It’s been almost a week since the ’16 NFLPA exam, and I’ve had several conversations with the 400-plus people who were there. Here are a few observations.

• My initial observation was that the NFLPA made the test a lot easier after last year’s exam cut the passing rate by about 30 points, from about 70 percent to just under 40 percent. After talking to more people, it seems they might have made it a little easier, but not appreciably.
• Where I think they changed things is that they made the pre-test seminar a lot better and more thorough. Last year, especially on the second day, the seminar was a bit of a blow-off; they even ended the seminar early and almost started the exam early. They must have taken fire last year from some of the candidates that failed.
• My impression is that Mark Levin, who’s one of the better officials at the NFLPA and certainly one of the more knowledgeable of the CBA, played a bigger role this year. If that’s the case, that’s a good move on the NFLPA’s part.
• If you’ll permit me to brag a bit, the people that seemed most confident about the test used our practice exam. We expanded it this year, and I think the 40-plus questions gave people an excellent look at what to expect. At least that’s what everyone told me.
• On the other hand, I spoke to one test-taker who freely admits he wasn’t prepared and didn’t perform well (and probably failed). This is incredibly refreshing. There are so many big egos in this business, especially when they’re first getting into he business, but this young man (who has an NFL background and who was fresh out of law school) essentially laughed at how not-ready he was for this test, and how lightly he took it. I mean, it was classic what-not-to-do-when-taking-the-exam stuff. We’re at least six weeks away from even getting the results for the ’16 exam and we’re already working with him, getting him ready for ’17.
• I think the era of the easy NFLPA exam is over, for several reasons. One, the NFLPA doesn’t really like agents, especially lower-tier agents. Two, the PA really struggles to vet all the applicants (every year, there are several applicants that don’t even find out they’re approved for the exam until a week or more beforehand). Three, the PA is always hearing from the big firms that there are too many agents. Four, the PA sees agent applications as an insatiable, renewable resource (and that may be right). No matter how many agents fail the exam, and no matter how many leave the business each year, they’re still going to have about 300 people taking the exam.
• I think you’re going to see an uptick in the size of the agent class this year, but it won’t be a landslide. Many of the 200 or so that were back this year for a second whack at it will pass (at least a hundred, I’d say), plus the 200-plus new test-takers were, generally, better-prepared, I’d say (we worked with an awful lot of them), so I’d guess at least a hundred of them pass. So my guess is that we get an agent class that’s more in line with the usual 150-200 that pass.

That pretty much wraps up our coverage of the ’16 agent exam. On to next year.

This morning, I got an email from a gentleman who’s registered to take the NFLPA exam later this month in Washington, D.C. He told me that at this point, he hadn’t “cracked the book” in preparation for the exam. His question — should he defer to 2017?

It’s a good question. Lack of proper preparation time is one reason plenty of people fail the test. I guess that’s true of any test, really, but especially the NFLPA exam. It’s even more true this year, after the test was made exceptionally harder than in previous years. With the pass rate for last year’s exam below 40 percent, it’s driven plenty of people to our practice exam, the only one on the Web. The 42 questions there are the only ones you’ll find that resemble what would-be contract advisors will see in our nation’s capital in two weeks.

When you register for the NFLPA exam, the players association sends out a copy of the CBA and source documents that make things a little easier. However, studying the entire CBA to pass the exam is a little like studying Encyclopedia Brittanica to pass your American history exam. I mean, the answers are in there, but so is a lot of stuff you don’t need. That’s why you need plenty of time to prepare. It’s also why many people take advantage of the study guide we offer. It’s not free, but reasonably priced, and gives many test-takers the tools they need to succeed. Especially if they don’t find out until a couple weeks before the test date that they’ve been approved. Which happens all the time. Literally.

Here are a couple other reasons people fail the exam.

• Lack of humility: If there’s ever been a job that attracts people with big egos, it’s the agent world. I guess the legal profession already has plenty of people with  outsized opinions of themselves, but when you stack on the (potential) status that comes from being part of the NFL, the arrogance zooms into the stratosphere. Of course, a lot of that goes away the second the seminar starts and the pure volume of information starts flowing. It can be very humbling. I’ve heard stories of people begging the more prepared guy next to them to help when they realized what they faced.

• Poor time management: The PA made last year’s test harder not necessarily by making the material harder, but by making the questions longer and more nuanced. The people who took it last year told me there were very few fill-in-the-blank or true/false questions. Instead, there were word problems that required nuance and comprehension. Many people go into the test figuring, ‘it’s open book, so how hard can it be?’ That’s a terrible approach. Last year, dozens of people wound up spending too much time on one answer, then found themselves scrambling to finish when the proctor called time’s up.

Today, I had a discussion with an ITL client who’s been an agent under five years. Though he’s still relatively new to the business, he’s incredibly knowledgeable and insightful, partially because he’s already had remarkable success in other football business fronts. Whenever he calls, I always check my watch, because I know we’re going to be on the phone for an hour and I have to make sure I’m not scheduled for anything for a while.

Anyway, today we were discussing recruiting, and the difficulty of converting a player from prospect to client, especially for people like him who’ve had tremendous success in business already (especially sports business). He said something that really resonated with me: “You have to realize that they’re the star.”

That was a Eureka moment for me. I’m always trying to convey to people new to the business, or who are considering the business, the challenges they’ll face. This is a great way to do it, especially to those who approach in the financial realm.

Many of these people manage money for doctors, attorneys, business owners and other high-net wealth individuals. This means they have millions, and sometimes billions, under management. It also means they have a certain amount of cache among people who themselves have cache. Then they come to the football world, and none of that translates. The truly elite player — i.e., the ones that will go in the top 30-40 picks, and the ones that will truly generate revenue — are super-specialized, and have been told that all their young lives. Financial advisors, even the good ones, are a dime a dozen, relatively speaking. To cross the bridge from just another guy to The One, that financial advisor has to do more than provide extra services, connect on a personal level and have the keys to the network that player travels in. He also has to swallow his pride, to some degree. That’s not so easily done, especially when you have to jump through so many other hurdles.

Brief story. I spoke at a seminar last fall, and while there, I met an accomplished financial advisor who was registered by the NFLPA, but who had not cracked the code for repping players. As he drove me to the airport, we talked, and he assured me he’d become an ITL client and take advantage of the tools we offer. However, as the weeks wore on, it occurred to him (apparently) that the nice car he drove, and the nice house(s) he owned, and the impressive clientele he worked with probably weren’t going to get him very far among flashy players in their early 20s. We lost touch, and I doubt I’ll hear from him again. Hey, I understand.

Of course, one day, these young men will be ex-players, and they’ll mature and start to realize the stature of the men who once begged them for their time. But it doesn’t matter then, does it?

This time of year is fun for me because it’s when we celebrate our successes at Inside the League.

With OTAs under way and rookie mini-camps in the rear-view mirror, there’s no more mystery about who’s going to be drafted and which players will line up an NFL contract despite not being selected. So many agents dream of having first-rounders in their inaugural year certified, but this is incredibly unrealistic. A far greater measure of success is simply having a player in the league in your first three years registered with the NFLPA. In fact, if you don’t have someone certified in that time, you have to start over, taking the exam again and paying the initiation fee.

For the last 3-4 years, we’ve spent June interviewing the agents we partner with who’ve had such success. It’s a lot of fun celebrating this accomplishment while learning a little more about their experiences in their first year, as well as how they wound up becoming contract advisors. Every year, only 15-20 independent agents — i.e., agents who came into the business with no connections, no hookups and no relatives slated to be first-rounders in the coming year — actually land a player on an NFL roster, and 70-80 percent of those agents are part of our team, I’m proud to say. That’s why it takes all month to interview them, and why we publish our interviews to the people taking the exam this summer in a daily newsletter.

This year, I turned the job of interviewing ITL clients over to my ace intern, Mark Skol. So even though I’m not doing the interviews myself, it’s still awfully informative to read each account.

One of them, Maryland-based Jon Howard, got interested in the business when he tried (unsuccessfully) to get his brother into the league.

Another interesting thing: opinions on the NFLPA exam really vary. Some of them feel the test was pretty easy (like Mississippi attorney Jay Bolin, whose interview is tomorrow). Some of them, like South Florida-based CPA and attorney Bob Engler, feel it’s quite hard. Others, like Baltimore-based attorney Gary Leibowitz, feel it should be a bit more practical and based on actual agent practices, rather than simply about the CBA. Most, but not all, used our practice agent exam (the only one on the Web) to get ready.

Of course, some of the things they’ve said weren’t exactly shocking. All of them are passionate about football and wanted to find some way to become involved in the game, and saw the agent avenue as easiest. One of them is my former intern, Murphy McGuire, whom you’ve already read about in these pages.

If you’re getting ready to take the exam this summer, I hope you’ll join us. One of the things you’ll get is access to our newsletter. I want you to be one of the people whom we write about next summer.