Category Archives: Agents

Penny Wise and Pound Foolish

10 Friday Feb 2017

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Last Friday was the deadline for registration for the 2017 NFLPA contract advisor exam, which is administered each July (here are all the details for registration, in case you were wondering). For the hundreds of people hoping to be the next Jerry Maguire, it’s an important day to know. For more than half of those who registered for the 2016 exam, the day’s passage is probably not so exciting. It might even be a little painful.

It’s pretty commonly known among young agents that two years ago, the NFLPA made the exam a lot harder. The passage rate went from around 75 percent to less than 50 percent. People who use our practice exam still pass at about a 70 percent rate, but those who don’t wind up returning for a second bite of the apple. But they only get one more try, and if not, they are barred from another attempt for five long years. About half to two-thirds of the people who took the test last summer were there a second time, and I anticipate about the same rate this summer.

I know a lot of aspiring contract advisors read this blog, so today I want to pass along a cautionary tale. It starts with an email I got about a month ago from a person I’ve corresponded with over the years, an aspiring agent himself. “I would like to start using your services,” he wrote, “being that I took the test twice and came up short both times.”

He went on to explain that he was super-close to passing both times, missing by two and four points, respectively, in successive years. Neither time that he took the test did he use our practice exam or study guide. For that reason, and given that he knew fully well what we do at Inside the League and how we help people like him, I had to gently admonish him. “Why in the world would you not have subscribed to ITL the first time, not to mention the second time?,” I asked. “We had a practice exam and all kinds of stuff you could have used. That’s really puzzling.”

To his credit, my friend didn’t try to defend himself. He said he tried to subscribe the first time but never followed up, then forgot about us the second time around. At any rate, he said test-taking isn’t his strength. “Honestly, when I sit there taking the exam, I feel confident in the information I’ve obtained, but something goes wrong. . . It’s frustrating because I know all the information but I guess you can say I’m a horrible test-taker.”

I have no doubt he’s right, and he knows the material, but still, here he is. The worst part is that the NFLPA takes such a hard line on those who fail twice.

“I’ve put myself in a horrible position,” he admitted. “I still have a job in this industry and with an agency, but not having my certification has crippled me.”

If you’re one of those people that is set to take the exam this summer, please don’t take any risks. Our practice exam is $150, and we have a study guide, too for a reasonable price. Our subscribers also receive a daily email that gives them tips on exam passage as well as tales from previous test-takers. There are other services out there that are credible (though a lot more expensive), but none have been around as long as ours, and none has as many success stories. But bottom line, if you’re going to go for this, really go for it. Don’t try to save a few pennies here and there and risk not achieving a life goal that is really cool. Be smart. And if you have any questions, drop me a line.

 

 

Notes From The Road

13 Friday Jan 2017

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Every year, when I travel to all-star games, I get to talk to the people that make up the business. Scouts, agents, financial planners, trainers, players and their parents — they all have different perspectives on the game. That’s part of what makes football so fascinating.

Here are a few things I found of interest this week:

  • I had a long talk with a scout who’s been in the game for more than 30 years. In the course of our talks on the business of player evaluation, he talked about how busy he is from August to November, and how, even when he’s home on the weekends, he’s mainly finishing up reports. He told me the secret to driving four hours after a full day of work (without falling asleep) is to adjust your seat so the backrest is at a right angle to the seat. It’s not so comfortable, but it keeps you alert. Makes sense to me.
  • He also said his ‘laundromat’ during a two-week trip is usually the hotel sink. So let’s see: 12-hour days followed by four-hour drives; washing your undies in the sink; and staying so sleepy that you have to drive bolt upright in your seat. Still want to be a scout?
  • One school that takes agent registration, prospect education, and the selection process very seriously threatened to bar one of its players from its pro day when he signed with a contract advisor who’s not registered with the school. I’m not sure if I’m in favor of that, but I do know that if all schools had that policy, and followed through with it, the recruiting process would be a lot more orderly.
  • I’ve always been a guy who believes teams should cover every all-star game of every stripe, no matter how low on the food chain. They should also make sure they’re keeping tabs on all the other leagues, like the CFL, Arena League, etc. However, I had an interesting conversation with a scout this week who disagreed. He looks at a scouting department as a tablecloth that’s a little too small. You have to make sure the biggest part of the tablecloth  is covering the key parts of the ‘table’ (mainly the FBS teams and the better FCS teams), and accept that there may be a few crumbs left here and there. You have to play the odds, basically. Even when you’re an NFL team with 10-12 area scouts. There’s just too many players.
  • We had one more (friendly) disagreement. He likes the idea of the Pacific Pro Football League, and thinks it will attract a number of talented players that have no interest in attending school and who are willing to spend their three post-high school, pre-NFL eligibility years making $50,000 per year. My feeling is that most players worth considering for such a league will still see colleges as their best path to NFL riches, even if it means they’re essentially indentured servants for three years.

Those are the highlights from Week 1. More next week.

Combine Prep, Costs and Contempt

22 Thursday Dec 2016

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Earlier this year, I had lunch with a couple financial advisors who have been longtime friends as well as ITL clients. In the course of conversation, one of them mentioned that he’d developed a friendship with a talented young player who had bounced around at a few FBS schools.

He asked about the young man, and mentioned that he was slated to train with one of the top combine prep specialists in the business. That piqued my interest, so I called the trainer. It turned out that the young man had found the trainer and placed a call or sent an email, but was still a ways from finding someone to fund his training.

This has become pretty common. As I talk to agents across the business, I always get stories about solicitations they get from unsigned players. More and more often, these players — often the longest of long shots, sometimes no longer even draft-eligible — usually close their emails or voice mails with, “I’ve already picked out who I want to train with!” This is seen as a kind of step-saver, proof that the player is ready to hit the ground running without further ado.

Today, players see training as a given part of the agent-player relationship. This is just the latest manifestation of accelerating expectations.

As someone dedicated to helping young student-athletes realize their NFL dreams, it’s incredibly frustrating that players are getting farther and farther away from realistic goals instead of closer to them. I run a series of newsletters during the summer for draft-eligible players and their parents, and I’ve also created a series of mini-podcasts that addresses the questions I get most often.

When players reduce their whole agent selection process to which contract advisor is willing to offer training, it trivializes an agent’s role and turns the relationship into a mere business transaction. This is an absurd oversimplification, and in the end, I think this is one reason why these relationships so often become contemptuous.

If you’re a draft-eligible player reading this, I beg of you to realize that you can’t train your way into the first round. In no way am I trying to minimize the role of combine prep specialists. More often than not, they do an incredible job of sharpening a player’s athleticism and bringing out the best in a prospect. However, it’s important to understand that covering the cost of training is a major investment by a potential agent, and not something you should take for granted.

Just because a prospect can’t find an agent to cover training, that’s no reason not to go for it. And maybe it’s even better to find a contract advisor willing to go for broke for a player even if he’s not willing to go broke paying his training fees.

When Colleges, Football and Compliance Collide

14 Wednesday Dec 2016

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This week, ESPN’s Darren Rovell wrote a good story about the growth of the sports agent industry partly as a result of the release of the movie, Jerry Maguire, 20 years ago this week. There’s no denying there are more contract advisors vying for NFL clients today than there were two decades ago.

Here’s another area that’s boomed: sports management programs at national universities. Rovell notes, correctly, that as more young people have sought to enter sports fields, schools have tried to accommodate them. Today, there are 42 states (plus D.C.) with at least one school offering a sports management program, bachelor’s, master’s and/or doctoral. Five states have at least 14 (14!) schools that offer a sports management program. By the way, these numbers are courtesy of the North American Society for Sports Management. Oh yes, there’s also now a North American Society for Sports Management (NASSM) and dozens of other clubs, groups and fraternities for aspiring sports management types.

The point is that academia has wholly embraced the sports agent trend and — are you sitting down? — even monetized it. Hey, that’s capitalism. There’d probably be no Inside the League, and a host of other small businesses that are part of this cottage industry, if not for the sports agent trend. More power to ’em.

So here’s the problem. Once these young people absorb morsels of wisdom on ethics, contract negotiation and whatnot from these fine institutions of learning for four or five years, they often pursue careers as contract advisors — and immediately become persona non grata at the very schools from which they graduated.

Here’s an example. One of my longtime clients graduated from one of the finer schools in the Southeast (undergrad and master’s), and he’s a proud alumnus. However, when he tries to attend a pro day, or recruit a player, or otherwise conduct business as a contract advisor, his alma mater goes out of its way to make life hard for him. He has to sit in a special section when he accompanies his client to a workout; he can only contact draft-eligible seniors when the school says he can (though there are no laws forbidding it); and there are a number of other hoops he has to jump through. Naturally, the school didn’t mention any of this while it was drafting his account for probably around $100,000 over a five- to six-year period.

So what’s my point? How about a little honesty from schools? It’s not fair for the sports management program to teach these young people that as long as they play by a certain set of rules they can achieve success, then see these schools’ own athletic departments set up a whole different set of rules that are mostly unachievable.

If a school wants to keep its student-athletes safe and warm (and mostly uneducated) behind a big, beautiful wall, don’t accept millions of dollars from students. It’s duplicitous and dishonest, and it would be a better world if we had a lot less of both of those.

Careful: Eggheads At Play

06 Tuesday Dec 2016

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Monday evening, I tweeted something from a conversation I had with a new agent that afternoon. It dealt with two obvious (and easily controvertible) lies a player told to make himself look like a far greater prospect than he is. I debated over whether I should even waste a tweet on it, especially late at night. Finally, I pulled the trigger.

In the space of about 45 minutes, that tweet had generated 14 likes and 2 retweets. This told me two things: my followers are entirely too busy on Twitter late at night, and people in the business are disgusted with the false info, entitlement, smug attitudes and misplaced confidence displayed by too many draft hopefuls.

In the course of reviewing some of the responses, I tripped over a recent tweet by a person who’s pretty revered in the sports and entertainment law industry. Basically, the substance of his tweet was how draft prospects should have a layered, segmented structure of financial, tax and accounting advisors to handle their NFL careers. There was no ‘unless you’re just hoping to one day make the 90’ qualification. Just a summary statement about sports ethics and how things ought to be.

If you ask me, this is one of the reasons these young men have such a disastrously outsized view of their NFL prospects and the life they’ll lead.

There’s a cottage industry out there of people who love to pontificate about the business, but have no real-world experience with it. Most of the time, these are the people sitting in ivory towers and dismissing agents as fire-breathing dragons while touting players as snow-white angels. As with most things in life, these one-dimensional characterizations are useless, but because there is such a dearth of legitimate insight into the football business, they fill a void. It’s sad, really. Few can challenge them, so they go about saying whatever until people start buying it.

If you’re a young man who’ll (a) be drafted in the top 100 next April, you’re (b) going to be described often as a first-rounder throughout the spring. And if you’re not so mentioned, you can forget the idea that you need to build a team of professionals to handle your every business move going forward. Keep in mind that for every 100 players that are wanted by all 32 teams, there are 900 more who need to forget about money and focus on one thing only: making a damn 53.

To make that 53, find an agent who believes in you, will work hard for you, and will get you into an all-star game attended by scouts. Also, you don’t have to train at a gym with all the bells and whistles and jerseys on the wall, but you better go somewhere and bust your hump for 60 days. I mean, last-half-hour-of-Rocky style work, with someone who knows what they’re doing. And if that’s your school, who cares? Work.

I’ve had it up to here with people who say they know, but don’t know. They make the jobs a lot harder for people in the business — my friends, my clients, and the people I have real respect for. But more importantly, they encourage many young men to create an alternate universe on a foundation of impossible expectations. And that’s not a bit fair to anyone in the game.

An Early-Exit Process Primer

02 Friday Dec 2016

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This week, there was a firestorm over something I wrote (and Darren Heitner tweeted)   regarding Michigan’s Jabrill Peppers, as well as my tweet Monday confirming that Texas’ D’Onta Foreman would enter the ’17 draft. The tone of the tweets coming back was, ‘oh no, these players have spoken to agents, now they’re gonna lose their eligibility!!’

I thought this warranted a blog post. There’s a huge disconnect between what fans understand about the agent process and what’s actually true. There’s an even bigger disconnect (Grand Canyon-esque) about what fans understand about the early-entry process and what’s true.

I’ve preached ad nauseam about the agent selection process and it’s perceived ‘illegality’ (here’s a tweet and here’s a two-minute podcast on the subject), so today let’s talk about players leaving early for the draft.

Here’s how the average fan perceives of the process for early entry.

  1. Promising player arrives at university focused on graduating in four years and pursuing degree of his choice. Also plays football on weekends.
  2. Conniving agent lures star player into thinking about money, convinces him to desert his teammates and enter NFL draft before every ounce of his eligibility is exhausted.
  3. Player declares early; coaches, administrators and teammates scream and shed tears of rejection and betrayal.

Admittedly, that’s a oversimplification, but the whole situation is rather complex. Here’s a much more realistic take on it.

  1. Player is recognized as talented early in his football playing days and begins to dream of NFL stardom. Coaches, teammates and family members encourage and empower this dream as it takes shape over a decade.
  2. Often, player realizes NFL playing career could lift himself and his family out of poverty or negative financial situation, and again, family encourages this. Often, family members ask how long until he’s in the league.
  3. At times, player will father a child out of wedlock. This heightens the financial pressure.
  4. Coaches, media, opposing teams, his own performance, etc., confirm player’s impression that he’s an elite talent and ready for the NFL. Player also realizes the mortality of his playing career.
  5. Often, his coaching structure and/or key players around him graduate and he realizes his chances of repeating his success are lessened going forward.
  6. Usually, the player has discussed his mindset entering his third year out of high school with coaches and family, and teams support and understand his thought process (often, I have scouts tell them that schools encourage them to evaluate certain juniors that have made it known they’re leaving).

Somewhere during this process, agents enter the picture. But this isn’t an evil thing, and not even necessarily a bad thing. At any rate, hopefully, the young man has a responsible and loving support system around him that can help in the vetting process, and hopefully he plays for a progressive school that educates him and doesn’t try to shutter him from the outside world. Also, hopefully the parents are educated and attentive enough to be helpful (which is one reason we started our Two-Minute Drill series). By all accounts, Peppers and Foreman have that.

At no point does simply talking to agents invalidate a player’s eligibility. It’s important to understand this.

It’s also important to look at these young men not as strictly Saturday’s warriors. We all want to live our dreams, and everyone at their schools — especially their coaches and teammates — understands that.

Paradigm Shift

25 Friday Nov 2016

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About a week ago, I was having a conversation with a longtime friend who’s an up-and-coming contract advisor. Conversation turned to the new default 1.5-percent agent fee, and I asked if any prospects or their advisors were playing hardball so far, demanding that he drop his fee from three percent.

“Not so far,” he said. “Everyone’s paying three percent.”

That has since been echoed by other agents I’ve spoken to. I hope that continues. NFL agents, already billing at the lowest percentage of all the major sports, don’t need to get further whittled down by players who know they have all the leverage.

However, as I always tell my clients, having November discussions is easy. It’s the December discussions where agents and their prospective clients talk terms. Players are seeking the best training and pre-draft packages they can get, while agents are counting dollars and trying to decide where to spend them.

Of course, nothing happens in a vacuum in the football world, and the practical reduction in agent fees means fewer contract advisors will take the plunge and pay for a prospect’s training fees. They’ll be even less likely to send a late-round prospect to Florida, California, or some other sunny clime, as has traditionally happened. Naturally, this isn’t going to stop players from thinking that the right training will transform them from late-rounders into solid prospects, and in some cases, they may even be right. Therefore, I see the combine prep business moving in a different direction this January and February.

The challenge for agents isn’t paying for training, per se. It’s paying $6,000-$7,000 for training, food and supplements, plus another $5,000-$6,000 just for accommodations. Often, the player’s lodging costs more than his training. With more and more good trainers providing solid regimens, the mission is to find a combine prep facility near enough that a prospect can sleep in his own bed. The biggest job will be finding those facilities, evaluating the different facets of each program (when does it start? what kind of facility? who conducts training?) and, of course, weighing the costs of each.

With this new paradigm, we’re assembling a marketplace where agents and players can do their Black Friday shopping (and beyond) for combine prep. It’s our 2017 ITL Combine Prep Grid, a place where everyone in the business can sort out all the options in one place. Though we’ve only got four entries so far, they’re all solid, there are plenty of outside-the-box options, and there are many, many more on the way. We’re just getting started.

There are still a handful of titans in the combine prep business, and they won’t stop being titans. But now there’s a chance for a number of smaller training houses to work with players and make a little money while cutting costs (and risks) significantly for contract advisors. If I’m right about this new trend, it could be a rare win-win-win for trainers, agents and prospects.

Dissecting Darius: Thoughts on the Intersection of Entertainment and NFL Representation

08 Tuesday Nov 2016

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About a year ago, I was having a conversation with Jay Courie, an NFL agent and partner at one of the bigger law firms in the Southeast, McAngus, Goudelock & Courie. Along the way, he mentioned that he needed someone to partner with, someone who had youth and energy but also someone who had enjoyed success and knew the agent business. I get this kind of request at times.

So I thought about it, and when I bumped into him at the Senior Bowl, I told him I had just the guy. When I finally got Jay together with Kyle Strongin of 1 Degree Management, Jay had already met him and knew him. I could see in his eye that my choice had reaffirmed what Jay was already thinking.

That’s why it wasn’t a big surprise to me when I heard Monday that Jay had brought Kyle in as Vice President of MGC Sports, with country music star Darius Rucker a part of the deal, as well. While I’m not, in any way, taking credit for putting this merger together, I can definitely say I know both Jay and Kyle well, they’ve both been ITL clients for a long time, and I knew Jay was leaning toward a merger of some sorts. The only mild surprise was that Kyle, whom I’ve tried to recommend to inquiring agencies for some time now, was willing to move. He’d always told me in the past that he was happily independent.

While adding a big star to a sports agency is decidedly not a new idea, here are a few thoughts on this move.

  • In 2016, the Kardashian century, celebrity matters. Having a big name on your team is an edge in recruiting, especially in a business that is as poorly understood as football representation, and especially when the people you’re recruiting are young men with big egos.
  • Courie has made significant inroads at Clemson, and has major ties with the school. But if I know him at all, I know he likes to win. I don’t think he’s happy getting the second-line kids at Clemson. He wants the DeShaun Watsons of the world.
  • On the other hand, Rucker, a black country star, is a perfect fit for MGC Sports, which consistently recruits white offensive linemen as well as the speedy black skills position players that have taken Clemson to the next level.
  • Outside of Clemson, MGC really hasn’t been relevant. In fact, I wonder if Jay even consistently recruits non-Tigers. But that’s where Kyle, who finished a close second to super-power CAA on Laremy Tunsil last year, comes in. Jay is an accomplished lawyer, likable and professional, but Kyle, who spent time with the 49ers scouting department as well as in the Ole Miss and University of Tennessee recruiting offices, gives the firm a credible NFL background. Kyle has significant relationships in scouting, and having those insights gives you a tremendous edge when you’re trying to sort out the stars from the overhyped pretenders. Meanwhile, Jay has a legal practice to run, and now he doesn’t have to split his time as mercilessly.
  • The next 60 days will be very telling for MGC. Clemson has a number of top players that will be part of the ’17 draft, and the firm has now gone from a solid contender that operates beneath the radar to a firm that others will be recruiting against. The Carolinas are very contentious, with several solid firms, big and small, battling for talent.
  • In an industry where the NFLPA makes things harder virtually every day, sorting out costs and distilling a profit won’t be easy. But if MGC can land a Watson, a Williams or another comparable talent, it might be the jolt needed to propel it into ‘big agency’ status.

In the end, this is just one more indication that the sports agency business is becoming an arms race, with margins and business decisions perhaps running second to the chase for bigger and flashier names. Increasingly, to stay relevant, bigger firms are going to have to decide if they’re ready to partner up with big personalities, and in so doing, figure out how to make it all work on the profit/loss sheet.

 

NFL Supply and Demand

26 Wednesday Oct 2016

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When it comes to the NFL draft, most coverage focuses on the potential superstars slated for selection in the first couple rounds. But taking a broader view of things, which positions seem to be most in demand? Which players, by position, are NFL teams most focused on?

We’ll break it into three groups, based on the percentage of players that sign with agents and how many actually make it into NFL camps (as draftees, UDFAs or tryout players). For more details — total number of players drafted, signed as UDFAs, made it to tryout camps, percentages of each, all by positions — click here.

Most in demand: If you’re an offensive lineman, your chances of wearing an NFL helmet, at least for a day, are pretty good. Centers were the second-most in-demand position, as 71.7 percent of them made it to camp as a draftee, undrafted free agent or camp tryout. When it comes to tackles, 63.6 percent made it to camp, while 64.9 percent of tight ends made it. Defensive ends (62.4 percent) were also popular. Who was most popular? Quarterbacks, which made it to camps at a 72.2 percent rate.

Somewhere in the middle: For positions like running back (52 percent), fullback (52 percent), wide receiver (52 percent), guard (58 percent), kicker (55), cornerback (54), defensive tackle (58) and inside linebacker (50), your odds are somewhere around 50-50.

Least in demand: Though safeties are far more valuable than they used to in the days of the slot receiver and the hybrid LB/S, they’re still least in demand. Free safeties made it to camp at a rate of 45.3, while strong safeties at 44.3. Punters were similar bottom-feeders, as only 44.4 percent of those that signed with agents actually made it to camp.

 

 

A Few Thoughts About ’60 Minutes’ and NFL Financial Losses

24 Monday Oct 2016

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If you operate in football business circles, there’s an excellent chance you saw the ’60 Minutes’ report about several NFL players taken in by a bad investment in an Alabama casino. It was orchestrated by a financial advisor, Jeff Rubin, who was then based in Florida (he’s in Denver now). Here are a few thoughts.

  • This story has been on hold for at least two years. I have no doubt the NFL (and especially the NFLPA) have been battling CBS, which obviously has a big broadcast contract with the league, to withhold it altogether. I have no doubt that this tweet from Bleacher Report’s Jason Cole is true.
  • This report is the tip of the iceberg. The two ‘watchdogs’ interviewed in the report, Rand Getlin and Chase Carlson, are both friends of mine, and both were interviewed at length about far more than just the Rubin incident.
  • Here’s an excellent, comprehensive report Chase put together. It pretty much recounts all the financial advisors registered with the NFLPA who stole NFL players blind.
  • After reading Chase’s report, you might wonder why there are so many such incidents, but so few reports. You might also wonder why Rand (formerly with NFL Network, and a veteran of excellent work at Yahoo! Sports) and Chase aren’t affiliated with major media entities. My theory: it’s sexy to talk about this stuff for a while, but at the end of the day, the man on the street just shrugs his shoulders and says, ‘that’s their problem. If these millionaires can’t keep track of their money, screw ’em.’
  • I guess that’s OK, but at the end of the day, shouldn’t the NFLPA care? I mean, they’re charging thousands of dollars to register financial advisors. Even though the PA is careful to protect itself from litigation exposure by admitting that it has no idea if these guys are legitimate or not, the fact is that agents can only recommend advisors from this program. To me, that’s a de facto endorsement from the NFLPA, whether it’s technically true or not.
  • Dozens of the registered members of the NFLPA program are ITL clients, but I would say the lion’s share of our financial advisor clients that really work with NFL players are not in the program. I was texting with a member of the latter group last night, and I think this pretty much sums up his (and his group’s) thoughts: “The NFLPA feels as though any advisor that can afford a $1500 annual fee must be good.”
  • Here’s a simple fix that I think would work, and if I were the PA, I’d get out of the registration business and simply post this on the site. If you are an NFL player and you are approached by a financial advisor, step 1 is to plug his name into FINRA BrokerCheck. Step 2 is to check out his record there, and if he’s got a few issues, ask questions. If he’s clean, press on with confidence (mostly) that he’s a straight shooter. And if his name doesn’t show up there, presume that he’s not an official, registered, honest, educated financial advisor and consider avoiding this person.