Tag Archives: NFL agent

NFLPA exam feedback

28 Monday Jul 2014

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After a few interesting days in Washington, D.C., last week, shaking hands and meeting the people hoping to be members of the 2014 agent class, I got to talking to several people about the test. I’ve compiled a few texts from the test-takers to give you an idea of what to expect if you’re one of those folks hoping to sit for the exam someday.

“It was no joke. . . I was prepared, it was just harder and worded much more difficult than the practice test. LOL my mind is mushhhhh.” — The first part of this sequence (“It was no joke”) was the first response I got from any of the test-takers (I’ve worked with several of them in the run-up to the test) and was completely unsolicited. This is when I first started to understand that this year’s exam was quite a challenge.

“If I have to do it again, I will do it from memory. Open book slowed me down. And I didn’t need to have to look on all of them. Some yes.” — This is a pretty classic response. Having a chance to refer to source materials tends to lessen people’s intensity when it comes to studying. If you don’t have the answer when a tough question comes along, you have a tendency to look it up, which is natural. Where it really trips you up, however, is when you don’t know an answer (or aren’t sure) on a medium or even easy question. You wind up using time you don’t have. Three hours goes quickly.

“It’s tricky definitely. Thank God I double checked and double checked.” — This is a luxury you don’t have if your strategy is to leaf through the source materials and try to find the answers. Review is key but only if you have time left after you finished Question 60.

“I think it went OK. I don’t want to be too confident . . . lol. It took mostly everyone the entire 3 hrs to take it.” — This response came from one of the most prepared test-takers in the room this year, based on what I know. This tells me the test may have been a little tougher than last year. Each year actual certified agents make up questions for the test. Maybe this year they came with a little hotter stuff.

“The questions are worded very uniquely. . . exam was hard to understand. A lot of unnecessary wording.” — Once again, this tells me they made this year’s exam a little harder than previous tests. The wording is always the part that makes things confusing, but it seems the questions this year were layered with more ‘goop’ than usual.

 

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.

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.

NFL Agent ABCs (Pt. 3)

03 Thursday Jul 2014

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So far, we’ve discussed the costs of registering with the NFLPA and the costs associated with recruiting. Today, let’s talk about training fees.

I always say that the business of football representation turns over about every 3-4 years. If there’s been one major change in the last half-decade, it’s combine prep. The specialized training that football prospects receive has gone from something that nobody did (15 years ago) to something that the biggest firms offered to players rated as certified first-rounders (10 years ago) to something that most draftable players got (five years ago) to something that every player that aspires to be drafted expects from his agent.

How much does training cost? For the truly established programs that have been training first-rounders for years and have proven track records, you’re looking at a total training cost that approaches $25,000-$30,000. That cost usually includes 6-8 weeks of training plus lodging, supplements and food designed to enhance muscle-building and take weight off (or put it on). Some facilities also offer options. For example, most top prospects will expect a car, so facilities might roll this into the price. Some prospects will want individual rooms rather than roommates. There are also out-of-pocket expenses like deep tissue massage or interview prep; some trainers roll this into the total price, and some make them options. The problem is, when one athlete sees his training brethren getting these perks, it’s hard for an agent to tell him he’s not inclined to pay for such add-ons. Of course, this doesn’t address the cost of flying the prospect home to see his girlfriend, or celebrate a parent’s birthday weekend, or any other special request an elite client might have.

As one might expect, this has had a major impact on the people seeking to represent young athletes. The cost of training has truly separated the men from the boys when it comes to agencies, with some flatly refusing to pay exorbitant training fees and some seeing them as the cost of doing business. It’s a major risk that comes with no guarantees. Probably every other year I get a new agent who subscribes who spent more than $20,000 on combine prep for a player who’s not on an NFL roster the week after the draft.

Often, an agent comes to the business completely oblivious about training fees and what they represent in the recruiting process. I guess the upside is that contract advisors with unlimited resources can often land late-round prospects with tip-top training offers. Of course, the odds of late-round draftees making it to a second contract are not good, so chances of recovering by assessing an annual three percent on the player’s contract are remote. Ineffective play, injuries, or abundance at a position might conspire to keep a player off a team’s roster, and unless he makes the active 53, he owes his agent nothing.

We’ll talk about how agents deal with exorbitant training fees in Monday’s edition.

In today’s newsletter, we’ve got a sample question for the NFLPA exam. Here’s the answer: (C) $885,000.00.

The explanation: First you must determine signing bonus proration, in this case $800K/4 years = $200K/yr. Then add that number to the first year paragraph 5 salary. $420K + $200K = $620K. Then apply the 25% Rule – multiply the $620K by 0.25 (25%) = $155K. That is the max yearly increase. Then just add the numbers for each year:

Year 1 – $420K
Year 2 – $420K + $155K = $575K
Year 3 – $575K + $155K = $730K
Year 4 – $730K + $155K = $885K

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.