A Beginner’s Guide to Working the NFL Combine

17 Friday Feb 2017

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Every year I talk to people looking to break into the NFL as an agent, scout, financial advisor or even player, and very often, their plan is to start with the combine (yes, several years I’ve seen ex-college stars trying to give their resumes to scouts and writers in Indianapolis).

Look, I get it. Nowhere else can you find every scout, every coach, and every top NFL prospect in one city at the same time. Not at the Senior Bowl, and certainly not at the NFL draft. In addition, Indianapolis is pretty easy to navigate. Unlike my home city of Houston, you don’t need a car once you get downtown. Pretty much everything is within walking distance, and if you know the walkways, you never even have to go outside.

If you’re an aspiring member of the football business who’s headed to Indy in two weeks, here are a few do’s and don’ts.

  • If you’re a financial advisor headed to Indy, hoping to hit up as many top players as you can talk to, curb your enthusiasm. Players are in town for four days, not a day more, and while they’re in town, almost every minute is scheduled. In fact, players are assigned to groups with a scout who takes them around; it’s almost like they have a chaperone. In addition, all players stay at the Crown Plaza Downtown Union Station, and it might as well be Fort Knox. Twenty years ago, the lobby at the Crown was the nerve center, the place where writers, agents, and even scouts hung out. These days, take as much as a step inside the lobby without the proper credentials and security tackles you.
  • I spoke to a young man today who will be taking the agent exam this summer, and he’s headed to Indy to meet as many scouts as he can. I have a lot of respect for someone who’s spending his own money with no agenda but to try to make ‘cold’ introductions to scouts. This is also a tough proposition. Most scouts don’t want to know an agent unless he’s got a player that interests them. Until then, these agents are just someone else clogging their inbox or handing out business cards. I’m going to try to help this young man, but I’ve tried to keep his expectations reasonable.
  • It helps to have a sense of ‘place’ when you’re at the combine. For NFL scouts and personnel, obviously, it’s everything going on at Lucas Oil Stadium, and for the media, it’s the interview room at the Convention Center, with players and executives streaming through regularly. For agents, there’s the NFLPA seminar all day on Thursday. Even selected fans will have something to do this year with Indianapolis turned into a Super Bowl-style hive of NFL entertainment and activity. But if you’re someone looking to make connections, it’s a little tougher. That’s one reason we at ITL have held a seminar for seven years. We’ve hosted a number of ex-NFL GMs and scouts, as well as key members of the NFL draft media. This year, for our eighth event, we’ll have former NFL scout Matt Manocherian, who’s now with Sports Info Solutions. He’ll give an insider’s look at how analytics are being used by NFL teams. String that together with a happy hour sponsored by one of our partners and a few other lunches open to people in the agent business, and it gives you something to do. But you kind of have to know where to go and what to do.
  • If you don’t fit into any of these categories, I always recommend The Omni as a place to people-watch and maybe meet a few key people. Lunch is good at The Ram, which has big, enclosed booths that can hold 6-8 people; it’s almost like having your own mini-meeting room. After dinner hours, you can find scouts and executives at St. Elmo’s, Shula’s, and High Velocity, the tony bar at the J.W. Marriott.

Penny Wise and Pound Foolish

10 Friday Feb 2017

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Last Friday was the deadline for registration for the 2017 NFLPA contract advisor exam, which is administered each July (here are all the details for registration, in case you were wondering). For the hundreds of people hoping to be the next Jerry Maguire, it’s an important day to know. For more than half of those who registered for the 2016 exam, the day’s passage is probably not so exciting. It might even be a little painful.

It’s pretty commonly known among young agents that two years ago, the NFLPA made the exam a lot harder. The passage rate went from around 75 percent to less than 50 percent. People who use our practice exam still pass at about a 70 percent rate, but those who don’t wind up returning for a second bite of the apple. But they only get one more try, and if not, they are barred from another attempt for five long years. About half to two-thirds of the people who took the test last summer were there a second time, and I anticipate about the same rate this summer.

I know a lot of aspiring contract advisors read this blog, so today I want to pass along a cautionary tale. It starts with an email I got about a month ago from a person I’ve corresponded with over the years, an aspiring agent himself. “I would like to start using your services,” he wrote, “being that I took the test twice and came up short both times.”

He went on to explain that he was super-close to passing both times, missing by two and four points, respectively, in successive years. Neither time that he took the test did he use our practice exam or study guide. For that reason, and given that he knew fully well what we do at Inside the League and how we help people like him, I had to gently admonish him. “Why in the world would you not have subscribed to ITL the first time, not to mention the second time?,” I asked. “We had a practice exam and all kinds of stuff you could have used. That’s really puzzling.”

To his credit, my friend didn’t try to defend himself. He said he tried to subscribe the first time but never followed up, then forgot about us the second time around. At any rate, he said test-taking isn’t his strength. “Honestly, when I sit there taking the exam, I feel confident in the information I’ve obtained, but something goes wrong. . . It’s frustrating because I know all the information but I guess you can say I’m a horrible test-taker.”

I have no doubt he’s right, and he knows the material, but still, here he is. The worst part is that the NFLPA takes such a hard line on those who fail twice.

“I’ve put myself in a horrible position,” he admitted. “I still have a job in this industry and with an agency, but not having my certification has crippled me.”

If you’re one of those people that is set to take the exam this summer, please don’t take any risks. Our practice exam is $150, and we have a study guide, too for a reasonable price. Our subscribers also receive a daily email that gives them tips on exam passage as well as tales from previous test-takers. There are other services out there that are credible (though a lot more expensive), but none have been around as long as ours, and none has as many success stories. But bottom line, if you’re going to go for this, really go for it. Don’t try to save a few pennies here and there and risk not achieving a life goal that is really cool. Be smart. And if you have any questions, drop me a line.

 

 

Scenes from Super Bowl Week

03 Friday Feb 2017

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Today was an interesting day. The Super Bowl came to my city this year, and that’s special for me as the ‘big game’ has never been part of my January/February schedule. I spent Thursday downtown getting a look at the landscape, just trying to get a better handle on what the festivities surrounding the game look like. Here are a few observations.

  • I watched the people who buy and flip Super Bowl tickets for several hours today. Quite a high-wire act. This morning, ticket prices were in free-fall, and vendors were looking for a soft landing spot for anything they had in their inventory. By this afternoon/evening, ticket were revving up again as many of the high-end ticket services were panicked and afraid the tickets they had already committed to filling might not be there. As I understand it, the league could release a huge block of tickets at any time that could once again drop prices. Hold your tickets too long, you could lose thousands of dollars. Hold them even longer, and maybe the prices rebound and you make thousands.
  • By the way, this week players from selected teams (different teams deliver their tickets in different ways) could pick up their tickets at a downtown hotel. Ticket people know this, and about 20 of them hung around outside the hotel. Pretty much, whenever an athletic-looking man in his 20s came anywhere near the hotel, he was mobbed by people wearing backpacks. Sometimes, they’d pull a wad of cash from the backpacks, count out a sum of money, and trade it for a pair, right there on the sidewalk. Today, I saw a player who had already struck a verbal deal with one broker take a different deal with someone who approached him on the sidewalk. Just like that.
  • If you’re a person aspiring to work in the league, you could do worse than to be here in Houston. At the Hilton downtown, where the media are staying, I saw young people with business cards they’d made up handing them out to the agents, business managers and other league-affiliated professionals in the lobby. Not a bad move. Here’s another place to be: at any bar near the downtown party locations for EA Sports, ESPN, the NFLPA, or any other big event. Very often, the VIPs spill out of the parties to have a drink at the nearby establishments. It’s just one more place to maybe make a connection.
  • By the way, if you’re into celebrity-watching, you could have done worse than to be at the Hilton this afternoon. In about two hours, I saw Dave Wannstedt, Morten Andersen, Boomer Esiason, Michael Strahan and Mike Greenberg of ESPN’s ‘Mike and Mike.’
  • Downtown was crawling with volunteers from the city who were handing out pro-Falcons or pro-Patriots handbills, giving directions, or holding props for tourists to use in selfies. They were all smiling, friendly, clearly excited to be a part of things. I know they didn’t get paid, and don’t get tickets or anything like that. I’m pretty sure all they get to do is say they volunteered with the Super Bowl effort. It’s amazing how much the NFL delivers excitement, electricity, and yes, even status to people freely giving their time and energy on a workday.
  • During a casual conversation I had with a fellow I met today, we discussed the life of a recruiter attached to a big agency. My friend was of the impression that recruiters for major agencies make millions of dollars. That’s a common misconception. He was pretty surprised when I told him a typical recruiter is lucky if he’s making a base of around $40,000-$50,000 plus expenses. And I mean, that’s a recruiter who’s really lucky. Most agencies these days will work with a younger agent (or unlicensed recruiter) strictly on an eat-what-you-kill basis. If he makes anything north of $20,000 and gets his expenses covered — plus gets to live The Life — he has to count himself extraordinarily lucky.

Week 3: A Final Road Roundup

27 Friday Jan 2017

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I came off the road this week after spending Sunday through Wednesday in Lower Alabama for the Senior Bowl, one of the best weeks of the year if you’re in the football profession. It’s football with a side of Mardi Gras in a friendly town reminiscent of New Orleans.

Here are a few thoughts from the road.

  • Most bizarre/sadly funny/semi-tragic plane flight story of the week comes from Jeff Jankovich, an agent I’ve profiled in this space before. Jeff took off from Reagan Airport on Monday morning. About 10 minutes into the flight, the pilot comes over the intercom to say that there’s a mechanical issue and they’ll have to land. That’s the bad news. The really bad news is that they had too much fuel, so they had to circle for two hours before it was safe to put down. Of course, they landed not back at Reagan, but at Dulles. By the time Jeff had deplaned; traveled an hour-and-a-half (through traffic, by bus) from Reagan back to Dulles; then waited in line to be re-ticketed, it was 3 p.m. and there were no more flights to New Orleans. His best option was to go home, then take an early flight the next day to Atlanta, rent a car and drive (about five hours from Mobile; New Orleans is about two). It was not a banner day for American Airlines. Incidentally, big congrats to Jeff for having his first Senior Bowl invitee, West Virginia OC Tyler Orlosky.
  • We all know the expression ‘it’s a small world.’ It came to life for me this week as I sat and watched North Carolina receiver Ryan Switzer catch passes and run routes as a member of the North squad. Ryan’s dad, Mike, was a senior offensive lineman at St. Albans High School, about 20 minutes south of Charleston, W.Va., when I was a sophomore. In 1985, we’re two guys on the practice field in a small town in southern West Virginia. More than 30 years later, we’re two guys at Ladd-Peebles Stadium congratulating each other on making it to Mobile, though in completely different ways. Weird, and kinda cool.
  • I love going to practices because it’s one of the best chances I get to see and say hi to clients and friends. The only drawback is, because I’m there, I always get asked who’s looking good out there. First of all, I’m so engrossed with catching up with friends that I rarely get a glimpse of the field.  But second — and I know this pretty much goes against everything you’re going to read over the next four months — I just don’t know how much all the hubbub about who’s having a great week and who’s not really matters. Scouting is just entirely too subjective, and most of what you read online about whose ‘stock’ is soaring or falling is really questionable. I’ve been coming to these games so long that I can remember several players that ascended after a strong week (North Carolina DT Ryan Sims in 2002, California QB Kyle Boller in 2003, Arkansas’ Matt Jones in 2005 and Louisville DT Amobi Okoye in 2007 are just a few), then went out and had nondescript NFL careers. I’m sure you could name players that had awesome weeks, then went on to football stardom (Oregon State’s Chad Johnson in 2001 was one), but I just don’t see a strong correlation anymore. That makes it hard to really get excited about what happens here. There are just too many variables, too many unknowns. I know that’s not sexy and not really connected to what you find on the Web these days, but I believe it’s true.
  • In keeping with that theme, I’m pretty excited about our coming ITL Combine Seminar set for Wednesday, March 1, at 7 p.m. We’re going to have former Saints and Browns scout Matt Manocherian speak, but not really because he’s a former NFL evaluator. Instead, it’s because he’s now with Sports Info Solutions, a firm that Bill James founded to develop the analytics ideas that have taken hold in baseball (and been featured in Moneyball). I’m not sure analytics translates to football the way it does baseball — just too messy, too much integration between players — but I’m willing to listen with an open mind. I look forward to them discussing how their methods apply to football.

Week 2: More Sights, Sounds and Notes from the Road

20 Friday Jan 2017

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It was another week on the road for me with two all-star games, the Tropical Bowl (played in Daytona Beach) and the Shrine Game (St. Petersburg) played in Florida. Here are a few things I thought interesting from this week.

  • I got to tour IMG Academy in Bradenton on Tuesday. In many ways it gave me a chance to see the future of athletics; it was an unbelievable place. You might have seen my tweet, which included an attempt at a panoramic shot of the place. The picture doesn’t do the place justice anyway. By next year, it will include 700 acres of  fields, stadiums, classrooms, parking lots, auditoriums, cafeterias, scenic ponds and lakes, weight rooms, roads, pathways and green space. Yes, even with all of this, there’s plenty of green space, in addition to hundreds of students from literally all over the world dressed from head to toe in IMG-logoed, Under Armour attire.
  • There are two things I’ll remember most. One, when a draft prospect arrives, the first thing IMG officials do is test his sweat to measure the electrolytes he loses. Then they design a concoction at the Gatorade Sports Science Institute (which is right there on the grounds, one of three in the world) and voila! He’s got his own specific Gatorade blend, and it’s available whenever he wants it. That’s pretty cool. The other thing was that IMG has developed a combine — for e-sports. Yes, the good people at IMG have even figured out a way to make money off the nerds who aspire to go from their mother’s couch to a stadium somewhere, where other nerds will pay money to watch them play video games.
  • One thing I always hear from scouts is how disappointed they are in the lack of talent at the various all-star games. The older scouts, especially, lament the fact that fewer stars play in the Senior Bowl, Shrine Game and lesser games. There’s a good reason for that — most of those would-be seniors are already in the NFL — but the fact remains that some of these games have grown a little stale. That’s why it was so refreshing this year to see the Shrine Game involving assistant coaches from  all over the NFL as the assistants for this week’s game. It brought a new energy to this week’s workouts.
  • Here’s another big plus: referees were on site to throw flags during the team portions of the drills. It made everyone sharper and gave every workout a game-like intensity. This was one of the better Shrine weeks in recent memory.
  • One longtime friend told several stories about former Miami (Fla.), Oklahoma, Louisville and Florida Atlantic head coach Howard Schnellenberger, who has also coached several all-star games. As the story was told, Schnellenberger was not so adept when it comes to pop culture, especially the music scene. One time, he proudly announced to his coaches that “one of the hottest band in music” would be playing at the stadium at a future date. The band? “Trickshot!” he proudly exclaimed. When he got blank stares from his staff, he excoriated them for living closed, uncultured lives. “You guys gotta get out more and live life,” he urged them. Of course, the blank stares were warranted, as the band was really Cheap Trick.
  • Another time, the Rolling Stones were playing Louisville’s football stadium, and shortly before the show, Schnellenberger found a member of the band’s entourage checking out the school’s trophy case. “Hold it! Hold it! Hold it!,” said the coach with outstretched arms. “If you’re with the band, back in the visitors locker room!” When the band member obliged, another coach chided him with, “Coach, do you know who that was?” When Schnellenberger was told it was Mick Jagger, he responded with, “well, he didn’t know who I was.”

Notes From The Road

13 Friday Jan 2017

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Every year, when I travel to all-star games, I get to talk to the people that make up the business. Scouts, agents, financial planners, trainers, players and their parents — they all have different perspectives on the game. That’s part of what makes football so fascinating.

Here are a few things I found of interest this week:

  • I had a long talk with a scout who’s been in the game for more than 30 years. In the course of our talks on the business of player evaluation, he talked about how busy he is from August to November, and how, even when he’s home on the weekends, he’s mainly finishing up reports. He told me the secret to driving four hours after a full day of work (without falling asleep) is to adjust your seat so the backrest is at a right angle to the seat. It’s not so comfortable, but it keeps you alert. Makes sense to me.
  • He also said his ‘laundromat’ during a two-week trip is usually the hotel sink. So let’s see: 12-hour days followed by four-hour drives; washing your undies in the sink; and staying so sleepy that you have to drive bolt upright in your seat. Still want to be a scout?
  • One school that takes agent registration, prospect education, and the selection process very seriously threatened to bar one of its players from its pro day when he signed with a contract advisor who’s not registered with the school. I’m not sure if I’m in favor of that, but I do know that if all schools had that policy, and followed through with it, the recruiting process would be a lot more orderly.
  • I’ve always been a guy who believes teams should cover every all-star game of every stripe, no matter how low on the food chain. They should also make sure they’re keeping tabs on all the other leagues, like the CFL, Arena League, etc. However, I had an interesting conversation with a scout this week who disagreed. He looks at a scouting department as a tablecloth that’s a little too small. You have to make sure the biggest part of the tablecloth  is covering the key parts of the ‘table’ (mainly the FBS teams and the better FCS teams), and accept that there may be a few crumbs left here and there. You have to play the odds, basically. Even when you’re an NFL team with 10-12 area scouts. There’s just too many players.
  • We had one more (friendly) disagreement. He likes the idea of the Pacific Pro Football League, and thinks it will attract a number of talented players that have no interest in attending school and who are willing to spend their three post-high school, pre-NFL eligibility years making $50,000 per year. My feeling is that most players worth considering for such a league will still see colleges as their best path to NFL riches, even if it means they’re essentially indentured servants for three years.

Those are the highlights from Week 1. More next week.

My Son, and a Draft Prospect’s Mindset

06 Friday Jan 2017

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This week, I had an epiphany on why so many draft prospects (especially projected late-rounders) struggle to see the game as a business and fail to see their place in it. It sprung from an experience I had at a hometown eatery with my wife, son, and his swim coach.

My oldest son, 14, plays pretty much whatever’s in season, but basketball, swimming and track (long jump) are his passions, and what he’s best at. He’s long and lean, with a perfect swimmer’s build, and at 6-foot-3 just an inch shorter than I am. But he lives in suburban Houston, a place where young men start being groomed for the pros at second grade. He’s also captivated by Michael Phelps, and aspires to the Olympics. So there we were at lunch with his swim coach, wanting to know what it might take for him to realize his dreams, however impractical they may be.

In the space of an hour, my son’s coach talked about his decorated career as a high school swimmer under one of the best coaches in the state of Texas. He talked about giving up summer vacations and holidays; about two-hour swim sessions early in the morning followed by two-and-a-half-hour sessions in the afternoon; about having only one month (August) off from that routine every year; and about giving up all other sports in junior high to focus solely on swimming. His sacrifices and devotion to life in the pool produced a scholarship to an excellent Division II school in the Midwest, where he swam four more years and earned an engineering degree. To me, or any other adult, that’s an incredible success story. At the same time, it came at a stiff price, and despite his excellence, fell far short of Olympic glory.

 

The coach’s story of sacrifice and work gave my wife and I pause. I’d heard pretty much all I had to hear, and to me, the path was clear: swim, yes, but also play as many sports as possible, whatever’s in season. Have fun. Let life play out, hoping to play basketball in high school but also trying to swim and maybe even continuing his long jump career. And as the competition stiffened, he could withdraw from sports, but it would all happen organically. In short, something less than total devotion to one sport in a probably fruitless Olympic chase.

That’s the reaction I expected from my son. Instead, he turned to the coach and said, basically, when do we start?

There’s a postscript. That evening, coming home from youth group at our church, we had a long talk, and he admitted his tension about what lay ahead. The commitment to swimming was daunting and he didn’t know if he could do it. “I just want to make you and mom proud of me,” he said. Though I assured him that my wife and I love him and have no expectations, and that we would support him no matter what, the next day he sent me a text a few hours before the afternoon’s basketball game. “Still nervous,” it read. Not about the game. But about swimming.

I take two things from this. One, when you’re young, you believe everything is possible. I mean, everything. With the right amount of effort and the necessary training, you’ll get to your goals. I think this is why so many aspiring NFL players feel combine prep is so absolutely critical.

But the other is this. Many of these young men feel overwhelming pressure to get to the NFL. A lot of it is internal, because they know it’s ‘put up or shut up’ time. However, a lot of that is external. Their whole identity has already been associated with their status as a football player, and when their NFL dreams die, they become someone else, not just to themselves, but to their friends, family, the people back home, everyone. That produces desperation, and it’s probably why it’s so hard for that dream to die.

As a 47-year-old, it’s so easy to forget what it’s like to not be established, and how difficult it is to grapple with the weight of expectations. But I think I understand it a lot better now.

Questions of the Season

30 Friday Dec 2016

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The 60 days from about Thanksgiving to the Senior Bowl are the busiest ‘behind the scenes’ times of the football business, or at least, they are for me and most ITL clients. It’s also when I spend most of my time on the road, hopping from all-star game to all-star game.

It’s a wild and crazy time when my wife and kids rarely see me, but it’s also the time when I get to see ‘my people,’ face to face. When you run a business like mine, you spend hours texting, emailing and talking on the phone with people, but you never see their faces unless it’s on a Facebook post. There’s still value in meeting with people, shaking hands, and talking shop.

Of course, there’s very little time to waste, so I try not to spend a lot of time on small talk. Here are a few questions I’ll be asking my contacts and colleagues over the next few weeks.

Three percent? 1.5 percent? Something else?: As you know, if you read this blog, we’ve spent a lot of time on the new SRA, which defaults to a 1.5 percent agent fee unless otherwise marked. There was a pretty high level of interest (and worry) on the part of agents when the NFLPA released the new SRA with these standards set. Were these worries warranted? Are players willing to pay 3 percent? Are they demanding training be paid in return for paying 3 percent? Do they even have any idea about the 3 percent vs. 1.5 percent issue?

How small is too small? What off-the-field matter makes a player too hot to touch?: I’m not sure anyone can answer these questions, but 14 years after launching ITL, I’m still asking them. What makes one player with high production but size limitations a first-rounder, but another with almost exactly the same production and dimensions undraftable? I started a text conversation with an ex-NFL player a few weeks back regarding this question, and it got so detailed that I asked him to postpone it, with hopes that we’ll have time to expand on it at the combine or somewhere else on the all-star trail. Maybe the truth is out there. Ultimately, I think the answer lies in what’s ‘safe’ and defensible in scouting circles. My guess is that it’s got a lot to do with the media, and how much criticism a team will get or not get if it violates the scouting ‘book.’ Could the media and public perception really have that kind of impact on player evaluation? if so, it means analytics deserve much wider use in football circles, at least to me. But I don’t want to fall back on convenient solutions if there’s something concrete that I’m missing.

Anyway, if these questions interest you, I’ll be on a fact-finding mission over the next month-plus, and I’ll try to bring my findings back to this space. I hope you’ll check it out. And if you have your own ideas on these topics, please, fill me in via the comments section.

Combine Prep, Costs and Contempt

22 Thursday Dec 2016

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Earlier this year, I had lunch with a couple financial advisors who have been longtime friends as well as ITL clients. In the course of conversation, one of them mentioned that he’d developed a friendship with a talented young player who had bounced around at a few FBS schools.

He asked about the young man, and mentioned that he was slated to train with one of the top combine prep specialists in the business. That piqued my interest, so I called the trainer. It turned out that the young man had found the trainer and placed a call or sent an email, but was still a ways from finding someone to fund his training.

This has become pretty common. As I talk to agents across the business, I always get stories about solicitations they get from unsigned players. More and more often, these players — often the longest of long shots, sometimes no longer even draft-eligible — usually close their emails or voice mails with, “I’ve already picked out who I want to train with!” This is seen as a kind of step-saver, proof that the player is ready to hit the ground running without further ado.

Today, players see training as a given part of the agent-player relationship. This is just the latest manifestation of accelerating expectations.

As someone dedicated to helping young student-athletes realize their NFL dreams, it’s incredibly frustrating that players are getting farther and farther away from realistic goals instead of closer to them. I run a series of newsletters during the summer for draft-eligible players and their parents, and I’ve also created a series of mini-podcasts that addresses the questions I get most often.

When players reduce their whole agent selection process to which contract advisor is willing to offer training, it trivializes an agent’s role and turns the relationship into a mere business transaction. This is an absurd oversimplification, and in the end, I think this is one reason why these relationships so often become contemptuous.

If you’re a draft-eligible player reading this, I beg of you to realize that you can’t train your way into the first round. In no way am I trying to minimize the role of combine prep specialists. More often than not, they do an incredible job of sharpening a player’s athleticism and bringing out the best in a prospect. However, it’s important to understand that covering the cost of training is a major investment by a potential agent, and not something you should take for granted.

Just because a prospect can’t find an agent to cover training, that’s no reason not to go for it. And maybe it’s even better to find a contract advisor willing to go for broke for a player even if he’s not willing to go broke paying his training fees.

When Colleges, Football and Compliance Collide

14 Wednesday Dec 2016

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This week, ESPN’s Darren Rovell wrote a good story about the growth of the sports agent industry partly as a result of the release of the movie, Jerry Maguire, 20 years ago this week. There’s no denying there are more contract advisors vying for NFL clients today than there were two decades ago.

Here’s another area that’s boomed: sports management programs at national universities. Rovell notes, correctly, that as more young people have sought to enter sports fields, schools have tried to accommodate them. Today, there are 42 states (plus D.C.) with at least one school offering a sports management program, bachelor’s, master’s and/or doctoral. Five states have at least 14 (14!) schools that offer a sports management program. By the way, these numbers are courtesy of the North American Society for Sports Management. Oh yes, there’s also now a North American Society for Sports Management (NASSM) and dozens of other clubs, groups and fraternities for aspiring sports management types.

The point is that academia has wholly embraced the sports agent trend and — are you sitting down? — even monetized it. Hey, that’s capitalism. There’d probably be no Inside the League, and a host of other small businesses that are part of this cottage industry, if not for the sports agent trend. More power to ’em.

So here’s the problem. Once these young people absorb morsels of wisdom on ethics, contract negotiation and whatnot from these fine institutions of learning for four or five years, they often pursue careers as contract advisors — and immediately become persona non grata at the very schools from which they graduated.

Here’s an example. One of my longtime clients graduated from one of the finer schools in the Southeast (undergrad and master’s), and he’s a proud alumnus. However, when he tries to attend a pro day, or recruit a player, or otherwise conduct business as a contract advisor, his alma mater goes out of its way to make life hard for him. He has to sit in a special section when he accompanies his client to a workout; he can only contact draft-eligible seniors when the school says he can (though there are no laws forbidding it); and there are a number of other hoops he has to jump through. Naturally, the school didn’t mention any of this while it was drafting his account for probably around $100,000 over a five- to six-year period.

So what’s my point? How about a little honesty from schools? It’s not fair for the sports management program to teach these young people that as long as they play by a certain set of rules they can achieve success, then see these schools’ own athletic departments set up a whole different set of rules that are mostly unachievable.

If a school wants to keep its student-athletes safe and warm (and mostly uneducated) behind a big, beautiful wall, don’t accept millions of dollars from students. It’s duplicitous and dishonest, and it would be a better world if we had a lot less of both of those.