On Friday, I’ll be part of a panel at the Fowler School of Law Sports & Entertainment Symposium at Chapman University in Southern California. It’s a big deal, and if you’re in town, I hope you can make it out (and if you do, I hope you grab me and say hi). Here are a few thoughts as I approach this week’s event.

• It’s a little intimidating to be sharing the dais with five agents from four major firms. I don’t mean to sound immodest when I say I study the player-agent recruiting game probably more closely than any non-agent in the business. However, I’ll admit that’s a little different from being in the room with a draft prospect plus his parents, or his girlfriend, or his ‘business manager,’ or his former coach, or anyone else who has influence over him. It’s also different from going toe to toe with an NFL GM.
• I’m always a little out of sorts when it comes to addressing sport management students and/or law students with a sports interest. On one hand, I want to be insightful and genuine, and want to stimulate learning and interest in the business, but I also don’t want to get too focused on the finer points of the agent industry and lose them entirely. I also have a habit of, at times, focusing on the challenges rather than the rewards. If our credo at ITL is really going to be ‘succeeding in football,’ I have to give young people the ammo to do that, or at least not extinguish the flame before it’s even lit.
• I’m kind of on the fence about how I curry favor with the NFL Network’s Rand Getlin, who’s moderating the event. I mean, we’re buddies, but he’s gotta be provocative to stir interest, right? How do I know he’s not going to ask me a question that I respond to with ‘um’ or ‘huh’ or ‘may I be excused?’ Maybe a bribe is in order. But how much? I know Rand is a car guy. Perhaps I dangle the keys to some fancy wheels. Maybe that’s too over the top.
• With every trip I’m taking this year, I’ve set a goal of trying to solidify one relationship and create (at least) one relationship. I want to do this in very intentional ways. For example, I’m having dinner with a relatively new client, Tim Johnson of the accounting firm JLK Rosenberger. Ironically, I met him at the last event where I spoke, the 2015 Sports Financial Advisors Association’s Conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., last November. Hopefully, this trip will be equally as productive.

If you’re in Southern California and you’re interested in the business, try to make it out for the symposium. I promise you won’t be sorry.

We try to celebrate the victories of those who take the long road to success in football in this space. I can’t think of anyone who fits that description more than Rand Getlin, the former Yahoo! Sports writer who announced today that he’ll be joining the NFL Network. Let me tell you Rand’s story of success, at least from my point of view.

My association with Rand started in the early days of ITL, probably around 2005 or 2006. At the time, Rand had gotten to know Josh Luchs, an L.A.-based agent at the Gersh Agency who had a sizeable NFL agent practice. Josh went on to write an article you might have read — if you haven’t read it, stop right now and do so —  followed by a book you might have read, but that’s a story for another day. Rand cut his teeth with Josh after Luchs had ‘gone straight,’ but in short order, Josh got out of the business, leaving Rand a bit stranded.

I think it was after Josh had left the agent world that Rand became an ITL subscriber, somewhere around 2007 or ’08. At the time, Rand was not content to just attend the prestigious USC law school, but also serve as half of a libertarian think tank, the Prometheus Institute (here’s a story about his work there). Like most people who get a taste of the football business, Rand wasn’t ready to give up, so he took his passion for the game and the players in it and started a service aimed at educating schools about the agent process. Long story short, the goal was to protect young men playing the game from being the next ones featured on ‘Broke.’ Despite a couple years of fighting tooth and nail to interest schools, he got no traction. Sadly, he learned that schools’ football interests don’t always intersect with players’ interests once they’re done. We kept in touch through his struggles, but lost touch when he finally shelved it.

The next time I heard from Rand, he had earned his way into a role with Yahoo! Sports. How he landed that, despite no formal ‘big journalism’ experience, is a story best-told by Rand, but bottom line, he quickly evolved into a prize-winning writer, penning some of the most intriguing stories in the football business over the last 3-5 years (here’s one of them). After a well-earned reputation as a highly connected news-breaker, he’s taken the next big step in his career, and I’m sure you’ll soon see him with a prominent on-air role.

There are three things I love about Rand’s story, besides the fact it’s awesome to see a good friend make the big-time. One, Rand is entrepreneurial. He wasn’t content to try only traditional jobs in the business. He tried identifying markets to attack, putting his own spin on things until he broke through. Second, he doesn’t quit. He hit road blocks in the agent world, then in his own college education venture, but never quite trying. That’s incredibly important. Third, he’s a regular guy who gives credit to people who helped him along the way. He’s been a guest at our annual combine seminar (he knocked it out of the park, by the way), and he’s always been a true friend of ITL. I can’t say that about everyone I’ve worked with.

If you’ve never heard of Rand, follow him on Twitter (especially if you like cars as much as you like football). But more importantly, take inspiration from Rand’s story. He started with no connections and built a career on his smarts and hard work. You can do it, too.

We just finished examining the entire 2015 draft class, and we’re starting a breakdown of the players who were eligible to be selected two weekends ago. I find it a lot more illuminating to look at every single player who was hoping to hear his name called that week, rather than strictly the ones the media was touting. It just gives you a clearer, bigger picture of the entire draft. Here are a few thoughts.

• We identified 1,989 players who signed with agents this year. We arrived at that number by taking the 2060 players the NFLPA listed as being draft-eligible and signed to a standard representation agreement, then eliminating all the repeat listings, veterans sorted in with draft prospects, misspellings that created incorrect listings, etc.
• Also, I would estimate that the actual number of players who signed such deals is at least five percent, and maybe 10 percent, higher than 1,989. We had to go through and add 105 names to the list that had been omitted, and this was based solely on the tryout and UDFA players we know were part of this draft class. At any rate, almost 2,000 players is a big number when you consider that most teams only have around 100-150 on their boards as draftable.
• Counting the number of players signed to undrafted free agent deals, as well as those invited in for tryouts, is notoriously hard because (a) some teams like to hide this from the media and (b) there are still six teams that will hold camp this weekend and don’t yet have their rosters and invitations set.
• With that said, we’ve counted 489 tryout players and another 437 signed as undrafted free agents. The number will be slightly higher by the time the six teams wrap things up this weekend, and we hope to gather those names to add to our totals. Still, statistically speaking, only about five percent of those invitees will actually be offered contracts. Of those who are offered contracts, only about eight percent (one in 12) will actually make it to the 53 or a practice squad.
• Figure that every one of these players that made it to a tryout, as well as those who signed as undrafted free agents, went into the draft as at least a solid bet to go in the seventh round. Having spoken to agents this spring, the cost of doing business for a player with a draftable grade is about $10,000 per player (counting training, food, lodging, etc.). That means that agents spent, all told, about $1 million training players that have, at best, an eight percent chance of making even a practice squad.
• And for those that don’t know, the NFL doesn’t allow contract advisors to bill players on practice squads, so those fees are eaten, as well, unless the kid gets elevated onto the 53.
• Of course, more than half the players that signed standard representation agreements didn’t even make it to a tryout, and we all know many of those players got paid training, as well. So determining the amount of money that went up in smoke at the end of the draft is really pure guesswork. I’d estimate that number to reach at least $1.3 million to $1.4 million.

I’m just getting started on these numbers. There’s still a lot of polishing that will go into them, and we’ll divide them up by position, school size, and a number of other factors next week over at Inside the League. This has been a wildly popular breakdown when I’ve done it in the past.

At any rate, I’ve provided today’s analysis just to give a little perspective, a peak behind the curtain. I think it provides a snapshot of the draft class and the odds players face in making the league.