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Opportunities

17 Tuesday Mar 2015

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From time to time, I see big events that appeal to the sports law crowd. Conferences, meetings, panels, seminars. They draw a lot of students and often have impressive speakers, by any standard. They’re a place to start if you’re looking at a career in football. But know the weaknesses of such gatherings.

There are a lot of people who regularly speak at these events that aren’t going to give you a lot of practical guidance. Oh, you’ll get ethics, and you’ll get people raging against the machine (the NFL, the NCAA, or whatever the perceived monolithic exploiter of the day is), and that’s all well and good, but are you getting practical guidance? Are you getting the answers to your questions? Are you in a setting where you feel confident seeking guidance on a specific area of the job search? Do you get closer to knowing what you really want to be?

Here’s one example. Every year at the combine, a company that is a semi-rival of ITL holds a big event for their clients. They bring in several people holding NFL jobs in evaluation, and they bring in a handful of agents and others from across the industry, and it’s a very impressive, star-studded list. For a day, all of those clients get to feel like big shots, hear war stories, tell their friends about who they’re rubbing elbows with, and maybe take a few cool selfies. But do they really directly benefit from this? The organization has lots of members, but I haven’t seen a record of success that indicates they’re giving any real value beyond entertainment.

I’m not discounting networking. That’s important, especially at an early stage of your career, and you’ll find no shortage of places to go if you want to wear an official-looking nametag, shake lots of hands, and sit in rooms with people with lots of Twitter followers. However, there is no substitute for actually working in the business.

As you attend these events, make sure you’re aggressive, direct, and mission-focused. You want to come away with leads, especially if you’re attending an event in the next 2-3 weeks. Make sure your goal is to go in without an opportunity, but to come away with one. If you are mostly sure there won’t be such opportunities at an event, maybe your time is best spent somewhere else.

WSW: Broadcast Bungle

11 Wednesday Mar 2015

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Well, it’s draft season, and everyone’s hearing from the various gurus and experts out there, so I figure it’s a good time to tell a War Story on me.

This is from my days as one of two partners in the precursor to ITL. It was called Lone Star Football. When I first moved to Houston in 1998, I met a dude who wanted to start a Mel Kiper Jr.-style draft magazine, and after meeting me, he knew I had a passion for the game that mirrored his, so he asked me to help him out. It wound up lasting four years before it folded. Troy handled the offense and I handled the defense. One of these days, I’ll tell more stories from my humble beginnings with Lone Star in this space. When I do, take some No-Doze.

At any rate, we didn’t have any money, so our main strategy for selling our draft magazine (yes, it was a print publication just as the Internet was taking off, which was among our inept business decisions) was doing radio shows. I’d poke around on search engines (pre-Google) for whatever stations I could find with a sports talk format, and we’d volunteer to do their shows. We never got paid, so we’d always hope they had a toll-free line, so at least we didn’t have to come out of pocket to give away free programming.

Anyway, one year we landed a couple segments on a station in Green Bay. The problem was that they wanted to do it mid-day (which is probably where they stashed the draft guys that weren’t ready for prime time). We liked to do them together because we had a pretty strict dividing line between offense and defense, and if we had to ‘solo’ a show, we could wind up looking stupid if a caller asked about the wrong player. This is why I was really, really nervous while waiting for call time for this show, because my partner had to work. That meant I was stuck. I had to roll without Troy and hope for the best.

Well, the show wasn’t going very well (I think the host had wrangled with me over my opinion on a player, which kinda pissed me off) when we got a question on a cornerback from a small Midwestern school. I immediately panicked. As we only had two people trying to watch hundreds of players, our focus was almost solely on the big schools. Obviously the wise thing to do would be to cop to my ignorance, admit I didn’t know him, and throw myself on the mercy of the caller.

But hey, screw wisdom. I decided to sell out. Go for it. Burn my ships. Throw caution to the wind. I said something along the lines of ‘great ball skills, plus tackler, needs to prove he can play on a bigger stage.’ You know, the usual blather you get about small-school players, and it might have worked. Problem is, the caller had said ‘quarterback.’

No easy way to wiggle out of that one. Obviously, this didn’t endear me much with the host, who was already not a fan. I don’t remember how we wound up the segment, but that pretty much took all the steam out of it.

Ever since then, when I do radio and I get stumped, I will admit it. I will own it. It’s awkward, but it’s a way better place to be than I was that woeful day on Green Bay radio.

 

The Downside

05 Thursday Mar 2015

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In this space, I spend a lot of time encouraging you to ‘go for it’ in the football world, to roll the dice and pursue your passions. I haven’t retreated from that position one iota, but I wanted to give you a couple downsides to such a path.

This post is maybe only half-serious, but I guess the idea is that life changes as you make football not just your passion, but your profession.

You’ll never watch SportsCenter again: In the 90s, there’s nothing I wanted to be more than Craig Kilborn or Chris Berman. Today, I can’t remember the last time I watched more than 10 minutes of SportsCenter when I wasn’t on a hotel treadmill. There are a couple reasons for this. No. 1, in the rare instances I actually watch the show, they’re trying to sell me something or be too cutesy. No. 2, in the age of the Internet, I already have all the information I need. No. 3, shows like SportsCenter have little to no application to the football business. They’re more fan-driven. I understand this, obviously, but your tastes change once you’re in the business.

You can’t talk football with anyone: I live in Greater Houston, so once someone finds out I’m in the business, the first thing they ask me is something about the Texans. Hey, they’re just trying to be friendly and congenial, and once again, I get that. The thing is, my tiny corner of the business is so all-consuming that I don’t get to really be a fan as much anymore. I can’t remember the last time I watched all four quarters of a college game, and the only NFL games I watch are Saints games (I’m not a Texans fan, which is another problem). Even when I go places like the combine or all-star games or whatever, it’s rare when I meet a client and we talk about on-field, traditional football stuff. We wind up talking about our families, our common non-football interests, or about real ‘inside football’ stuff. Again, your tastes change.

You’ll never enjoy football movies again: About this time last year, the movie ‘Draft Day’ came out. My wife, who knows I hate sports movies, nonetheless declared that we were going to go see it. Well, I humored her and agreed to go, but for one reason or another we never made it while it was in theaters. I breathed a sigh of relief, and so far, I’ve ducked renting the DVD, as well. Most people don’t believe me when I tell them I haven’t seen ‘Jerry Maguire,’ either. They think it should be the one movie that I’ve seen, if any. Once you’ve seen the inside of this business, it ruins sports movies for you because they have to make so many concessions to drama, entertainment, selling tickets, whatever.

I know these issues seem pretty small in the greater scheme of things, and heck, maybe they apply only to me. Still, you should probably get used to thinking in different terms as you move into this world in a more official capacity.

Getting big

03 Tuesday Mar 2015

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Yesterday, I was having lunch with a longtime friend who’s also a client. He happens to be involved in private equity, and we got together specifically because he wants to help ITL take the next step. Inevitably, talk turned casually to my friend’s company becoming an investor. Shortly afterward, it became more serious, and we’ve scheduled a meeting later this week to discuss it more formally.

This kind of talk scares the crap out of me. On the one hand, I know investment is the only way I can make ITL achieve what I think it can achieve. On the other hand, do I want to give up control of the thing that I’ve spent a decade building? There has been plenty of blood, sweat and tears to get to this point. Am I ready to potentially give that all up if we don’t hit certain financial markers in the coming years?

There’s a major combine prep trainer in the business who probably asked himself the same question earlier this decade. When I say ‘major,’ I’m talking big, very big. In fact, this trainer was one of the pioneers of the business. I don’t know all the details of how it happened, but this trainer took in investors who wanted to make his service a franchise, the McDonald’s of combine prep. I’m sure they wanted to inhabit several markets, with combine prep the anchor and the multiple jerseys on the wall and various accolades from Hall of Famers as their draw. Well, ultimately, when things didn’t go the way the investors had planned, this trainer lost his brand and had to start over. There’s a happy ending for him — he’s launched another brand, and the contacts and body of work he’s built have helped him get right back on top — but there’s never any guarantee the story ends that way.

So the reason I discuss all of this is that probably once a week in the late spring and summer, I’m approached by agents who’ve had some success, but on a small scale. How do I partner up with a big firm, or get purchased by a corporation, they ask? I always ask them two things.

No. 1, if you were in an investor’s shoes, would you buy your agency? And No. 2, if things don’t go the way you hope, are you ready to walk away from the practice you bought, potentially even having to sign a non-compete that forces you out of the business?

These are the things I grapple with. There is no guaranteed happy ending. As you enter the business and start to take measured steps to the top, consider all sides and all outcomes. I can tell you that while I’m excited about the possibilities as I approach this week’s meeting, I’m also going to be praying plenty about where all this goes.

WSW: Right Way, Wrong Way

25 Wednesday Feb 2015

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For today’s War Story Wednesday, I want to take you back to something that happened to me last Thursday, less than a week ago.

You hear all the time that in football — as in life — success is built on relationships. You don’t want to burn bridges, and you don’t want to screw people over. You want them to know that they are valued, and that you are worthy of their trust, no matter how big they are in the game. I’d hope people would treat me the same way, which takes me to what happened last week, when we held our sixth annual ITL Seminar in Indianapolis.

We’ve been fortunate to grow in size every year, and this year was our biggest event yet with around 120 people there. I know, that doesn’t sound like a lot of people, but it’s big enough that if you play your cards right, you can ‘hide’ in such a group pretty easily.

Our annual seminar is open only to ITL clients, and I make that perfectly clear, both on the site and in the various newsletter editions I send out to agents and financial planners in the game. I do this because I’m trying to spur business, of course, but also to avoid uncomfortable situations at the door. I don’t want to tell anyone that they can’t attend, though, of course, there are always one or two exceptions.

One ‘good’ exception this year was New York-based agent J.R. Rickert, who’s with Authentic Athletix. Though J.R. isn’t an ITL client per se, we’ve always enjoyed a positive relationship, and his partners have always been clients. For that reason, when he asked if he could join us Thursday, I was happy to welcome him. It’s not something he’s ever attended before, and I was happy to share some goodwill. Of course, there were others who weren’t so fair-minded. There are three examples that come to mind.

One was a group of three people who showed up. They were loosely linked to a combine prep service that has been a long-time client, so when they showed up at the event, I let them in at the request of the trainer. I was a bit frustrated that one invitation had turned into three, but I felt it was the right thing to do to let them in. Of course, I told them that it was normally for members only, and requested that they sign up this week. We’ll see if they follow through on that.

Another was a single, first-year agent. He knows all about ITL and knew the event was clients-only, but I could tell he was trying to play dumb when I confronted him at the door. I asked him to sign up this week — and to his credit, he offered to pay cash on the spot for a month’s subscription, which I declined — and so far, he has not. I made sure to greet him when I saw him later in the week in an effort to show good faith and take the high road, but I’m not going to hold my breath waiting on him to make good on his promise. I don’t think anything’s on the way.

The third person was a financial planner based in the Northeast. For the second straight year, he ducked into my event despite not being a member. He’s clearly trying to get around becoming a client as he likes to show up right before the start, when there’s a long line of people clamoring to get in and things are a bit more rushed. This year, he waited for me to leave the registration table before he made his move, but I saw his name on the admission list, so I know he was there. Next year, I will make a point of confronting him.

It’s not that I’m into confrontation, but there are a couple of reasons I take this stuff seriously. No. 1, this has become a client appreciation night, and I’m not appreciative that he — or anyone else who’s not a client — is taking advantage of that. No. 2, these events are not free, and it’s frustrating that someone would not want to pay his fair share. But the third reason is that I resent the lack of respect these folks have, not just for me, but for the others in the room.

The football world is a small one. As you rise through the ranks and build relationships, make sure not to blatantly disregard civility and fairness. One way or another, it will come back to haunt you. I don’t hold grudges, but I also won’t let these three groups take advantage of me, or anyone I know, ever again.

Three Lessons from Phil

20 Friday Feb 2015

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So last night was our sixth annual ITL Seminar, which we always hold the Thursday night of the NFL Combine. Last night’s featured speaker was Phil Emery, formerly the GM of the Bears. He spoke to the 125 or so ITL clients who made it out to the Indiana Convention Center as part of our annual event. It was very well-received, and we got lots of positive feedback.

As part of his presentation, I gave him 10 questions I always get from young agents and financial planners as well as people hoping to make it in the football business. The first question was, what’s the best way to secure a scouting internship with an NFL team? His answer was lengthy and detailed, and we hope to have it in its entirety on the site within a couple weeks. But there were three takeaways I got just from listening to him, so I thought I’d pass them along here.

1. Don’t say you hope to be the team’s GM: Phil said, as a GM, it was a bit insulting for a young man coming into the game to be thinking in terms of such a lofty position. I think he sees it as presumptuous for someone who hasn’t even achieved a place on the team to be thinking of running the team. He said he wants a young person who is adamant about mastering skills, one by one, that will build a resume over time. So be measured if you’re asked about your goals.

2. You can’t work for free anymore, no matter how badly you want to: Phil said the government has gotten involved here, and for tax reasons, it’s almost impossible to have interns around that aren’t getting (a) pay or (b) college credit. Now, if you get college credit, there’s an excellent chance you’re not getting paid. But without college in the mix, it’s pretty tough. So, free work is one less thing scouting hopefuls have to offer.

3. Don’t hope to make a late-life career change: Phil said teams he’s worked for get letters all the time from highly successful people who are ready to throw away their life’s work (stock analyst, medical professional, whatever) to become scouting interns. Literally. He’s seen lengthy, detailed letters from people who claim their passion has always been football, and that they are ready to start over. Phil said that if it were really their passion, they wouldn’t have waited until mid-life to pursue it. As tough as that is to hear, I think there’s something to that. We all have only so much time, and scouting careers aren’t built over night.

These are just a few of the gems we got last night. We’ll have more for you when we get the film up. We promise to put selected passages on YouTube and, hopefully, the entire presentation on our site. We’ll keep you posted.

 

For your consideration

30 Tuesday Dec 2014

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We’ve used this space in the last couple weeks to feature some selected players that aren’t getting the attention from agents that perhaps they deserve. Due to the response from these posts, we’ve gotten more players asking to be featured, so here are a few more.

I should mention that we don’t feature everyone that contacts us. These are players, we feel, that at least have a chance of making it to a camp next summer.

There are no guarantees, but I think they have possibilities. I should also note that I’m not ‘brokering’ these players. I’m just passing them along to agents who might have interest. If you’re an ITL client and you have genuine interest in these players, I’m happy to provide their contact info, no strings attached.

Derek Akunne, ILB, North Texas: I’m a little confused on why Derek hasn’t gotten more interest from agents so far. He led Conference USA in tackles this season (108) and led the Eagles in tackles for loss (8.5). That’s good production. He lists at 6-0, so he’s not as tall as teams would like their linebackers to be these days – if he lists at 6-0, he’s probably closer to 5-11 at best – but you can’t argue with what he’s done on the field. And no, he didn’t exactly play at a football factory, but as a member of an FBS team, you know he’s going to have a pro day that gets covered by scouts. That’s not always a given when it comes to players that went to D2, D3 or even Division I-AA (FCS) schools.

Blake Renaud, ILB, Boise St.: Unlike Akunne, Renaud has plenty of size (6-2, 255). He also has a nice pedigree, having played HS ball at powerhouse De La Salle in Concord, Calif., before moving on to BSU. Inside linebackers are seen as unsexy by the NFL, and tend to go late in the draft, if at all. Still, every team uses them, and Renaud’s got a solid shot at making it to an NFL camp if he can stay healthy. The key is that he’s a kamikaze on special teams, and that’s the kind of thing that makes a player valuable.

Zack Patt, DE, Rice: Here’s another player off an FBS bowl-winning team that is squarely under the radar, but maybe shouldn’t be. He has a couple knocks. One, he’s quite undersized for his position, and he’s going to have to consider playing outside linebacker on the next level. There will be valid questions on whether or not he can move in space and drop and cover. He’s also had problems getting into the lineup; he didn’t start until his senior season, and he missed several games with injury. However, when he was on the field, he was a true impact player, notching an eye-popping five sacks in one game (against Florida International) this season.

Nico Carlson, OG, Rice: A 37-game starter at Rice, Nico is the kind of guy who scouts love because his best football is ahead of him. He arrived at Rice as a defensive lineman, but switched to OL his sophomore year and became an immediate starter. This gives him the ‘attitude’ and nastiness of a defensive player with an offensive lineman’s focus, smarts and fire. A second-team All-CUSA pick, he’s a legit 6-3/290 and is willing to live at home and train, so despite all his pluses, he won’t cost too much to represent. And he’s smart and personable.

War Story Friday: Flight to Nowhere

19 Friday Dec 2014

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These days at ITL, we’re re trafficking a lot of information about the postseason all-star games that are a key to getting ‘discovered’ by NFL scouts. I get a lot of calls about agents and/or players getting ‘screwed’ by all-star games that claim a player is not good enough to play in a game, or that they’re full at the player’s position. Well, sometimes it’s the player (or his agent) that does the screwing.

Here’s a good illustration. When I ran the 2008 Hula Bowl, we were the No. 3 game, but we had challenges (as I’ve recounted in the past) related to getting players to commit. These challenges were related to our place on the schedule (players arrived during bowl season) as well as the fact that getting to Hawaii is no easy task. That’s why I was really excited when we got a commitment from a Big Ten linebacker who figured to go in the fifth or sixth round.

As I recall, I had been in regular contact with the school’s head coach, working with him in an attempt to get 3-4 of his players into the game. I already knew the drill; he would encourage a couple of his late-rounders to participate in the Hula Bowl if I would take 1-2 of his ‘program’ guys, i.e., players who had no realistic shot of even going to an NFL camp, but who had been loyal soldiers for the coach.

Unfortunately, the coach was having the same conversations with his own agent, and had worked out a similar deal with him. This agent was an old-school guy, and never one to be an ITL client. Therefore, I had no relationship with him, and he had no interest in my lobbying or evangelizing for my game. It was clear he was going to try to get the linebacker into a ‘real’ game, and the Hula Bowl did not qualify.

Still, I didn’t know that when I was trying to schedule the player’s travel the week before the school’s bowl game. Like many colleges, the town where he had gone to school was quite remote, and we’d have to fly him out of Chicago. Though the head coach had been quite enthusiastic about him playing, I didn’t get the same vibe.

“I gotta fly out of my college town,” he insisted, and wouldn’t budge.

I tried and tried to convince him to fly out of a bigger airport, but he wouldn’t. So I went back to my scouting contacts to get a better handle on his pro prospects; each was adamant that he was a late draftee. So I eventually relented and booked him out of a tiny airport local to his college town. The price of the ticket exceeded $1,000, which was probably 3-4 percent of our entire travel budget.

That’s why I was furious when his agent called about a week later, just days before the player was scheduled to arrive, and told us he wouldn’t be coming. He didn’t have a reason why, but it didn’t matter, because no reason would have been good enough. Now I had to replace the player, finding a flight just days before our players were set to arrive, and spend money on top of the $1,000 I’d already spent. But here’s the kicker: there was no way I could get the money back or the ticket back once his name was on it.

In other words, not only had I been royally gamed by this young man, but I’d just handed him a $1,000 travel voucher. And there was nothing I could do about it.

He wound up skipping the all-star process altogether, and missed out on an attempt to solidify his standing in the ’08 draft. Perhaps as a result, he fell completely out of the draft, and had a brief cup of coffee in the league before his pro gridiron career ended.

I hate to take any pleasure in a player’s misfortune, but I have to admit it was hard not to smile when the last pick was announced that spring and his hadn’t been called. Meanwhile, I’ve never spoken to his agent since.

 

Frayed nerves

16 Tuesday Dec 2014

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This time of year is absolutely crazy for the people I work with. Here’s one illustration.

I have one client who’s literally been an ITL client since before he was an agent, sometime in the mid-’00s. We’ve come to be pretty good friends, and he’s one of my biggest supporters, regularly encouraging me and pitching me on ideas (many of them good ones) regarding my services. It’s been pretty rewarding to see his rise through the business, as he had his first top-100 pick last year, and feel like I’ve played some small role in it. I know we’re friends, one of my closer friends in the business, and will be for a long time.

All that said, twice in the last 4-5 years, this friend has lashed out at me in latter December, accusing me of helping ‘the enemy.’ He’s as competitive as they come, and it hurts him when he loses, and defeat causes him to ask ‘why?’ In his zeal to answer that question, he’s looked at me. Both times, the players he expressed frustration about were players I barely knew existed. One of them, I literally couldn’t even pronounce his name. Yet my friend was positive I had given someone else (maybe even the player himself) some kind of sensitive information that influenced the young man away from my friend.

I have to admit that I usually don’t react well, and get pretty dismissive out of my own frustration. Of course, it’s not true. I would be a fool to take sides in a business as wild and crazy as sports representation. I depend on all my clients to see me as neutral; if they don’t, ITL is dead in the water.

In a similar vein, I’ve had agents swear up and down that they’ll be signing a player as soon as his season is over, only to find out days later (sometimes even hours later) that they were wrong. That makes you crazy, too.

The point is, if you’re focused on being in this business, whether it’s player evaluation/scouting or player representation, prepare for your sanity to be tested. From about Dec. 1 until you get your client signed to an NFL deal the following summer, your life will be crazy and unsettled. But even at that, there’s no high like having success in football.

 

Work the Plan

09 Tuesday Dec 2014

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Yesterday, I guess I had too much time on my hands, so I reviewed my Twitter feed and found one of those endless lists that journalists put out this time of year because they’re easy, it’s the Christmas season, and they can churn them out in no time. This one recognized the top 100 or 20 or 50 or whatever people in the football business. No surprise, my name wasn’t among them.

For a minute, this frustrated me. I never measure myself by others’ success, because usually you’re comparing apples and oranges. Inside the League doesn’t fit neatly into any category. We’re not really media; though that’s the easiest label to put on us. We’re not scouting or recruiting, though lots of people put us in that group. We’re not a sports gossip site, though that’s another way we’ve been described. We’re more of a business-to-business consulting service, which is how I describe us. It’s hard to judge our success based on the number of Twitter followers we have, because our relationships are a lot more vertical than they are horizontal. I see us as less a mountain and more as an iceberg.

So here’s the point: don’t make the same mistake I did, even for a minute, by comparing your success to others’ success. All the time, you can see people in the football world getting credit for ‘winning’ when they really aren’t. You see this in the agent business when a lesser agency signs a top prospect, well over its station. Usually, it’s because the agent has paid a boatload in training, signing bonus and/or training, and more often than not, the player fires him well before he has a chance to make his money back. You’ll see another example of this on the last weekend in April when the media ‘grades’ the draft classes of all 32 teams. Those grades are at least three years early, and based on nothing more than the hype the same media has been creating for months.

Work your plan. Talk to everyone you know about the path you want to take, then take it. Figure out what your budget is, what your goals are, and what your time frame is, and stick to it. Don’t stray when you see someone else enjoying fruits that you think you deserve. And if your intention is to be part of the next wave of football professionals and you need a little guidance, we’d love to help.