On Monday night, I spent an hour on the phone with a new agent. It was really refreshing.

This agent had lots and lots of questions, and she was clearly taking notes as I discussed the various answers to her questions. There are a lot of people who come into this business thinking they already know the answers. There are still others who’ve spent a little time in the industry and think nothing’s changing. Wow, is that ever wrong. . . .

Here’s an example. There’s a new all-star game added to the slate this year called the College Gridiron Showcase (CGS). This is the fifth game in January and will take place the same week as another game, the Medal of Honor Bowl, which was pretty well-received in its first year (2013). It would be easy to dismiss a new game, and already I’ve gotten lots of questions from clients asking if the CGS is even worth considering. I’m sure lots of agents don’t even know about this new game, and others have already dismissed it as a waste of time. This is where it’s an advantage to stay up to date on the business.

Though the CGS is a new game, the people running it aren’t new. The organizers have spent a great deal of time putting all the pieces in place, and have developed a solid base of sponsors to help give them the resources to do a good job. One of the game’s co-founders is Craig Redd, who’s himself a former NFLPA-certified contract advisor who knows the drill quite well (in addition to being a high-character, standup guy). Among Craig’s smart moves is bringing in John Murphy to run the personnel side of things. In addition to being the Assistant GM of the CFL’s Calgary franchise, John has been involved in more all-star games than I can count. He’s super-familiar with the process and knows what NFL talent looks like.

I haven’t personally checked out the hotel sponsoring the game, but I’m sure it’s more than adequate. They’ve been smart about assembling broadcast partners, and they’ve got a good field for the game. They’ve also been aggressive about reaching out to NFL teams and they’ll have a great group of scouts there. But you might not know that if you don’t read ITL (sorry for the shameless plug), or if you are serious about staying up to date on things.

If you read this blog regularly, you know I feel that you can be successful in the football business, but you must be vigilant about information-gathering to ensure victory. This is just another example of that. Don’t ever presume the learning process has ended and that you know all you need to know.

Earlier this week, I had a lengthy conversation with a young law student who’s dedicated to being an NFLPA-licensed agent someday soon. Among the topics we discussed was internships. He’s worked with agencies before, and wants to continue his learning. His question to me was, should he look large firm or small firm?

The easy answer is to go with a small firm. The opportunity for growth is huge, and there’s no limit to what he’ll be asked to do. In addition, he will have a chance to see, up close, what the firm’s principals do, and measure their success. His first experience was with a small firm, and he got marketing expertise rather quickly due to their handing him several accounts (much to his surprise). The downside to working with a small firm was easy, too. They only had one client who drew draft attention, and when he didn’t make a roster, there wasn’t much to do. For this reason, he said he’s thinking trying to make a run at a big firm next.

I think it’s a good idea, but if you’re in a similar situation, there are a couple things to think about.

The first item is the high barrier to entry. Everyone wants to intern with CAA, Athletes First, Rosenhaus Sports, or whatever. The truly elite agencies have dozens and dozens of applicants. I worked with one top-ten agency this summer trying to find them a new hire, and after sending them the cream of the crop among newly certified contract advisors, they wound up rejecting all of them and starting over, hoping to find a young, hard-charging Ivy Leaguer. Most firms are the same way. They want guys who have a pedigree AND a fire-breathing work ethic, so the first drawback is the difficulty in landing an internship. It’s a serious barrier to entry.

The second negative is that if you go to such an agency, you better burn your ships. The odds of your getting hired will be very long, so you’re going to have to work like you’ve never worked and be able to adapt to any situation (and succeed at it). I know lots and lots of young agents who got their first taste of the sports agent business as interns with big firms, but ultimately weren’t hired. They spend years trying to chase success on their own, but lacking the client list, sizzle and muscle of a big-time firm, don’t get there. The pedigree gained from an internship with such an agency doesn’t translate to success.

So which way is the smart play? To me, if you’re looking to land an internship next semester or next summer, send out lots of resumes to agencies big and small. Just know that, depending on the size of the firm that picks you up, you’ll have to adjust your strategy.

As regular readers of this blog already know, I’ll be joining sports business icon Leigh Steinberg tonight on his new Yahoo! Sports radio show ‘Behind Closed Doors’ (shameless plug: I’ll be on from 8:30-9 p.m. CST). It got me thinking about Leigh’s career, and perseverance, and to some degree, mine too.

When I was in my early 20s, ESPN’s SportsCenter was in its prime. These were the days of Craig Kilborn, Dan Patrick, Keith Olbermann, Chris Berman, etc. I couldn’t imagine a sports career that could top being on SportsCenter. That was a major goal. But today, I can’t imagine being on SportsCenter, and I don’t know anyone who even watches it anymore. It’s become trite, and anyway, all the highlights you want to see have either (a) been broadcast or (b) are readily available online somewhere. The model has changed completely.

In a similar vein, Leigh’s career has changed completely. Obviously, he’s known for a lot of things. He was one of the fathers of modern sports representation, if not the father of it, and he was the inspiration/model behind the movie Jerry Maguire. The number of legendary quarterbacks he’s represented is endless, from Steve Bartkowski and Warren Moon to Troy Aikman and Ben Roethlisberger. However, after a highly publicized lawsuit and some personal struggles, he fell from atop the sports representation business, and over the last decade, people around the business started referring to Leigh in the past tense.

Now here’s the interesting part: as Leigh showed when he helped Bartkowski land a mega-deal in the 70s, he’s adept at identifying trends and leveraging the market. He’s still an agent — client Garrett Gilbert, a QB from SMU, was drafted in the sixth round by the Rams this spring — but I think Leigh recognizes that the Dodge City environment that made a creative mind such a license for success 40 years ago is not in evidence today. As the agent business has saturated and competition has risen to great heights, he’s leveraging online radio, social media and more traditional methods (he’s authored several books, including one published this year) to tap into what I call the sports education market. It’s the one populated by hard-core football enthusiasts as well as the endless number of students pursuing sport management degrees in universities across the country.

Leigh is uniquely positioned to tap this market. Not only has he represented several members of the Hall of Fame and served in several roles related to sports and entertainment, but he’s indirectly played a role in the birth of several major agencies, including Irvine, Calif.-based Athletes First; Rep 1 Sports, also based in Irvine; and even Chapel Hill, N.C.-based Vanguard Sports Group, which was just launched by Joby Branion. Joby was one of the three agents who left Leigh in 2002 to launch Athletes First, and he’s a top agent in his own right today.

I think the takeaway from Leigh’s career is that the opportunity that everyone else is pursuing is not always the best one. When players were not yet using agents, or barely using them, Leigh found a way to enter that market and make it a success. When others flocked to it, he found another way to capitalize. Keep this in mind as you launch your career. There’s more than one road to success.

One of the things that I’ve found to be true in the football world is that it’s a ‘quid pro quo’ world. Who benefits most from a relationship? It’s a question you must constantly ask yourself as you gain contacts and build your network. Is this a specifically football-related issue? Maybe not. But let me tell a story about how it’s been illustrated in my career.

When I ran the 2008 Hula Bowl, I had one agent who was constantly calling me and advocating for a certain player. He just wouldn’t stop. I mean, no matter how many times I told him it wasn’t going to happen, this agent kept on calling me back, up to the eleventh hour, trying to shoehorn him into my game. Keep in mind that I already had one of his clients in the game, but he thought I owed him another one. Well, sorry. No dice. We’ve had only infrequent contact over the years though we both definitely know each other.

So earlier this year, he confronted me about something I’d written last fall. He was polite about it, and it didn’t turn into anything heated, but he was clearly angry, though subdued. I couldn’t help but laugh when he brought it up, and I wondered at the time what made things so funny. I’ve thought about it since, and finally come up with the answer.

This agent thought he had done me a real favor by sending me one of his players, and felt he’d been wronged when I didn’t take the other one. Quid pro quo. When I further wrote something that he found negative on the site — which is part of my job, and something that always creates tension in my relationship with various agents — he felt like I’d further let him down. On the other hand, I felt like he owed me. I’d gotten one of his clients into my game even though he’d never thought enough of me to become an ITL client (though I’m sure he’s used unauthorized passwords to access the site), and I took offense at that. So maybe that was my quid pro quo moment, too.

So what happened early in 2014 had its seeds in that time in late ’07 and early ’08 when he was trying to get a player into the game and I was resisting. He felt he had done me a favor by putting one big-school client in my game, and was doing me another favor by letting one more of his clients play. I felt I was doing him a favor by allowing a player with an iffy draft status into my game; after all, that invitation included an all-expenses-paid week in Hawaii, where he’d be evaluated by scouts and given a chance to go from nowhere to somewhere, football-wise.

As you work your way up the football ladder, I hope you aren’t as small as I was earlier this year (and sometimes, admittedly, still can be at times). However, I also want you to realize that, in the football world, score-keeping takes place off the field and not just on it.