Today, we continue our discussion on how to achieve success as a first-year agent by considering the value of recruiting.

About a week ago, on May 25, we discussed the fact that about half of all agents certified last summer didn’t have a client in the 2015 draft. I don’t mean they didn’t have a player drafted, and I don’t mean they didn’t have a player signed to a UDFA deal. They didn’t even sign a player eligible for the 2015 NFL draft. Think about that. I doubt that was there goal when they spent about $5,000 to pass a test and get certified. There are three reasons this happens to agents.

1. They don’t know how to reach players. Many come into the business thinking the NFLPA, or colleges, or someone is going to provide them with this XL spreadsheet of cell phones, emails and the like for draftable players local to them. Nope.

2. They’re intimidated by the process. If they reach out to their local college and try to make nice, normally the school makes them promise not to talk to any of the players until they walk off the field for the last time. That’s a no-doubt recipe for failure. If they do get hold of players, what do they say? “Hi. How’s it going? Um, I don’t have any NFL clients, and I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I’d like you to place your dreams of playing in the NFL in my hands.” That can be scary.

3. It’s so much easier to sign players that call you. Once a contract advisor gets certified, his phone and email are listed on the NFLPA site. Then, come December, every player who’s not getting recruited starts down the NFLPA list. Many of them have compelling stories about why they aren’t showing up as top-ten prospects on the various draft sites, and it’s easy to get seduced by this. However, if you’re not careful, you’ve spent $10,000 training and preparing a player you never should have signed. These players are the ‘junk mail’ of the business. If a player’s recruiting you, how badly do you think you’re going to have to ‘recruit’ the NFL to sign him?

If you’re considering getting into this business, understand that you can’t stand on the wall and hope the pretty girl asks you to dance. You also have to understand that rejection is going to be part of the business; after all, when you get right down to it, this job is commission sales. Identify a player you feel has a shot, figure out a way to contact him, and get after it. You have to. You don’t want to waste Year 1 of your budding agent career.

Tomorrow, we’ll have a story illustrating this, and we’ll continue our discussion.

As we close in on the end of the first year of Succeed in Football (thanks for reading), we’re about two months from the NFLPA exam for the people hoping to join the ranks of NFL contract advisors this year. With that in mind, we’re turning from talk of the scouting business to the representation business this week.

We’ll try to lend a hand to all those folks heading to Washington, D.C., this summer in a couple of places. One of those is this blog, where this week we’ll pass along a tip a day on how to break in and truly be successful in a tough profession. The other is in the email arena, where today we launched our annual newsletter for prospective 2015 NFLPA contract advisors. It’s free, of course, and if you’re interested in getting it, click here.

Our blog, you already know about, of course. Our email series, however, will go in a slightly different direction. We’ll focus solely on the agent business. We’ll interview several ITL clients who experienced success this year with their first draftee (I think we had six clients, all independent agents with no affiliation to big firms, who had players drafted, and that’s something worth saluting). We’ll also talk to several agents who had players signed as undrafted free agents, and if you think that’s easy, well, you’re wrong. Getting a player on a UDFA deal is important every year because, as young agents know, you only get three years to get a player on a contract with an NFL team. If you don’t, the NFLPA dumps you and you have to go back through the whole expensive process again, including paying the initiation fees and passing the test again.

So that’s it. I just wanted to introduce the week. Class starts tomorrow (LOL). I hope you’ll stick around. We’ll have plenty of good stuff, lessons, insights, etc., if making deals and signing players is something you hope to do someday.

First off, happy Memorial Day. I hope you and your family set aside time today to remember why we’re all off work today and able to celebrate with our families. It’s sad that some will scarcely remember why in the world we don’t jet off to the office today.

On Friday on the ITL side, we reported that only 96 out of 175 contract advisors certified last fall went on to sign a prospect for the 2015 NFL draft. That’s about 45 percent, around half of the entire class. We actually missed on our count Friday, calling it 94. Anyway . . . .

Here’s the rationale for those 79 agents without clients this year. No. 1, they get a really late start on the process, because though they take the test at the end of July in Washington, D.C., they don’t get their results until late September. That means they get a really late jump on the process. OK, I get that. I don’t agree, but I get it.

Here’s a secondary reason. A serious portion of those that come into the game only got certified because they thought they had a sure thing — a nephew, or brother, or a player they coached in Pop Warner, or whatever. Then they get to November or December, and then they get the ‘hey, I love you like a brother and you’re always gonna be part of the family, but I gotta go with this experienced agent over here.’ Discouraged, they sign no one.

The third reason is really a fear of getting in the game. Many of them get certified thinking the costs of representing a player are negligible (that’s off by about $10,000/player) and they feel like they’ll get a fair shot if they play by the local college’s rules and get registered properly in the states where they recruit. Then they find out the players they waited all season to talk to had been having discussions with agents since the previous summer, and have already made up their minds.

But that’s for another day. I know a lot of people who’ll take the agent exam this summer read this blog. I want those people to decide, right now, that they will truly go for it if they get into this business. If you make it to certification, don’t be satisfied with simply putting that on your business card.

The pro football business, despite its difficulties (and there are plenty), has the shortest incubation period (from player signed to player paying his agent) in professional athletics. Represent a baseball player or hockey player, and it may take years for him to wind his way through the minor leagues, then in baseball, you don’t get paid until he makes it past arbitration. In basketball, which has a much shorter bench, you better identify the top players when they’re in seventh grade, then start cozying up to their families very early. In football, you might meet a kid in December, sign him in January, and see him make a roster in September. You won’t find that in any other sport.

Gotta run. But my basic message is the same as it is every day in this space. Don’t be paralyzed by fear. Decide what you’re going to do, count the cost, then really sell out for it. There’s no feeling like succeeding in football.

As the NFL Network’s broadcast kicks off and I sit here among unpacked bags, exhausted from a return trip home but excited for what lies ahead over the next three days, I’m in a bit of a reflective mood.

Today, my reflection turns to how quickly things can turn, especially when it comes to an NFL player’s value. I think there’s value in weighing the way things have turned out, especially for people considering making the NFL their profession. First, a story about this year’s draft.

Tuesday night, my wife and I were fortunate enough to be invited to a get-together in Chicago hosted by the Sports and Entertainment Division of Morgan Stanley. It was wonderful, casual yet upscale, in a perfect setting at a classy bar at the Dana Hotel downtown. There were probably 300 people there, including people from all around the football industry: agents, financial planners, trainers, parents and relatives of players, and of course, players. It’s always fun to meet with players in a relaxed setting, especially when the hay is in the barn, so to speak, just days before the draft. Among the players there was LSU OT La’el Collins. But first, let’s flash back to earlier in the week.

On Sunday, I gotten a call from a source who’s very connected in Baton Rouge. He told me police were interested in talking to Collins regarding the murder of a young woman Saturday night. My source said Collins was the father, and hinted that it looked like a Rae Carruth situation. He urged me to investigate further.

That was a tough task for me. I have a small shop and a limited bandwidth, so I couldn’t put resources toward a wild goose chase through law enforcement and legal channels Monday and Tuesday, hoping for a scoop. While it looked like a juicy tip, and I couldn’t dismiss its veracity, it just wasn’t something I could act on. There was also one question I had: if a player wanted a former lover murdered, wouldn’t the killer make sure the baby didn’t survive?

Fast forward to Tuesday night. I didn’t get to speak to Collins, but I did exchange pleasantries with his agent, Deryk Gilmore of Priority Sports. It’d been a bumpy ride the past couple months for Gilmore and he looked relieved to be finishing up the lunacy of the annual draft hype-fest.

Less than two days later, the world of Collins, Gilmore, and everyone associated with them has been turned upside-down in a way no one could have foreseen as recently as a week ago. In a time when Aaron Hernandez’s conviction is still ringing in the ears of team officials, umerous reports indicate Collins has been removed from numerous draft boards.

Obviously, it will be a long time before all the facts of the case have been decided and all voices heard. However, Collins’ potential fall is perhaps the most meteoric of any player I can remember in a long time.

Keep the names of Collins and Johnny Manziel, another player whose fall from grace is measured in seconds, not years, in mind as you decide whether the fish bowl life of the NFL is for you.

Today, with the draft little more than a week away, I thought I’d tell a story about a young player whose father I worked with through last year’s draft process. It’s a bit of a cautionary tale for agents and parents alike.

The player went into his senior season as a solid end-of-draft/undrafted free agent at a mid-sized BCS school in the south. By the end of the year, he was about the same status, and he signed with an agent that was new but who had deep pockets. It looked like he had a fighting chance to at least go to camp and maybe even make the team.

Though he didn’t receive a combine invite, he took care of business at his pro day and set himself up to be a legitimate camp possibility. Unfortunately, I don’t think this was good enough for his agent, who had sunk a good amount of training money into several players that held undrafted free agent grades. The father, the player and the agent had a long talk going into the draft, and according to the father, the agent set a bottom number for the bonus he’d be willing to accept for the young man. I never got to find out from the father how much influence the player had had in that conversation.

When draft day came, the seven rounds predictably came and went, and the UFA process began in earnest. Unfortunately, there weren’t many suitors for the young defensive back. In fact, there was only one call that came in, and the agent fielded it. As the father told the story, the team was offering a $5,000 bonus, and that’s not what the agent had in mind, so he passed.

No other calls came in. For reasons I never learned, the agent wasn’t able to find the young man a tryout, either, perhaps because he was not in the metro area of any NFL team and not quite interesting enough to rate a plane ticket.

The father told me all of this about a month after the draft. The young man had waited four weeks after the draft, hoping that something would come in. I don’t know if this was at the agent’s urging, or if it was just the young man’s way of exhausting every NFL avenue. When his father called, he was composed, of course, but there was sadness and regret in his voice as he told me the young man was going to go ahead with his non-football life pursuits.

If you’re a young man or his parent reading this, make sure you tell your agent not to negotiate over a thousand dollars, or even a couple hundred dollars. If you’re an agent, make sure you don’t blow your client’s chances because you want to call a team’s bluff. If you’re an aspiring football professional, realize how tenuous a place on an NFL roster is.

Today, I was talking to an agent who’s had struggles satisfying a high-maintenance client during travels among teams. It reminded me of my own experience working with a high-maintenance client several years ago.

I had a friend in realty who was working with a Texans player living in Atlanta. She had set everything up so the player could come into town, hit several locations over two days, then fly back with minimal hassle. Of course, things rarely go as planned when you’re working with athletes used to having all their travel taken care of for them by their college and NFL teams.

My friend had worked hard to verify that they’d fly in early and we’d pick the young man up from the airport, then whisk him to several houses over two days, and put him back on a plane the following evening. Things got interesting when we got word from his financial planner who was with us in Houston that the player had missed his flight. That wasn’t entirely surprising. However, it was surprising when we showed up to pick him up and, though he insisted that he was in the pickup area, he was nowhere to be found. Oh, by the way, he wasn’t alone; turns out that, at his insistence, his financial planner had bought his ‘advisor,’ a street runner, a ticket as well.

So his realtor and I were at the airport planning to pick up one player, but it turns out, we were at the wrong airport (there are two in Houston) and needing to make room for two. OK. We’d roll with the punches. But it would take about 45 minutes to get to the other airport, which would mean the first half of the day was wiped out and the various house visits she’d planned would have to be completely altered.

The next 24 hours were like a comedy act. The next day, the realtor and I arrived to find his party had grown to a full processional, and his posse traveled in a convoy of vehicles behind us as we visited house after house. My friend and I went from realtor and host to caterer, entertainer, travel concierge and a handful of other duties associated with keeping several people happy.

It’s just a reminder that things rarely run exactly as planned, especially when you’re trying to keep a young man who’s rarely had to face the basic accountability that ‘regular people’ live with day to day. It’s something to prepare for as you consider a career in football.