Tag Archives: J.I. Halsell

WSW: Getting Creative

22 Wednesday Jul 2015

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I don’t talk about it much, but I think one of the themes of this blog is that to be successful in this business, you must be ‘your own man.’ You must be creative. You must be willing to go your own way.

J.I. Halsell of NFL Contract Metrics had an instance during his time with the Washington Redskins that his ability to think a little differently was a key asset.

The team had just drafted LSU SS LaRon Landry as the sixth pick in 2007. Landry would give the ‘Skins a pair of aces at the safety position as he teamed with FS Sean Taylor, the team’s athletic superstar at the back of the secondary. The problem was that though Landry, like Taylor, was an athletic freak (4.35 40 at the combine), the position where he’d be playing would not lend itself to easy incentives. Box safeties don’t rack up sacks and interceptions; they’re more like linebackers whose value is in stopping the run and intimidating at the line of scrimmage. That meant J.I. would have to come up with other ways to compensate him without the usual incentives.

“(Landry was) not a ball-hawking free safety like most first-round safeties,” J.I. said. “He was a box safety that went in top 10. Back then, there was a lot more leeway about how (a contract) was structured. There were not many box safeties in the top 10. How do you create an incentive package for a guy that wouldn’t get a lot of turnovers and interceptions? How do you judge his productivity, while also mitigating the team’s downside so that the team didn’t have a lot of risk?”

He said the ability to think outside the box (no pun intended) is key whatever side of the table you’re on.

“Once you get to a team, or to an agency, you have to think creatively so you’re compensating the player or the team accordingly. LaRon was just as much a freak (as Taylor) in terms of his testing at the combine. He didn’t have the length, but he could run. We had two freak athletes at safety, and how do we compensate these guys?”

J.I. was able to craft a deal that had the right mix of base salary and incentives that were enticing to Landry and his agency, New York City-based Lagardere Unlimited, and the team was able to get him to camp on time, signing him shortly before camp started in late July.

I think this is important if you want to work in this business because there’s no real formula for success. You can try to storm the gates of NFL teams in an attempt to be a scout, or you can save your pennies and take a shot at being an agent, but if you’re creative, you might be able to find your own way to the football heights.

 

How J.I. Got His Start

21 Tuesday Jul 2015

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Before we go further with J.I. Halsell’s place in the football business and his new website, NFL Contract Metrics, I wanted to let him tell the story of how he got his foot in the football door. I’ll let him tell it, then have a few comments to follow:

“When I was in my first semester at Seton Hall (where I was pursuing my MBA), I worked in the sports information office, and the assistant SID there, his good friend from his time as an undergrad worked with the NFL’s Management Council. I’m a stats guy, so working in sports information was great because I worked with the basketball team the entire semester.

“So the assistant SID noticed my work ethic, and his buddy (with the Management Council) was looking for an intern. I reached out on a Friday, interviewed on Monday, and got the offer to intern on Tuesday. I turned a three-month internship over the summer into two years with the league.

“It was a paid internship, but it’s New York City, which is super-expensive. But it was a paid internship. Harold Henderson was head of the Management Council at the time, and it was important to him that the interns on the Management Council and the legal clerks on the labor law side, the internships were paid. It didn’t pay a lot, but it was better than nothing.

“I lived in North Jersey, right across from Manhattan, me and one of the other interns. We all kind of lived in a house, and I paid a ton of money to live in a room that ‘s about the size of a walk-in closet, but it was great. My son’s godfather, I met him there, and it was a good time in my life. You’re in your mid-20s, you’re in New York City, you’re working in sports, and it was a fun time in life and transformational in the information I was acquiring.”

Here are a few thoughts on J.I.’s climb:

  • J.I. was working on his post-graduate degree, but still willing to work for free on a job that had long hours and not a lot of glory. Not everyone is willing to do that.
  • What’s more, he was working in basketball, but he was still able to parlay it into football. Get your foot in the door with one sport, and sometimes it takes you into another one.
  • Seton Hall isn’t exactly known as a football factory, but because he put himself in position to succeed, he happened to find a guy who knew another guy. He made his own breaks.
  • J.I. probably wondered how he’d make his situation work, given the low pay and the fact that he most likely already had a life plan mapped out. But he took a risk and it paid off big.
  • There were probably friends J.I. had from high school, and even from college, who were already out in the world, starting to make real money when he was working for peanuts at the Management Council with no guarantees and no promises. But because he went for it, it paid off. It’s hard not to root for a person like that.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about his experiences with the ‘Skins for WSW.

Introducing my friend, J.I.

20 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by in Agents

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This week, I’ll be talking to J.I. Halsell in this space. J.I. is an interesting guy for a lot of reasons. One reason is that he’s worked on both the NFL side, as part of the management council and as the Redskins’ cap guru, and on the agent side, as part of Chicago-based Priority Sports, one of the top firms in the business.

What’s also interesting to me is that he walked away from the agent side of the business voluntarily. He got a player drafted early in his two years with Priority, and had more than one active client in the league when he cashed in his chips. Most folks who had a slot with a big firm and were starting to make their way in the biz would never give it up to move back to his West Coast roots, nearer his family.

The final thing that’s cool about J.I. is that he is very entrepreneurial. Though he’s worked with an NFL team and he’s worked with a big firm, he’s willing to bet on himself. His new site is NFL Contract Metrics, which breaks down the effect the cap has on all 32 NFL teams in a way that anyone can understand. It’s a subscription-based website, like ITL, but it’s very reasonable at $24.99 for a year, and I guarantee that if you sign up, you’ll learn something.

The best feature of the site is where J.I. takes all teams’ depth charts and includes their cap numbers as well as a host of other numbers. It really brings out these players’ impact on the team’s salary structure in a way I don’t know that anyone else does. It’s the report that one NFL team’s GM is already raving about, and rightly so.

We’ll tell his story of landing an internship with the NFL Management Council later this week, but there’s one thing he said related to his work there that really resonated with me. “I knew that getting exposed to the cap was a unique skillset because you couldn’t take a class and learn that. In one way, I did kind of luck up on it, but in another way, luck brought me to a field that was right up my alley.”

If you want to be a success in football, and you’re determined to be an agent or a scout or any other traditional field, more power to you. However, be open to seeing fields that maybe aren’t already well-trodden, as J.I. did.

More on J.I. and his thoughts on the football business later this week.