine with max effort that could give you a supreme boost. Of course, there are caveats.

“If you don’t recover and don’t have the right nutrition, you’re leaving something on the table and not maximizing what you do,” Carlson-Phillips said. “They’re wearing the right cleats, the right gear that’s going to make them the best, but they’re fueling themselves from the outside but not from the inside out.”

So it’s not going to be as easy as swallowing something, snapping your fingers, and voila! You’re explosive. But still, it bodes for more interesting twists and turns in a business that is always changing. Something to look forward to, I guess.

WSW: Broadcast Bungle

11 Wednesday Mar 2015

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Well, it’s draft season, and everyone’s hearing from the various gurus and experts out there, so I figure it’s a good time to tell a War Story on me.

This is from my days as one of two partners in the precursor to ITL. It was called Lone Star Football. When I first moved to Houston in 1998, I met a dude who wanted to start a Mel Kiper Jr.-style draft magazine, and after meeting me, he knew I had a passion for the game that mirrored his, so he asked me to help him out. It wound up lasting four years before it folded. Troy handled the offense and I handled the defense. One of these days, I’ll tell more stories from my humble beginnings with Lone Star in this space. When I do, take some No-Doze.

At any rate, we didn’t have any money, so our main strategy for selling our draft magazine (yes, it was a print publication just as the Internet was taking off, which was among our inept business decisions) was doing radio shows. I’d poke around on search engines (pre-Google) for whatever stations I could find with a sports talk format, and we’d volunteer to do their shows. We never got paid, so we’d always hope they had a toll-free line, so at least we didn’t have to come out of pocket to give away free programming.

Anyway, one year we landed a couple segments on a station in Green Bay. The problem was that they wanted to do it mid-day (which is probably where they stashed the draft guys that weren’t ready for prime time). We liked to do them together because we had a pretty strict dividing line between offense and defense, and if we had to ‘solo’ a show, we could wind up looking stupid if a caller asked about the wrong player. This is why I was really, really nervous while waiting for call time for this show, because my partner had to work. That meant I was stuck. I had to roll without Troy and hope for the best.

Well, the show wasn’t going very well (I think the host had wrangled with me over my opinion on a player, which kinda pissed me off) when we got a question on a cornerback from a small Midwestern school. I immediately panicked. As we only had two people trying to watch hundreds of players, our focus was almost solely on the big schools. Obviously the wise thing to do would be to cop to my ignorance, admit I didn’t know him, and throw myself on the mercy of the caller.

But hey, screw wisdom. I decided to sell out. Go for it. Burn my ships. Throw caution to the wind. I said something along the lines of ‘great ball skills, plus tackler, needs to prove he can play on a bigger stage.’ You know, the usual blather you get about small-school players, and it might have worked. Problem is, the caller had said ‘quarterback.’

No easy way to wiggle out of that one. Obviously, this didn’t endear me much with the host, who was already not a fan. I don’t remember how we wound up the segment, but that pretty much took all the steam out of it.

Ever since then, when I do radio and I get stumped, I will admit it. I will own it. It’s awkward, but it’s a way better place to be than I was that woeful day on Green Bay radio.