As the NFL Network’s broadcast kicks off and I sit here among unpacked bags, exhausted from a return trip home but excited for what lies ahead over the next three days, I’m in a bit of a reflective mood.

Today, my reflection turns to how quickly things can turn, especially when it comes to an NFL player’s value. I think there’s value in weighing the way things have turned out, especially for people considering making the NFL their profession. First, a story about this year’s draft.

Tuesday night, my wife and I were fortunate enough to be invited to a get-together in Chicago hosted by the Sports and Entertainment Division of Morgan Stanley. It was wonderful, casual yet upscale, in a perfect setting at a classy bar at the Dana Hotel downtown. There were probably 300 people there, including people from all around the football industry: agents, financial planners, trainers, parents and relatives of players, and of course, players. It’s always fun to meet with players in a relaxed setting, especially when the hay is in the barn, so to speak, just days before the draft. Among the players there was LSU OT La’el Collins. But first, let’s flash back to earlier in the week.

On Sunday, I gotten a call from a source who’s very connected in Baton Rouge. He told me police were interested in talking to Collins regarding the murder of a young woman Saturday night. My source said Collins was the father, and hinted that it looked like a Rae Carruth situation. He urged me to investigate further.

That was a tough task for me. I have a small shop and a limited bandwidth, so I couldn’t put resources toward a wild goose chase through law enforcement and legal channels Monday and Tuesday, hoping for a scoop. While it looked like a juicy tip, and I couldn’t dismiss its veracity, it just wasn’t something I could act on. There was also one question I had: if a player wanted a former lover murdered, wouldn’t the killer make sure the baby didn’t survive?

Fast forward to Tuesday night. I didn’t get to speak to Collins, but I did exchange pleasantries with his agent, Deryk Gilmore of Priority Sports. It’d been a bumpy ride the past couple months for Gilmore and he looked relieved to be finishing up the lunacy of the annual draft hype-fest.

Less than two days later, the world of Collins, Gilmore, and everyone associated with them has been turned upside-down in a way no one could have foreseen as recently as a week ago. In a time when Aaron Hernandez’s conviction is still ringing in the ears of team officials, umerous reports indicate Collins has been removed from numerous draft boards.

Obviously, it will be a long time before all the facts of the case have been decided and all voices heard. However, Collins’ potential fall is perhaps the most meteoric of any player I can remember in a long time.

Keep the names of Collins and Johnny Manziel, another player whose fall from grace is measured in seconds, not years, in mind as you decide whether the fish bowl life of the NFL is for you.

Today, with the draft little more than a week away, I thought I’d tell a story about a young player whose father I worked with through last year’s draft process. It’s a bit of a cautionary tale for agents and parents alike.

The player went into his senior season as a solid end-of-draft/undrafted free agent at a mid-sized BCS school in the south. By the end of the year, he was about the same status, and he signed with an agent that was new but who had deep pockets. It looked like he had a fighting chance to at least go to camp and maybe even make the team.

Though he didn’t receive a combine invite, he took care of business at his pro day and set himself up to be a legitimate camp possibility. Unfortunately, I don’t think this was good enough for his agent, who had sunk a good amount of training money into several players that held undrafted free agent grades. The father, the player and the agent had a long talk going into the draft, and according to the father, the agent set a bottom number for the bonus he’d be willing to accept for the young man. I never got to find out from the father how much influence the player had had in that conversation.

When draft day came, the seven rounds predictably came and went, and the UFA process began in earnest. Unfortunately, there weren’t many suitors for the young defensive back. In fact, there was only one call that came in, and the agent fielded it. As the father told the story, the team was offering a $5,000 bonus, and that’s not what the agent had in mind, so he passed.

No other calls came in. For reasons I never learned, the agent wasn’t able to find the young man a tryout, either, perhaps because he was not in the metro area of any NFL team and not quite interesting enough to rate a plane ticket.

The father told me all of this about a month after the draft. The young man had waited four weeks after the draft, hoping that something would come in. I don’t know if this was at the agent’s urging, or if it was just the young man’s way of exhausting every NFL avenue. When his father called, he was composed, of course, but there was sadness and regret in his voice as he told me the young man was going to go ahead with his non-football life pursuits.

If you’re a young man or his parent reading this, make sure you tell your agent not to negotiate over a thousand dollars, or even a couple hundred dollars. If you’re an agent, make sure you don’t blow your client’s chances because you want to call a team’s bluff. If you’re an aspiring football professional, realize how tenuous a place on an NFL roster is.

Today, I was talking to an agent who’s had struggles satisfying a high-maintenance client during travels among teams. It reminded me of my own experience working with a high-maintenance client several years ago.

I had a friend in realty who was working with a Texans player living in Atlanta. She had set everything up so the player could come into town, hit several locations over two days, then fly back with minimal hassle. Of course, things rarely go as planned when you’re working with athletes used to having all their travel taken care of for them by their college and NFL teams.

My friend had worked hard to verify that they’d fly in early and we’d pick the young man up from the airport, then whisk him to several houses over two days, and put him back on a plane the following evening. Things got interesting when we got word from his financial planner who was with us in Houston that the player had missed his flight. That wasn’t entirely surprising. However, it was surprising when we showed up to pick him up and, though he insisted that he was in the pickup area, he was nowhere to be found. Oh, by the way, he wasn’t alone; turns out that, at his insistence, his financial planner had bought his ‘advisor,’ a street runner, a ticket as well.

So his realtor and I were at the airport planning to pick up one player, but it turns out, we were at the wrong airport (there are two in Houston) and needing to make room for two. OK. We’d roll with the punches. But it would take about 45 minutes to get to the other airport, which would mean the first half of the day was wiped out and the various house visits she’d planned would have to be completely altered.

The next 24 hours were like a comedy act. The next day, the realtor and I arrived to find his party had grown to a full processional, and his posse traveled in a convoy of vehicles behind us as we visited house after house. My friend and I went from realtor and host to caterer, entertainer, travel concierge and a handful of other duties associated with keeping several people happy.

It’s just a reminder that things rarely run exactly as planned, especially when you’re trying to keep a young man who’s rarely had to face the basic accountability that ‘regular people’ live with day to day. It’s something to prepare for as you consider a career in football.

You’ve heard me say in this space before that players hold all the cards in the agent-client relationship. That’s one reason why this is such a crazy business, and why things are so volatile for contract advisors. I came across a real-life illustration of this last week.

In December of 2013, a first-year-certified agent contacted me to tell me it looked like he had his first client, and he was in an all-star game, to boot. I shared his excitement and congratulated him, but as we went forward with the conversation, it became clear my friend had only received a commitment, and not a signed Standard Representation Agreement (SRA). That’s something else entirely. His would-be client was getting ready to go to an all-star game, a place that would be crawling with agents. Early in the week, agents would be able to access my list of players without representation and cherry-pick the best prospects. I explained all of this to him, and urged him to get a signed SRA as soon as possible.

Well, just as I had feared, disaster struck. The young man went to his game, got recruited by an experienced agent (a good guy who’s also an ITL client) and signed with him. Along the way, he gave his ‘first agent’ some cockamamie story about getting pressured by game organizers to give an agent’s name, and because he hadn’t technically signed an SRA with the first guy, he felt he had to pick representation at the game.

At any rate, I got behind on my agent termination lists this fall and got caught up last week. In the process of doing so, I noticed that the player had already switched from his first agent. That’s not altogether unusual; once a player makes an NFL team, he’s often taken under the wing of a veteran, and one of the first things the vet does is introduce him to his agent. However, it was quite unusual to see that, the following month, he changed again, to a third agent. That made three formal agent agreements (plus a ‘commitment’ to the first agent) in the space of 12 months. That’s pretty wild.

I can’t say this is usual — in fact, it’s quite unusual — but there’s certainly nothing barring him from changing representation every month of his NFL career. Of course, his first agent is still getting paid on the deal the young man signed when he entered the league, but as long as there are agents out there willing to ‘work’ for him without getting paid until his next deal, he can keep firing and signing, firing and signing.

That’s one of the unusual aspects of the NFL, but one you need to understand if you’re weighing becoming a contract advisor.