Last Thursday for our weekly war story, I talked about a difficult situation I’d encountered in my days running the Hula Bowl that was handled with class and respect by an agent I’ve had a long-running relationship with. Today, the other side of the coin.

In those days, though the Hula Bowl was the No. 3 game, it was a hard sell to established agents and top players. Though the game was being played in America’s paradise, East Coast-based players faced a 7-10 hour flight to get to Honolulu on a commercial airline flying in an economy class seat. We were also the first game in the cycle, meaning players would have to miss the first week of combine prep and/or they’d be playing a bowl game almost right up to departure time for Hawaii. There were also concerns about how many scouts would make it to the game and other considerations that are a normal part of the process. Bottom line, I had to be in ‘sell’ mode 24-7, always recruiting, always trying to keep invitees and their agents happy.

Sometime late in December, I got a call from an agent who had signed one of our better receivers and one of our few invitees from the SEC. Obviously, a touchdown-scorer from the nation’s most glamorous conference was a key part of our roster, and would help draw scouts, so I was pretty angry when he called to tell us the young man was withdrawing. But my anger doubled when the agent casually reassured me with this: ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ve got you another guy.’

Well, I was younger then, and maybe I would handle things better today, but that really made me blow my top. I tried to control my anger on the phone with the guy, but I’m sure I was tempted to throw something as soon as we were done. Why? Because not only was he pulling one of our ‘A’ players, but he wanted me to do him a favor by substituting in a ‘B’ player. I felt, and still feel, that getting an agent’s player into a postseason all-star game does the agent and his client a tremendous service (though most agents feel they’re the ones doing the favor). So when he dismissed me, then expected me to happily take his lesser client, well, that was tough to take.

The football business is a rather small one, so you see the same faces every year. At the time, I didn’t know this agent especially well, but I’ve continued to move in the same circles as he does, and I’ve since found other reasons to believe my trust in him would be misplaced. It is what it is.

If you’re aspiring to work in this business, let me just say that you’ll come across many people who are self-serving and disrespectful. That’s life, but maybe people like that are more common in the gridiron game. Never repay disrespect with your own rancor, but also trust your gut and your instincts. Those who burn you once are probably going to be inclined to try to burn you twice. Avoid that if you can.

With college football season wrapping up, there are a lot of questions about the agent selection process. With that in mind, I wanted to step away from our look inside scouting to post an interview with Rob Blanchflower, whose son, Rob Jr., is a tight end with the Steelers after being selected in the seventh round (230 overall) last spring. This piece is far longer than our usual posts here, but Rob has some interesting insights on the process and what tools he did and didn’t have when it was decision time for his son.

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Did it concern you that Rob was going into his senior season with a team that had struggled? Did it worry you that it might impact his draft status?

“I think when you look at what’s out there in the U.S. and the powerhouses that you have, the Stanfords, Michigan, SEC, and coming from an area other than Washington, D.C., not a lot of people are developing programs. It’s always a concern. We were hopeful that being in a Division 1 program might raise some eyebrows, and as a parent, you’re always pulling for your child, but you balance that with being at UMass. Even at Vanderbilt, that’s not a powerhouse, but it’s still a respected school in the SEC.”

What kind of guidance did former UMass head coach Charley Molnar and/or his staff provide regarding agents?

“I think they were OK. Coach Molnar had some challenges and I don’t think he had the connections with the larger programs and with other guys in the NFL that the more established schools could have. But from a standpoint of being encouraging and helpful, they were there. It does nothing but help their program if they have guys like Blanchflower in the league. One feeds the other.”

Going into his senior season, what was your perception of where Rob would go in the draft? Where did you get that information?

“To be honest, as a parent, you always want to try to balance your child’s expectations, and this was always a dream, and as he went through his senior year I became more respectful of his drive and focus, and his talent started to unwind. He broke a 40-year-old record for receptions that was held by Milt Morin, who happened to be from his hometown, and (Morin) was a Pro Bowler for three years, I think, so those things come along and you don’t want them to be disappointed, but as the season began going, it became more of a (possibility), and we didn’t have the resources you would normally have, and that’s about the time (ITL) reached out to us, and (its) program and (its) services provided were very strong and a very good influence on what’s happening and how the process works, and understanding the mindset of the agents, and what to do and what to talk about and what to think about, and as it gets closer, you have to be prepared for that step.

“I didn’t really focus on it too much because we just wanted to get him through the program, but we had no idea of the qualities they were looking for in each round. It’s seven rounds, and then you see the 1^st, 2^nd and third rounds, and then his agent said he might go anywhere from fourth through seventh, and at that point I would say probably 2-3 games into the season when Rob started to put up numbers and I started doing some pretty exhaustive and intensive research and tracking every tight end in the country on a weekly basis, and seeing where they stood, and at that point all the soothsayers come out, and I probably had 25-30 guys on my spreadsheet what we were tracking, and it distilled out to a dozen or 15 or so, and you start to weigh where they might go. I was hopeful he could go as early as the fourth round, but that was pretty high expectations, and it would be a great thing to go as high as someone from the SEC or California. I was always hopeful he would go somewhere in the fifth or above. And if a team had a hole maybe they would jump on it, probably late in the fifth or maybe the sixth. Until draft day, I thought maybe sixth round. And the other thing that’s been a phenomenon for me, is the number of insane people out there (who follow) fantasy football. It’s like these people don’t have a life. You can get all kinds of (research), and somebody’s done (the research) somewhere, with Bleacher Report and a lot of them you told me about, and then it kind of rolls out. You go there, find another one, and it’s amazing. You’re not going to get the kid from Maine, who was also pretty good, but you do get the big names. You can see them, and the harsh reality is that you have 250 or thereabouts picks, and any given year you might have seven tight ends go and some years two. (With all the research I did), my wife was starting to wonder about me.”

When did agents really start reaching out?

“I think we had 1-2 guys really reach out to Rob even in the late spring/early summer, and we started getting some promotional materials in the mail. Nobody would directly reach out but you’d get an email or something in the mail and congratulations on a great career, and maybe one or two in June, and then we had three or four in late July/August, and then probably 3-4 guys again in August or September, and the frenzy probably was really, well, what happened was that the former GM from Dallas, Gil Brandt, ranked Rob as one of the top five tight ends in the country on NFL.com, and that was an unbelievable surprise for us, and once that hit the (web), we started getting people calling, and that, I think, was probably the first week in October, and then it started to build, then it quieted down a bit, and then we went through the selection.”

Did you have any resources or friends or ex-teammates or attorneys who helped you vet people in the process?

“A local attorney . . . was a very big help, and he knew a couple of agents, and when it came time to look over (the SRA) he helped, but that’s pretty boilerplate. He was probably the best resource there, and when you start talking to people, everyone knows somebody who’s an agent, and you have to be kind of careful there. You want someone who’s a full-time agent and not someone who’s selling cars on the side. But some of the coaches were very helpful, and his old coach was very helpful with Robert, and (ex-UMass teammate) Emil Igwenagu was a big help, as well as (ex-UMass teammate) Michael Cox he talked to, even some of the other guys around the league were out there. . . There was not really anyone who pushed a certain guy. We had a few guys who were runners who pushed and some who were trying to get in with agents, and I was relatively surprised. It was a pretty clean process. Everybody wants you to believe they’re Jerry Maguire.”

What’s the one thing you wish you had (resource, website, advisor, anything else) that you would have found helpful?

“I will tell you that until my son became a junior in football, I was always a fair-weather fan. I always taught my children that sports are something you do and shouldn’t be a spectacle, so I never got into the minutiae. If I’d had a crystal ball, I would have tried to learn more early on the process. It’s hard to try to absorb in a six-month period of time, and (agents) would tell you of signing bonuses and who got what and where they went, and from that standpoint, I wish I had been more enthusiastic and had taken a detailed interest in the game prior to having a dog in the hunt. I thought (the ITL newsletter) was very helpful for me, and those are the sort of resources you can really use. They helped me tremendously. The Internet is a tremendous resource. I do think the schools could do a better job, and maybe the schools that have a better hit ratio do. If they had someone you could call and say, ‘what’s this all about,’ that would be very helpful.”

The following list came from my friend, Huntington, W.Va.-based David Rich of Rich Sports Management. Dave is not a super-agent in the flashy, represents-every-first-rounder sense, except when it comes to his sense of humor. If he wanted to take his series of stories on the business to the stage, he would be the Jerry Seinfeld of sports representation.

He’s learned a lot of lessons on his way to running a solid, mid-sized agency that regularly gets clients drafted in the middle-to-late round despite not going to the combine and not getting splashy headlines.

Today, he volunteered what he calls his ‘Top 10 rules every sports agent should know and follow.’ I’ve reproduced it here in full with minimal edits. Here goes. My favorites are Nos. 10 and 7.

10. Never let a player borrow your personal vehicle unless you want to find it burnt up on the side of the highway in Macon, Ga.

9. If you find a prospect, make it hard as hell for them to fire you for as long as you can, because they eventually will unless you are their dad (and often they fire you for their dad).

8. If a guy gets into your car on the way to the NFL Combine with a jug of water, and it has instructions on when to drink it and what to take with it written in Sharpie on the jug, expect that guy not to play in the NFL.

8A. (See also ‘If that same guy calls you from the NFL Combine at 4 a.m. saying he can’t find his ID, so he can’t take the NFL urine test that morning, despite the fact that he’s got his name written on the back of the shirt the NFL Combine just gave him,’ same advice).

7. Never assume when you ask a prospect if he’s been arrested that he’s counting arrests where he didn’t think he was guilty or where the case settled without having to go to trial.

6. All college players think they are first-round picks. All of them. Even the team managers. They all see what the first-round picks are getting (rental cars, training in Arizona or Florida, etc.) and they not only want it, but think they deserve it. What’s more, if you aren’t willing to provide it to them, it’s because you don’t “believe in them” enough.

5. Every player you sign will think he is the long-shot exception that is going to make the NFL, and beat all the odds. No matter that he only played one season; has no film; has two labrum tears in three years; and his college coach hates him and tells every scout he knows to “take him off their list.”  So prepare to lose money — a lot of it — because there is always some schmuck out there willing to pay more to train, house and feed a bad player, and you have to bid against them.

4. If the player is chasing you, there is a reason for that. Good players don’t chase agents. Good players are chased.

3. Most players don’t understand that their level of “want” doesn’t always equal the level of “will get.” Wanting to make the NFL does not mean you will make it. Lots of guys who suck want to make it. Players think their agent can call a team and say “sign my guy.” I always ask my players, “How pretty is your girlfriend?” When they tell me how hot they are, I tell them, “Really? That hot? Well I’ve got a really ugly sister. Break up with your girlfriend and date my ugly sister. No, I’m serious! Date her! Because I want you to! Just like you think I can convince an NFL team to cut a guy they really like for you.” They get it pretty quick then.

2. If your player is dumb, he won’t play in the NFL. Yeah he’ll make it for a while, may even get drafted, but if he’s truly dumb, like ‘can’t line up in the right place’ dumb, you are wasting your time.

1. I patented this phrase so don’t steal it, or I’ll sue you: Everyone says they want the truth, but then when you tell it to them, they wish you would have lied. This is so true, especially of hot women in bars and NFL prospects. I’m not saying to lie. I’m saying, you better be prepared to operate in the gray. Dark gray. I’m talking ‘Navy-Seal-raid-on-a-compound-at-4-a.m.-dark-gray.’ Abe-Lincoln-photo gray. You can’t tell a player he won’t be drafted. Ever. Even if you know he won’t be. You have to say that if he follows the plan and works his tail off, there’s no limit to what he can do.

I don’t have a war story today, per se. Instead, I hope you’ll permit me to pass along my dissection of a conversation I had with an agent from a top-10 firm today.

• I’m always getting asked by new agents how much money they need to recruit a player. Well, based on the phone conversation I had today, the figure his firm uses for budgeting is $35,000/player after the signing. This firm doesn’t cheat, but I’m still presuming the recruiting costs per player (which probably involve at least 2-3 visits each with probably 2-3 representatives) are around $3,000-$5,000 after you consider plane flights, hotel stays, meals and rental cars. This agency recruits players that range anywhere from 1-50 in the draft (from the first pick in the draft to about midway through the second round). So basically what I took from that is that if you want to recruit a first-rounder, the baseline is a commitment of about $40,000 to get you to draft day.
• I should mention two others related things. His agency doesn’t pay signing bonuses or stipends, which typically run in the five figures. If you’re a new agent with a limited client list, you’re definitely going to need to figure that into the cost, just as a sweetener to get the kid to consider you. That number could range into the tens of thousands, but let’s just say $10,000, for a grand total of $50,000/player.
• The other thing he added is that if the kid falls to the third round, the $35,000 becomes a break-even figure. The kid has to go in the first two rounds just to turn a profit. Now, as you know, a first-rounder in December is just a bad combine, a failed drug test, an arrest or a pulled hamstring on pro day away from the third round (or worse) in April. There are no guarantees in this business, except that bills will come due and you better pay them.
• There’s one other consideration. If you don’t have a client list ranging around 20-30 active players, you have very little shot of signing a player in the top 100. You’ll also need to spend, I would estimate, 100 hours on the phone with him and/or his parents. These are the non-money costs of recruiting.

We’ll get back to other aspects of the football industry in Thursday’s post, but I wanted to write about this while it was fresh. I hope you find it insightful as it pertains to your place in the football world.

A couple years ago, I was having a phone conversation with an agent who’s a longtime friend and supporter of ITL. We often talk generally about the business (he’s an avid reader of this blog, too). In our discussion, he asked me how many of the almost 800 agents in the business I thought were making more than $100,000.

I guessed high and said 100. He laughed and said it was a fraction of that, maybe 20. I’ve often gone back and thought about that. If it were possible to track such things, who was right? My friend or me?

I thought about this when I tripped across this link while browsing the web earlier today. I knew the big movie stars were making a killing and the big directors and producers, too, but it was interesting to learn what agents make. Now, I must caution you that I don’t know anything about how the agent business works in entertainment, or how many agents make this kind of dough, or how long it takes to build to that level. Still, it was interesting stuff.

A couple weeks ago, I texted a young woman who had expressed interest in representing athletes in the past. I wanted to know if she had taken the NFLPA exam this summer, and her response was interesting. “I’m still deciding if I want to be (a sports) agent” she texted. “Our entertainment side has grown so much and is more lucrative.”

She went on to say that her agency was considering “(divesting) wholly of the sports side. 1% with 40+ hours a week is probably not the best business decision for us right now. It’s a bummer because we love it, but the opportunity cost is rough to ignore.”

I subsequently sent her a text on Nov. 2 asking if she’d gone through with the NFLPA exam, and she never responded. I guess that answers my question.

I know I strike a negative tone at times in this space, and I don’t mean to be discouraging. However, I do want everyone considering this business to know the risks, to give themselves time to prepare for this business, and to understand that it takes a special kind of passion to make this career work.