Tag Archives: NFL

Breaking into the league

28 Thursday Aug 2014

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Today, I thought we’d talk about practical steps for getting into the league from this week’s guest contributor, former Jets West Coast scout Joe Bommarito. When I asked him how someone could increase his chances of becoming an NFL scout, his thoughts echoed those I’ve heard before.

“If I met a young person who wanted to be a scout I would advise them to contact their local NFL team and volunteer to work in their personnel department,” he said. “Also, contact local colleges and volunteer to work in their scouting department. Then make friends with everyone involved in the organization, because you never know who is going to advance into a position where they can make hiring decisions.”

As we’ve discussed already this week, Joe made friends with Herman Edwards during their time around Monterey Peninsula College, and it led directly to more than a decade as a scout.

He also shed light on how to ‘make friends’ with scouts, or anyone else in the league. Though he was speaking specifically about how agents could build bridges to scouts, his advice would work for nearly anyone.

“Go to workouts, introduce (yourself) to scouts, hand out business cards, get their phone (numbers) and email contact information,” he said. “Then . . . follow up with a note regarding “pleased to meet you,” etc. Ask their opinions on prospective players, etc. (It’s) also important to touch base with scouts at (the) Senior Bowl (and) Combine (and) work on building relationships.”

Obviously, going to all-star games or flying to Indianapolis to hang around the combine might be tough for students or young professionals looking to break into player evaluation, but no matter where you live, there’s probably one time each March that scouts — at least a handful — will come to your state. During pro days in the spring (most are in March, but some are in early April), scouts are evaluating schools at every state in the country. Finding out when a school’s pro day is (NFL.com tracks this and it’s usually readily available) and going there that day will get you around scouts. Making contact with them and expressing an interest in the business might be a difference-maker if player evaluation is your interest.

I’d make one more point. If you have a scout’s mailing address, write a handwritten note of thanks for a scout’s time. This would work if you’re an agent trying to make relationships or an aspiring scout looking to make contacts. I know it seems old-fashioned, but a lot of the scouts who have seniority and ‘sway’ within a department are pretty old-fashioned themselves. I’ve heard others talk of the value of a note. In other words, if you’ve got some old stationery around somewhere, it may come in handy.

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.

The SIF Interview: Don Mewhort (Pt. 1)

10 Thursday Jul 2014

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Though we usually reserve Fridays for our interview series, we wanted to get a head start on things this week for our conversation with Don Mewhort. Like Marion Graves, whom we interviewed last week, Don and his wife, Gail, received our newsletter aimed at parents of draft-eligible seniors. It helped him as he led the vetting process for his son, Jack, who was selected 2/59 by the Colts in May after a sterling career on the offensive line at Ohio State.

Going into his senior season, what was your perception of what round Jack would be drafted, and where did you get that information from?

“We thought he’d be drafted, but we didn’t have any idea where, maybe in the first five rounds, and where we got that information, we got it from various websites and media outlets. Ohio State didn’t provide any resources for that. Ohio State stayed out of it pretty much. That being said, I didn’t think it was appropriate to work through Ohio State on that. Given the history with agents and universities, I didn’t think it was appropriate to rely on them for that. Coach Meyer and I have a great relationship and I think he would have helped me but I didn’t think it was appropriate.

“Ohio State’s coaches never offered advice on agent selection. However, (former Ohio State assistant coach) Mike Vrabel talked to parents on his experience before Jack’s junior year, in the summer between his sophomore and junior year, and that was an Ohio State-sponsored thing with the parents group.”

What resource or person did you use in the agent vetting process? The school? A friend who played in the NFL? A former OSU teammate? Parents of a former teammate?

“We had a friend who was in the business who was formerly in player representation that I spoke to. He has been out of the business for a long time. We talked to him. We also talked to (ITL’s Neil Stratton) briefly, and I think that was the extent of it.”

How much anxiety or apprehension did you have about the agent selection process going into Jack’s senior year? Was the process intimidating?

“I don’t’ think (Gail and I) felt any anxiety about the process. We only felt anxiety about the phone calls and texts that Jack was receiving.”

When did those start?

“(Mid-July), I guess. The way we handled it, when I got calls, or we got calls at home, we asked (Jack) to refer all the calls to me, and there was a process that we were going to go through, and we asked that they respect Jack’s privacy and commitment to his senior season. We didn’t really want him to be distracted. It can be overwhelming for the (players). It’s flattering, and kind of like going through the recruiting process again, but I’m not sure it’s in the best interest of the kids to be getting recruiting calls from agents during their season.”

How did you go about deciding how you would handle the selection process?

“It’s something we came up with, my wife and I and my father who’s an attorney; he’s semi-retired and had some time to spend on it. We tried to gather as much info as we could from the various agents, and (my father) and I met with a number of people and tried to narrow the list as much as we could. We probably actually met with 10, and then narrowed the list to five, and then picked a day in Columbus, and his mother and I met with the final group, between the regular season and the bowl game. We wanted to have everybody on the same day, so we had the same context for everybody. We met with each of them for about an hour, hour and a half, and then at that point it was really Jack’s decision.”

Did any agents offer illegal inducements to sign Jack? How did agents pitch Jack and the Mewhort family in an attempt to sway them to their side? What’s Don’s advice to other parents? It will all be in Friday’s edition. See you then.

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.

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.

More on the roots of NFL scouts

27 Friday Jun 2014

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Today we thought we’d wrap up the week with a few more notes on NFL scouts, and where they come from.

  • One of my AFL friends, Scott Bailey with the Los Angeles Kiss, let me know that Colts GM Ryan Grigson was Director of Player Personnel for the AFL’s Buffalo Destroyers just 15 years ago (1999). So, that’s one more recent connection between arena football and high-level people in the game.
  • Though the UFL never turned out to be the pipeline to the pros its founders hoped it would be, the league did help a few budding personnel types hone their skills. Though the Redskins’ Bret Munsey is the only NFL scout who was also a scout for the UFL, Eagles area scout Trey Brown (UCLA) played in the UFL, while Jets scout Rick Courtright coached in the UFL and Rams scout Brian Shields was a personnel intern in the league.
  • One might expect that people in the scouting world got their jobs by playing or coaching at powerhouse college programs that send players to the NFL by the bucketful. Not true. For example, as of last fall, there were three NFL area scouts from Florida State, but also three from Heidelberg and North Carolina A&T; four from DePauw, UMass and Richmond; and even five from that powerhouse of powerhouses, Princeton!
  • If Miami (Ohio) is the ‘cradle of coaches,’ the University of Tennessee is the Cradle of Scouts. As of last fall, there were eight former Vols at the area or regional scout level in the NFL, including Jeremy Breit (Giants), Reggie Cobb (49ers), C.J. Leak (Bills), Mickey Marvin (Raiders), Raleigh McKenzie (Raiders), Kevin Simon (Cowboys), Jon Salge (Titans) and Mike Yowarsky (Titans). That doesn’t even count Raiders GM Reggie McKenzie or Raiders Director of Player Personnel Joey Clinkscales, also UT grads.
  • Being an area scout — the person who goes on the road 11 months out of the year and often lives out of hotels while driving thousands of miles annually — is, no surprise, a young man’s game. Out of 286 scouts from the Director of College Scouting level down to area scout, we found only one (Oakland’s Mickey Marvin) who’s been on the road, in his current position, since 1977. The only other man with similar tenure was former Vikings Director of College Scouting Scott Studwell, who retired this year.
  • Expanding on that, there are six road scouts who started in the 80s; 29 who’ve been on the road since the 90s; 151 who started between 2000-2009; and 98 who got their start in 2010 or later.
  • Youth served again: 198 of the 286 have been on the job for 10 years or less, indicating that (a) there’s a high burnout factor and (b) area scouts are often seen as disposable, especially when a team is looking to tighten its belt.

 

Volunteers

26 Thursday Jun 2014

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I wanted to take a minute today to talk about how important it is to volunteer in your quest for a career in football.

If you live in an NFL city, and you want to work in pro football, find a way to volunteer with your local team. If you have an FBS (or FCS, or good D2 or even D3) team in your city or town, go volunteer. Granted, volunteering for NFL teams may be a little harder, but usually if you poke around on a team’s website long enough you’ll find someone that will take you. As for colleges, summer camps have become a really big revenue stream for most coaching staffs, and if you’re willing to work for no pay, they can usually find something for you to do.

I’m always struck by how many people in awesome football jobs started off as volunteers, hung around, paid attention, showed their intelligence, and got hired. Dru Grigson started off as a volunteer scout with the Eagles in 2005, and 10 years later, he’s the Director of College Scouting for the Cardinals. Tom Ciskowski volunteered as a defensive coach with Butch Davis at Miami (Fla.) in 1985; in 2008, he was named Director of College and Pro Scouting for the Cowboys. Steven Price volunteered with the Panthers at the age of 16 and now he’s a scout with the Vikings.

Granted, some of them had an angle and had some assurances that if they put in work they’d get the first opening, but not all of them; Price started interning with the Panthers because his mother was a secretary there.

Can’t get an NFL team to even let you work for free? Have you tried the AFL route? Two Titans scouts, Jon Salge (Nashville Kats) and Brandon Taylor (Columbus Destroyers), were with AFL teams before landing a job in Tennessee. Bears scout Zach Truty was Director of Player Personnel with the Arizona Rattlers before coming to Chicago. Eagles scout Bret Munsey was Director of Player Personnel for the Orlando Predators before he latched on in Philly. Steelers area scout Mark Gorscak was the GM of Pittsburgh’s arena team in 1987 before moving over to the city’s NFL team.

I don’t know how many of these people got AFL positions by emailing resumes, knocking on doors or waiting in the parking lot to assail a top team executive. What’s more, there are lots of indoor teams of dubious nature that are not AFL teams, per se; they’re just teams trying to copy their model. Sometimes, these teams can be a little shaky and offer limited ability to provide reliable contacts.

Still, there are many routes into the game. We’ll discuss this at greater length tomorrow.

 

 

War Story Wednesday: NFL scouts edition

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

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Since it’s WSW, we thought we’d pass along a few stories about NFL scouts that we thought illustrated the inexact nature of the business.

I think there’s a perception that the evaluation process is very scientific, dry and unerring. Nothing could be further from the truth. No matter how many scouts a team has on staff, and no matter how long they’ve been evaluating personnel, there’s a human element to it, and people make mistakes. They always will.

One example of this is the Bears, who in 1991 drafted running back Darren Lewis out of Texas A&M in the sixth round (161 overall), though they didn’t mean to. In ’91, the combine was still in its early stages, but the league did perform drug tests on those they invited. Lewis failed his drug test, causing many teams to remove him from their boards. That includes the Bears. So how did they wind up drafting him? It turns out there were two running backs named Lewis in the 1991 NFL draft: Greg Lewis out of Washington in addition to the Aggies’ Lewis. According to reports, the Bears took the wrong Lewis off their board, then accidentally took the rusher struggling with off-field issues. Perhaps not surprisingly, the he lasted less than three seasons, getting cut by the Bears in 1993. As of last year, he was in jail after a series of petty crimes.

There are also a series of disagreements between scouts on teams that lead to players falling through the cracks. Longtime NFL scout Bill Groman illustrated this by telling this story at our first-ever seminar for parents of draft-eligible players in 2010.

“Dominic Rhodes was at Midwestern State, I think was the name of the school. . . Back then I was a national cross-check scout (for the Falcons), and I was in the Dallas area, up in that area, covering another school, and I thought I’d run into the school. Another guy had gone and seen him and given him a free agent grade. He was about 5-foot-8 and a half, 5-9, a short guy, and about 205 pounds, but I saw him run real fast, and I like speed, you know, and athletic ability, and I saw he had some stats, and he could really (play).

“I went and looked at film and tape on him, and then I stayed over on Saturday and went to the game. Shoot, the game I was at, I think he was at 200-some yards rushing, and did all kinds of stuff, so I wrote him up to be like a third- or fourth-round pick and make somebody’s team. The other (scout), I know what he was looking at was the fact that this was a Division II school, he doesn’t play against the great big guys, but I think offensive linemen, defensive linemen, from those schools, yeah, they aren’t playing against the big guys, but when you’re a skilled athlete, a receiver, a defensive back, a running back, I don’t care who you’re playing with. If you can do it, you can do it. He just stood out so much, and what ended up happening was, I was at Atlanta at the time and Dan Reeves was our coach, and so what happened is, I wrote him up good, and this other guy had just given him a free-agent grade, and for some reason or other, our Director of Player Personnel at the time put him as a free agent, and we didn’t talk about them, so we didn’t talk about him in our meetings, so Dan didn’t know anything about him.

“Well, he gets drafted late by the Indianapolis Colts (Rhodes was actually signed as an undrafted free agent after the ’01 draft), and doesn’t play, like, the first 5-6 games, and then they come and play at Atlanta, and the starting running back (Edgerrin James) gets hurt. Dominic starts the game and gets like 170-some yards rushing (Rhodes ran for 177 yards on 29 carries with two TDs in a 41-27 Colts win), and I get a telephone call Monday from Dan, and he said something about, well, this guy runs so well, and you know, I said just go look at my grade, which he did.”

For more stories from Bill, check out our video archive at Inside the League.

For another story discussing how players fall through the cracks, check out this interview I did with former Cowboys scout Jim Hess. In this YouTube clip (the interview starts at :34), Jim discusses how he, along with then-Cowboys quarterbacks coach Sean Payton, came to like an Eastern Illinois passer named Tony Romo. From obscurity, Hess and Payton came to champion Romo, so much so that he turned down a more lucrative UFA offer from Denver to sign with the Cowboys after the ’03 draft.