For the last couple months, you could barely surf the Web without plowing into dozens of stories, tweets, blogs and the like telling you who’s going to go where in the draft. Naturally, you need to take all of these reports with a grain of salt, whether you’re an agent or just a fan. What makes predicting this stuff so hard, even with so many parties jockeying to get information out there? Here are a few reasons.

Best player available: Many teams (I think the Steelers are one) are welded to the idea that you draft the best player available at all times. These days, you can find dozens of reports on what teams need what, but for certain teams, you can throw that out. Unless you have first-hand access to their boards, you can’t know who they’ll draft. That’s all there is to it.

Top 30 visits don’t matter as much as you might think: The way things have developed, T-30 visits are kind of the catch-all for players a team thinks it might draft that didn’t go to the combine. With the new rules that have expanded the geographical area for local pro days, lots of teams can now have projected first-rounders in without having to burn a Top 30 visit. For example, the Bears worked out Notre Dame QB DeShone Kizer as part of their local pro day. Bottom line, I won’t call T-30 visits plentiful, but I get the sense that teams are starting to use them almost to eliminate a player (and create false interest) rather than to get that up-close look they have to have before drafting them.

Opinions change: I’ve spoken to scouts who had great interest in a player at an all-star game, but subsequently lost interest in the player for any number of reasons. More often than not, no one tells the player or his agent. It doesn’t matter how many times a kid is interviewed at the Shrine Game or the NFLPA Collegiate Bowl. If that interest doesn’t continue throughout February, March and into April, you can forget about that all-star heat.

Good ‘ol subterfuge: I think this happens a lot less than it used to. In the old days, I think team executives and scouts were more adversarial with the media than they are now. The Internet has changed how much information, good and bad, is out there, and  it just makes more sense for scouts and directors to have the local writers and TV personalities on their dance card, so they don’t outright lie as much. Still, there are plenty of times members of the media (especially those that are from out of town, or who are new) are led to believe the wrong thing, or are not told the whole story (or are just plain ol’ lied to). After all, the draft is a huge card game. If a team can throw others off its scent with a false story, that’s a big win this close to the draft.

If you’ve been reading my blog the past two weeks, you know I’ve already broken a lot of ground on this topic (here and here), but let me dig a little deeper into this issue.

The one question I get the most often from new agents is, how do I get to know and build trust with scouts? How do I get to a point where a scout will give me honest feedback on a player I’m recruiting, and perhaps even recommend sleepers? If I could answer this question, I’d probably not be handing it out on a blog.

It’s a Catch-22 situation that all goes back to the ‘quid pro quo’ nature of the business. As an agent, until you have clients that interest scouts, they don’t particularly want to know you. Once you do have clients of some worth, they will be more interested, but in direct proportion to the ability of your client. In other words, the big firms get the big players, and therefore have the deep and long-lasting relationship with NFL power brokers that ensure their continued success.

So how do you get around this? We’re trying different ways of doing that. Last year, we helped five agencies contract with former NFL scouts, and while we won’t have results for about a month-and-a-half, all the agents I’ve spoken to about the program were especially satisfied. In December, we referred interested agents to a former NFL scouting executive who gave them a professional, insightful report on any player they wanted to know about, and it was very reasonably priced. We’re working on some other options for agents as they recruit the 2018 class and I think they’ll be helpful, too. But the bottom line is that, unless you’re connected to a top prospect or you’re a former NFL scout yourself, you’re going to have to figure out the players that have the best chance on your own during your first go-round. We offer several ways to find those players, but there’s no avoiding a sense of risk. The key is managing that risk and not letting it choke you.

If you’re in that big group with no ties to scouts or executives, here’s the good news: often, scouts don’t know the answers, either. Even though they’re out on the road, checking their sources and watching film, they get things wrong all the time. I have several stories from personal experience running all-star games and trying to build a roster that scouts had signed off on that prove this. You might find players that you think can play, and you may be right.

Now, here’s the bad news: it doesn’t matter what you think. Obviously, their opinions are the ones that matter. There’s a good deal of groupthink when it comes to scouting and evaluation, and you might find a player that checks all the boxes, but for some reason just doesn’t ring the chimes with many (or any) teams. In this case, you will have to decide if you want to trust yourself, or if you want to find someone you might not like as much, but that NFL teams seem to prefer.

It’s a conundrum, a truly difficult situation. But if you’re going to pursue NFLPA certification, you need to be prepared for it.

Next week, we’ll talk about the draft and a new agent’s odds of hearing his client’s name called during the seven rounds of picks. See you then.

Every year, when I travel to all-star games, I get to talk to the people that make up the business. Scouts, agents, financial planners, trainers, players and their parents — they all have different perspectives on the game. That’s part of what makes football so fascinating.

Here are a few things I found of interest this week:

• I had a long talk with a scout who’s been in the game for more than 30 years. In the course of our talks on the business of player evaluation, he talked about how busy he is from August to November, and how, even when he’s home on the weekends, he’s mainly finishing up reports. He told me the secret to driving four hours after a full day of work (without falling asleep) is to adjust your seat so the backrest is at a right angle to the seat. It’s not so comfortable, but it keeps you alert. Makes sense to me.
• He also said his ‘laundromat’ during a two-week trip is usually the hotel sink. So let’s see: 12-hour days followed by four-hour drives; washing your undies in the sink; and staying so sleepy that you have to drive bolt upright in your seat. Still want to be a scout?
• One school that takes agent registration, prospect education, and the selection process very seriously threatened to bar one of its players from its pro day when he signed with a contract advisor who’s not registered with the school. I’m not sure if I’m in favor of that, but I do know that if all schools had that policy, and followed through with it, the recruiting process would be a lot more orderly.
• I’ve always been a guy who believes teams should cover every all-star game of every stripe, no matter how low on the food chain. They should also make sure they’re keeping tabs on all the other leagues, like the CFL, Arena League, etc. However, I had an interesting conversation with a scout this week who disagreed. He looks at a scouting department as a tablecloth that’s a little too small. You have to make sure the biggest part of the tablecloth  is covering the key parts of the ‘table’ (mainly the FBS teams and the better FCS teams), and accept that there may be a few crumbs left here and there. You have to play the odds, basically. Even when you’re an NFL team with 10-12 area scouts. There’s just too many players.
• We had one more (friendly) disagreement. He likes the idea of the Pacific Pro Football League, and thinks it will attract a number of talented players that have no interest in attending school and who are willing to spend their three post-high school, pre-NFL eligibility years making $50,000 per year. My feeling is that most players worth considering for such a league will still see colleges as their best path to NFL riches, even if it means they’re essentially indentured servants for three years.

Those are the highlights from Week 1. More next week.

Monday evening, I tweeted something from a conversation I had with a new agent that afternoon. It dealt with two obvious (and easily controvertible) lies a player told to make himself look like a far greater prospect than he is. I debated over whether I should even waste a tweet on it, especially late at night. Finally, I pulled the trigger.

In the space of about 45 minutes, that tweet had generated 14 likes and 2 retweets. This told me two things: my followers are entirely too busy on Twitter late at night, and people in the business are disgusted with the false info, entitlement, smug attitudes and misplaced confidence displayed by too many draft hopefuls.

In the course of reviewing some of the responses, I tripped over a recent tweet by a person who’s pretty revered in the sports and entertainment law industry. Basically, the substance of his tweet was how draft prospects should have a layered, segmented structure of financial, tax and accounting advisors to handle their NFL careers. There was no ‘unless you’re just hoping to one day make the 90’ qualification. Just a summary statement about sports ethics and how things ought to be.

If you ask me, this is one of the reasons these young men have such a disastrously outsized view of their NFL prospects and the life they’ll lead.

There’s a cottage industry out there of people who love to pontificate about the business, but have no real-world experience with it. Most of the time, these are the people sitting in ivory towers and dismissing agents as fire-breathing dragons while touting players as snow-white angels. As with most things in life, these one-dimensional characterizations are useless, but because there is such a dearth of legitimate insight into the football business, they fill a void. It’s sad, really. Few can challenge them, so they go about saying whatever until people start buying it.

If you’re a young man who’ll (a) be drafted in the top 100 next April, you’re (b) going to be described often as a first-rounder throughout the spring. And if you’re not so mentioned, you can forget the idea that you need to build a team of professionals to handle your every business move going forward. Keep in mind that for every 100 players that are wanted by all 32 teams, there are 900 more who need to forget about money and focus on one thing only: making a damn 53.

To make that 53, find an agent who believes in you, will work hard for you, and will get you into an all-star game attended by scouts. Also, you don’t have to train at a gym with all the bells and whistles and jerseys on the wall, but you better go somewhere and bust your hump for 60 days. I mean, last-half-hour-of-Rocky style work, with someone who knows what they’re doing. And if that’s your school, who cares? Work.

I’ve had it up to here with people who say they know, but don’t know. They make the jobs a lot harder for people in the business — my friends, my clients, and the people I have real respect for. But more importantly, they encourage many young men to create an alternate universe on a foundation of impossible expectations. And that’s not a bit fair to anyone in the game.