Category Archives: Agents

A note about agent violations

17 Thursday Jul 2014

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I just wanted to weigh in briefly on an agent incident that’s gotten a lot of play lately.

It involves Justin Bingman, an agent based in Pacific, Mo., who’s entering his second year as a contract advisor. Justin’s a client and a friend, and while I won’t defend what he did in this story — and neither would he — I think it’s really important we give this story a little perspective.

When prospective NFLPA contract advisors are pursuing certification, they take a written test at the end of July, then find out whether or not they passed the test in late September/early October. That means they’re essentially trying to board a fast-moving car if they want to jump into recruiting that year. This is one reason it’s so hard for first-year agents to sign a solid prospect in their first year certified. At the same time, all agents are facing a three-year clock for getting a player on an NFL roster, or that agent has his certification pulled. If he wants to keep going, he has to pay the initiation fee of almost $3,000 again as well as taking the exam again. The clock starts the moment the agent gets word that he has passed the exam, so most of the time, Year 1 is a wash, making it a two-year proposition to get a player signed to an NFL deal.

For this reason, when the following spring arrives, most agents are excited to apply all the lessons they’ve learned in their first six months as registered agents. It’s their first chance to really get in on the ground floor with legitimate prospects. It was in this spirit that Justin reached out to a few University of Texas prospects this spring.

I don’t remember exactly how our conversation was initiated, but somehow last spring, we discussed the fact that he had dined with a a few Longhorns in a recruiting capacity. In the course of speaking, it became obvious he had covered the costs of their meals. Even as a rookie agent, it’s something he should have known, no doubt. Still, I’m sure Justin approached this the same way he would approach any business meetup involving a light meal. At any rate, the way I remember things, I made it clear he had made a misstep, and he got off the phone in short order. I presumed he was excusing himself to set things right immediately. I still believe that.

I realize there’s a great misconception among fans regarding the agent industry. Many feel that any contact between agents and players results in immediate loss of eligibility. That’s not true. The only mistake Justin made was covering the costs of the meals. It’s a mistake I doubt Justin will ever make again.

Once again, I’m not defending Justin, and he wouldn’t expect me to, anyway. But there’s a certain level of hyperbole that comes with any minor mistakes by NFLPA contract advisors, and it’s important to separate the minor mistakes from the big, intentional ones that take down programs.

College football has a number of systemic problems with the mega-agencies that won’t be solved easily. They include coaches who funnel players to their agents; payments and other accommodations made with the parents or advisors of top players; financial advisors, workout trainers, and others who work as de facto runners for agents; and compliance departments who are afraid to stand up to the powers-that-be in the name of transparency and education.

Justin will most likely face some kind of sanctions from the NFLPA over this, and may have his registration with the Secretary of State of Texas pulled. He’ll also get hammered mercilessly on social media because he made a rookie agent mistake. My guess is that the players will have to make restitution and may have to sit out an early-season game.

At any rate, my point is not to excuse what Justin did. Instead, it’s this: if we want to be honest about really regulating the industry and rooting out the exploitation of student-athletes, we can’t treat incidents such as these as if they were treasonous, punish the bad actor mercilessly, and then act as if a dragon has been slayed. If we really want to fix these  kinds of problems, we’ve got a long way to go.

The Dead Period

15 Tuesday Jul 2014

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At ITL, we focus on the game behind the game; once you start to understand how the business of football works, it can be just as exciting as the game on the field. With that in mind, we thought we’d take a look at what’s going on behind the scenes in football this time of year, a time when most fans are working themselves into a frenzy counting down the minutes until camps start.

AFL: Arena teams are making their final pushes for the playoffs. Many teams are frantically trying to plug holes created by injuries, ineffectiveness, etc. Team officials, most of whom do their own scouting, are trying to find impact players, and more importantly, hoping to find agents or other contact info that can get them to the players they need.

NFLPA agent exam: Aspiring NFL contract advisors are gearing up to travel to Washington, D.C., next week for a two-day seminar that ends with a three-hour, open-book test covering 60 questions on the CBA and other related matters. They’ll find out at the end of September how they did. Historically, about 200-250 take the test and about 75 percent pass.

Agent days: Speaking of agents, several schools will hold meetings between the contract advisors registered with the school and the seniors who will be draft-eligible after the 2014 season. Typically, agents submit the names of players they wish to meet with in advance, and the school notifies them of the players who have expressed a mutual interest in meeting. The school usually asks agents to refrain from any other communications with players until after the season, which is problematic, but best left for discussion another time.

Training facilities: With the advent of a new CBA in 2011, much of the offseason emphasis for training switched from team facilities to training facilities all over the nation. Especially in NFL cities, you can find athletes at selected gyms, especially those that focus on combine prep, especially those in the Southeast.

Job-hunting gets tough: The desperation really sets in for NFL scouts let go in after the draft (as well as those who were dismissed in 2013). There’s a flurry of job-seeking for scouts in early June each year, but those jobs are filled quickly, and once they’re gone, opportunities are rare. Some scouts will find places with AFL teams, but not until after the season is over later this summer. Others will try to latch on with colleges in the increasingly common ‘director of player personnel’ roles, but most schools are looking to fill these jobs with young (and less expensive) coaches.

All-star games: Many groups see all-star games as a good way to bring the excitement of the gridiron to a city that doesn’t have an NFL team or direct affiliation with a major college football program. They use the summer to explore the viability of bringing 100 draft-eligible players to their local stadium in January to be studied and evaluated by NFL teams. Right now, we know of at least three games that are in exploratory stages, and I’m in preliminary discussion stages of running one of them. If I come to terms with the game’s organizers, I’ll announce it in this space.

I know this kind of information isn’t necessarily the kind that gets your blood pumping and your heart racing, but if your aim is to be part of the game — and this blog is designed for just such people — it helps to start thinking of the football biz as a 12-month proposition. Knowing what’s going on all around the game will help you find your niche.

Does an agent really matter?

08 Tuesday Jul 2014

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I was being interviewed by the Texas Tribune’s Terri Langford for this story in late June, and in the course of our conversation, she asked a question that I often hear: “What difference does all of this make? Does an agent really matter?” That question has been turning over in my mind for weeks now. I think I finally have an answer, so let’s s leave the topic of training fees today to discuss it.

I have to admit that when Terri asked me this question, I stumbled a bit. I should have had a ready answer, because the very question gets at the legitimacy of the entire sports representation industry. I don’t take the question personally; after all, I’m no agent, have never been an agent, and have no plans to be one. Still, many of my closest friends in the business are the most established contract advisors in the business, and others are trying to get there.

I guess the thing that irks me most is that whenever someone in the business — often a coach, a school official or a compliance professional — asks that question, their real agenda is to dismiss agents, though that wasn’t Terri’s intention.  So, next time I get this question, I’ll have an answer in two parts.

Here’s the first part. Let’s say you were accused of murder. Your life is on the line, and obviously, you need a lawyer. How would you go about finding one? Would you just settle for whoever the court appointed for you? Would you Google ‘defense lawyer’ and then just take the first guy that popped up in your browser? Would you just call a buddy who’d had legal trouble and take whoever he recommended? Of course not. You’d gather as much information as you possibly could, get educated on the charges you face, and try to find the most experienced and successful attorney you could afford.

Finding the right agent is very comparable for a young man aspiring to play in the NFL. The only difference is that his professional life, not his actual life, is what’s on the line. When a coach, school official, or other person forbids any contact between agents and players or their parents, he’s essentially taking away that research process.

Here’s the second part. The Colts signed a tight end named Erik Swoope as an undrafted free agent this spring. Ever heard of him? Unless you are a fan of Miami (Fla.) basketball, probably not. However, I bet you’ve heard of Saints TE Jimmy Graham. Their stories are similar: played hoops for the ‘Canes, had limited football experience (no football experience, in Swoope’s case), and wanted to give tight end a try. They also have one other thing in common: their agent, CAA’s Jimmy Sexton. Now, if Swoope wasn’t a Sexton client, maybe he’d have gotten a shot with an NFL team. But having a powerful agent going to bat for you, and having that agent tell his NFL contacts that he’s got a guy who reminds him of another of his ultra-successful clients, is more than a little advantageous.

These reasons may seem intuitive, but I’ve never had them at the ready when I got the ‘what are agents for’ question. Now I do, and so do you.

War Story Wednesday tomorrow. We’ll have something good. Check us out then.

 

 

NFL Agent ABCs (re: training fees)

07 Monday Jul 2014

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The escalating costs of training draft prospects, along with even the lowest-ratest players’ expectations of training, has made the business of being an NFL agent an expensive proposition. There are a few ways of handling this without writing big checks.

The first way is to refuse to pay for training. There’s one big agent from the Midwest who represents several head coaches at big FBS schools, and he continually gets his coaching clients to (a) recommend him for representation and (b) encourage the players to train at the school, not at a combine prep facility. This works very well for the agent, but 99 percent of agents don’t have that kind of a coaching clientele. For the rest of the business, having a ‘no training’ strategy pretty much relegates an agent to the lowest of the lowest-rated clients, the longest of the long shots. Constantly going to bat for such players can be trying and can kill your credibility with the scouts and team officials.

A second way to deal with this is to offer to pay a set fee. You can call this a ‘stipend’ or a ‘signing bonus’ or an ‘allotment’ or whatever you want to call it. Your client can then apply it to his training, or to a place to live, or to nutrition, or whatever. What you often find in the business is that players take the cost of training for granted, and give their contract advisors very little credit for covering this. What they really want is something in their pockets. If you go this route, you’ve fixed your costs while also asking the player to take part in managing finances. Like the first strategy, this one is going to limit the prospects you can sign, but it’s also going to keep you from blowing through an unlimited wad of cash.

A third approach is to offer to split the training with the player’s family. This can be an awkward conversation, but if a player is truly looking for good representation and not just a free ride through the spring, it can work. More and more, parents are starting to get involved in the costs of training, but it can be hard to figure out what families have such resources. In this case, you’ll probably need to have a good trainer at the ready who’s nearby the player’s family so the living expenses can be reduced.

In all these strategies, you’ll need to find the right player to pursue this. Probably not one who’s being highly recruited, and one who has taken his studies rather seriously. We’ll talk more about finding players this week.

War Story Weds: Lone Star Law

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

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To illustrate our point about the importance of state registration for agents, I thought I’d make today’s WSW about a series of phone calls we got last spring.

We’re fortunate to work with plenty of new NFLPA contract advisors who reach out to us when they have questions. Around May or June of 2013, several panicked callers told us about registered letters they’d received from the office of the Secretary of State of Texas. Each recipient had (a) signed a player who finished his college football eligibility with a Texas school and (b) not registered as an athlete agent in Texas. They had been threatened with significant fines by the AG if they couldn’t prove registration, or if they couldn’t counter charges that they had signed a player from a Texas school.

In almost every case, it was a first- or second-year certified contract advisor who had had no intention of recruiting players from Texas schools. However, as happens every December/January, each had gotten inquiries from unsigned players who had sifted through the NFLPA’s published listing of certified agents and cold-called them. These callers, like so many would-be draft prospects hoping to earn the attention of NFL teams, saw signing with an agent as the best way to jump-start their pro football dreams. Rather than waiting to be courted by potential representatives, they were doing their own courting, and they wound up signed by agents trying to do them favors. These agents, who were acting altruistically, had no idea they were setting themselves up for a major fine.

Ultimately, probably a half-dozen agents called with similar stories. None had signed a draftee, and I think only one even signed a player who went to a rookie tryout camp (he ultimately signed briefly in Canada). Still, these agents were facing fines. What’s more, the way the statute is written, even if they had signed a player who had been out of college for several years, they were facing fines if it was the player’s first agent. In the eyes of the state, even if the young man had been out of college football for years, he was still an amateur until he signed an SRA (standard representation agreement).

So what’s the rest of the story? I referred all the agents who had called me to a sports attorney I know and he was able to smooth things out with the state.

There are two takeaways from this experience. One, understand that statutes are written most often by people who see athlete agents as threats, and don’t really understand the business. The people writing these laws don’t understand that the overwhelming majority of contract advisors get in the business to help young players, not to suck money out of them. Real enforcement of laws and investigation of the firms signing high-end players might make a difference in cleaning up the business, but ultimately, this doesn’t win anyone votes and may cost a state’s team its title hopes. So very little gets done.

Be that as it may, you have to make sure you know the laws in the states as you decide where to recruit. Especially in Texas. That’s the second takeaway. Fines are an added cost you don’t want to incur.

More on the costs of the business on Thursday.

The ABCs of being an NFL Agent (Pt. 2)

01 Tuesday Jul 2014

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On Tuesday, we dug in a bit on an overview of the job of NFL contract advisor. Today, we’ll talk a bit more about the finances of things, since they often come up when I talk to someone considering the business.

As we’ve already covered, your start-up costs, just for the purposes of registering with the NFLPA so you can take the exam, are about $5000, presuming you pass. Still, in a way, that’s just the start of expenses. Of course, there are a lot of variables that determine what your budget should be. The two biggest are recruiting and training.

Within recruiting, there are a couple of questions an agent has to ask himself. First, where will I recruit? If an agent seeks to recruit nationally — and I always encourage new contract advisors not to do this — he’s got lots of costs ahead. For example, to register in Texas, my home state, you’re looking at a $500 registration fee plus a $50,000 surety bond, which costs $1,000 and doesn’t translate to other states. More and more states are requiring such bonds on top of their registration fees. Texas is on the high end when it comes to costs, but still, there are plenty of states that have talented athletes (especially in the Southeast). If you want to do this legally and ethically, it will cost you. Let’s say you register in the 3-4 states closest to you. You’re probably looking at a couple thousand dollars, just to be safe.

Then there’s travel. If you participate in agent days at NCAA schools, you’ll spend a fair amount of time traveling to schools in the summer, and depending on where you live, each trip might represent a plane ride and a hotel stay (and maybe a rental car). As you move into the season, you may or may not have a lot of travel (depending on whether or not you want to attend games regularly), but as you move into November and December, you will most certainly be required to sit down at a kitchen table with parents and players to state your case. Depending on how many players you’re courting, that adds up, too. Let’s say you make it to the finals with five kids, and spend $500 per player, on average, on lodging and travel. That’s another $2500.

At this point, an agent is near spending $10,000, and he doesn’t even have a client on SRA yet. We’ll roll out the expenses of combine prep as we continue the discussion this week.

The ABCs of being an NFL agent

30 Monday Jun 2014

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In less than a month, about 250 men and women will arrive at the Four Seasons in Washington, D.C., to take the 2014 NFLPA agent exam. Since the business of being an agent seems to carry so much intrigue, I thought I’d shed a little light on the business this week. Let’s start with the registration process.

As of today, there are 814 registered NFLPA contract advisors. Step one for all of them was registering in January before taking the test the following July. Upon registration, your first fee ($2,500) is due. To register, you must have at least a postgraduate degree or seven years of experience negotiating contracts. Once the NFLPA approves your application, confirming that you have an advanced degree and that you don’t have any arrests, bankruptcies or other blips that might preclude registration, officials send a copy of the Collective Bargaining Agreement as well as other study materials.

Sometimes, it takes a while to get those source materials, especially if there’s anything that holds up the review process. If you’ve ever had any legal or financial trouble, the process could drag. I’ve heard of people not getting the go-ahead to take the exam until literally a week before the test is administered at the end of July. It can be very frustrating, especially if you aren’t an attorney or if you struggle with tests. Of course, that just adds to your costs, as buying flights just days before your departure can add hundreds of dollars to the cost.

Speaking of money, if you’re a person who’s really low on funds, consider waiting before you dive into the representation world. By the time you get the results of your exam, you will already be down $2,500, and no matter the results of your exam, it’s a good news/bad news proposition. If you didn’t pass, sorry! The NFLPA keeps your money and gives you another shot to take it next summer at no extra cost (besides the trip back to D.C. in July).

Then again, if you pass, congratulations! Now the NFLPA needs a $1,200 annual dues fee plus liability insurance of about $1,400, and even if you’re an attorney with your own liability insurance, you still need to buy this. Bottom line: to get fully certified and ready to roll as a contract advisor, you’re in about $5K (plus the cost of travel/hotel/food for the exam) before you fire your first shot, figuratively.

More bad news: you are forbidden from any form of recruiting until you pass the exam, and you won’t know your results until at least October. This means all other agents have attended agent days; gathered contact information; built relationships with prospects and their parents; and whittled down their recruiting lists for 3-4 months before you’re allowed to make your first call.

That’s enough to chew on for one day. We’ll be back with more Tuesday.

Volunteers

26 Thursday Jun 2014

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I wanted to take a minute today to talk about how important it is to volunteer in your quest for a career in football.

If you live in an NFL city, and you want to work in pro football, find a way to volunteer with your local team. If you have an FBS (or FCS, or good D2 or even D3) team in your city or town, go volunteer. Granted, volunteering for NFL teams may be a little harder, but usually if you poke around on a team’s website long enough you’ll find someone that will take you. As for colleges, summer camps have become a really big revenue stream for most coaching staffs, and if you’re willing to work for no pay, they can usually find something for you to do.

I’m always struck by how many people in awesome football jobs started off as volunteers, hung around, paid attention, showed their intelligence, and got hired. Dru Grigson started off as a volunteer scout with the Eagles in 2005, and 10 years later, he’s the Director of College Scouting for the Cardinals. Tom Ciskowski volunteered as a defensive coach with Butch Davis at Miami (Fla.) in 1985; in 2008, he was named Director of College and Pro Scouting for the Cowboys. Steven Price volunteered with the Panthers at the age of 16 and now he’s a scout with the Vikings.

Granted, some of them had an angle and had some assurances that if they put in work they’d get the first opening, but not all of them; Price started interning with the Panthers because his mother was a secretary there.

Can’t get an NFL team to even let you work for free? Have you tried the AFL route? Two Titans scouts, Jon Salge (Nashville Kats) and Brandon Taylor (Columbus Destroyers), were with AFL teams before landing a job in Tennessee. Bears scout Zach Truty was Director of Player Personnel with the Arizona Rattlers before coming to Chicago. Eagles scout Bret Munsey was Director of Player Personnel for the Orlando Predators before he latched on in Philly. Steelers area scout Mark Gorscak was the GM of Pittsburgh’s arena team in 1987 before moving over to the city’s NFL team.

I don’t know how many of these people got AFL positions by emailing resumes, knocking on doors or waiting in the parking lot to assail a top team executive. What’s more, there are lots of indoor teams of dubious nature that are not AFL teams, per se; they’re just teams trying to copy their model. Sometimes, these teams can be a little shaky and offer limited ability to provide reliable contacts.

Still, there are many routes into the game. We’ll discuss this at greater length tomorrow.

 

 

Thoughts from a rare rookie year

24 Tuesday Jun 2014

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John Thornton got certified last fall, and by any measure, it’s been a great rookie season. In his first season, he negotiated a big veteran free agent deal (new Bucs DE Michael Johnson got $43.5 million over five years) and had a player drafted (the Seahawks took Marshall OT Garrett Scott at 6/199) despite being independent. Though he credits Chicago-based Rick Smith of Priority Sports as being a huge help and a big influence, he has no specific affiliation with Priority or any other firm.

Also making him unique: he’s one of only a handful of contract advisors who also played in the league; he was a 10-year veteran with the Titans and Bengals after being drafted by Tennessee in the second round in 1999. As such he’s got some unique takes on the football business after his first year certified by the NFLPA. In fact, he had too many thoughts to fit into Monday’s newsletter, so we thought we’d pass along some of what we couldn’t use in today’s post.

On the draft, and the expectations of draft prospects: “I think the rookie side of the business has gone out of whack on how they train and agents are told where (players are) going to go. I would say that’s the craziest part of this thing. You almost don’t want to deal with a rookie, and if you have a first-rounder you spend a lot to get them and to train them. It’s almost better to find a guy that you know is a good football player and have a great relationship with. Who cares if you have a first rounder if you overspent on him? I’d rather have a fourth- or fifth-rounder that you didn’t spend as much on but have a great relationship on. On the rookie side, so much is done for egos. Being (an ex-player, you know) it doesn’t matter where you’re training at and (you know) a guy can train at school, like Garrett did, and had better numbers than probably 95 percent of the guys at the combine. You got to send them here and there, and that’s part of the game. You know a lot of that is BS, but everybody’s doing it.”

On protecting a client while also managing expectations: “You gotta really keep your circle tight on who you do business with. Most people say they can do things and they can’t, and they’re usually marketing people or financial people. One thing that (Arizona State Director of Athletics and former NFL Executive V.P. of Football Operations) Ray Anderson told me is to stick to your principles in this business, and if I don’t know someone, I don’t do business with them. Everybody’s not in this business for the same thing. If you’re going to do business with someone, make sure they’re the same as you, business-wise. If you don’t do business with people you trust, nine times out of 10 they’re going to try to stab you in the back. Everybody says they have a deal for you, but they don’t always have it on paper. All they really want to do is to have a player’s name so they can go shop it around. Good players get great deals, but if you’re not a good player, you won’t get a good deal on or off the field. Nobody’s giving a bad player anything. There’s no marketing deal and no second contract to talk about. Football is football, and (Broncos QB) Peyton Manning is getting deals off the field because he’s a great player. That’s the thing I learned.”

On transitioning from player to agent: “When I played, I was always the type of player that coaches would say, ‘do what he does, follow him,’ and I became a big brother to guys like Robaire Smith and Albert Haynesworth at Tennessee. I was (head coach) Marvin Lewis’ first free agent at Cincinnati, and I tried to help change the perception of the team. Rather than being a dominant player, I did the right thing to prolong my career, and in doing that I became a big brother to players. I also had four agents (during my career), and I was always changing. There was Ray Anderson, Ralph Cindrich, Harold Lewis and David Dunn, and I learned a lot from them in what they do best and what they don’t do so well. Then, I helped Frostee Rucker during his pre-draft process, and while I was helping him, the Lions wanted me to come play because (then-head coach) Jim Schwartz had been my defensive coordinator at Tennessee, so I agreed to it, but two days later, I backed out, and I just said, I have something I want to do. I had made enough money to not have to struggle, and I had this itch to be a manger and be a professional and help guys off the field. I told the agents I would handle my side if you handle your side, and I wasn’t a runner. I was really helping the players through the agent process, and then I was coming out of my pocket as well, so that’s why I was given the opportunity to be a player with really good agents. As far as wanting to be an agent, that was the next step for me as player, mentor, manager, and then being an agent.”

Obstacles

23 Monday Jun 2014

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Lots of people dream of being a sports agent. I get to work with the ones who actually go through with the necessary steps to make that dream a reality, and it’s very rewarding when it works out. But sometimes it doesn’t, and there are some very good reasons for that. Here are two.

1. In the interests of full disclosure, Rand Getlin of Yahoo! Sports is a good friend, and even spoke at our last symposium at the 2014 NFL combine. He occasionally cites me on his Twitter feed or posts stuff that I have on ITL. On Friday, he commented on the University of Texas’ cancellation of its agent day, and what followed was this interplay with one of his followers. Now, I understand that Twitter is where snark reigns, and I know that in today’s post-modern society, everyone’s opinion is to be given equal weight, no matter how without merit. Still, Stosberg’s retort really makes me angry because he clearly has no understanding of the agent process and sees only one side of the argument. Which is really convenient.

Yes, I understand that agents make easy scapegoats.

Yes, I understand that the common perception is that all sports agents are sleeping on piles of money, washing their hair with money, drying themselves off with money after working out, etc., but the vast majority of contract advisors are taking great financial risks on long shot players with no prospect of recovering these fees.

Yes, I recognize that sports masses only know of agents what they see in TV or read online. I realize that there’s even a fair amount of jealousy on the part of some sports fans who wish they had the opportunity to play in the NFL.

Still, isn’t it worth considering that these players have a right to make informed decisions about the people in whose hands they’ll be putting their NFL dreams? Is that unfair? Which leads me to my second item.

2. Check out this story that was in the Texas Tribune (and NYT online) on Sunday, and not just because I’m quoted in it. I think the ‘wow’ moment comes when Drew Pittman, a long-established agent with Domann & Pittman (and yes, Drew and I are also good friends) talks about the money he’s spent with the state just staying certified. Even at that, if he wants to stay in good graces, he’ll stay in his lane and not complain when the University of Texas bars him from speaking to any of its players until the entire regular season has been completed. And he shouldn’t expect the state to go out and bring down the few dirty guys out there. He just needs to stay in his corner, and keep his mouth shut until at least the end of November, with no other contact, and hope he can get lucky based on one quick meeting.

Is that how most multi-million dollar business deals are consummated?

Is that how any multi-million dollar business deals are consummated?

The narrative says that your run-of-the-mill agent is so corrupt that you can’t take any chances. You just have to bar them completely from even speaking to players to preserve these players’ pristine, blameless, innocent amateur status. That’s sad. Still, is it so absurd to suggest that if you’re in the education business, and you care about your players (even after they leave college), you might be interested in educating them? Maybe it is absurd, because most schools hold to this kind of policy. There are very few schools with progressive policies that give players the tools to know what to look for and what to stay away from. That’s a real shame.

These are two examples of what NFL agents have to deal with. The issues look simple, but they’re not. If you’re seeking to work with NFL hopefuls one day, keep this in mind.