Tonight, we’ll have our third Zoom session for aspiring NFL agents, covering several key concepts that could be part of July’s exam. With less than 100 days until the test, things are ramping up.
Simultaneously, we’re hearing from agents who are facing their third draft class and, without having signed anyone who made it to an NFL roster so far, they’re facing professional mortality. Basically, they have five months to get someone on a roster, and if next weekend goes poorly for them, they’re in a real bind.
So how does this happen? How do so many talented people — many of them accomplished attorneys, all of them having achieved a postgraduate degree — come into the business every year but find themselves ousted from the business three years later? More generally, why do people hoping to represent NFL players fail? Here are the top reasons.
They can’t pass the exam. In our decade-plus working with aspiring agents, we’ve seen our share of people who failed the test twice. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s not at all uncommon. It’s a very complicated exam, and if you don’t use prep services like ours, that’s doubly true. You’re talking about a 700-page CBA with lots of complicated topics, and the NFLPA does you few favors. It’s open-book, yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s a walk in the park. And given the responsibilities an agent has, the test should be challenging.
They don’t make the right relationships. Every year, there are dozens of people who sit for the exam because they’ve been asked to get certified, either by someone in the league or someone who’s draft-eligible. They then find out, to their surprise, that those players were less serious about signing with the agent than previously believed. Often, the agent doesn’t find this out until October or November, at which point he’s left trying to find someone else to recruit. Make the wrong recruiting decisions and you’ll never make other key contacts (scouts, college GMs, trainers). It’s a vicious cycle.
They trust the wrong people. From the players they sign to the trainers they hire to the draft analysts that solicit them, there are countless people who enter a new agent’s orbit. Some know more about the game than others. When you’re new to an industry, you don’t know where to place your trust, but you’re desperately seeking people worthy of it.
They run out of money. This is the most common one. So many people enter the game thinking their first $2500 (just to take the exam) and second $2500 (for fees and malpractice insurance) are a considerable barrier, but once they get past both, they’re home free. You haven’t even begun to spend money at that point. We’ve discussed this ad nauseam. Here’s one example.
They run out of time. As mentioned earlier, the new agent gets thrown into the fire rather quickly, and Year 1 is over almost before it starts. As an independent agent, if you don’t get a player on a roster in that first year — and only about 20 percent of independent agents pull that off — you now have two years to get it done. Maybe you make a contact here or there in scouting, get a decent referral or two in Years 2 and 3, but neither actually hit. You’ve finally built a network and kinda learned what you need to know . . . just in time for the clock to run out.
Ego, pure and simple. It sounds ridiculous, but there are still people who try to get into the industry because they want to be big shots. They want to have cool jobs that make their friends jealous. You see it all the time in their LinkedIn pages, their Instagram accounts, the pictures in their social media bios. When you enter the business with this kind of attitude, you don’t realize that there’s stuff you don’t know, and it is absolutely crucial to enter this business with humility.
Succeed in Football 