Tag Archives: NFL

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.

 

A bit about our service

16 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by in Coaches

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I’ve alluded to the fact that I’m speaking at a clinic in San Angelo this week. I wanted to expand a bit on the subject of my talk and why I’ll be there.

I’m one of six partners in Champions Search Firm. We’ve got some cool videos and we’ve even been referenced (indirectly) on si.com once, but we prefer to stay in the background (though that’s becoming harder and harder to do). Our mission is simple. We work with schools that have vacancies on their athletic staffs, though at this point I’ll admit the only positions we’ve helped fill are head coach and/or athletic director, though we have the bandwidth to help in much more than that. Soon, our website will provide a way for school districts to look for coaches, sorting them by their qualifications, experience level, or other criterion.

I know that coaching high school football may not seem glamorous or lucrative, and to some degree that’s true. However, salaries aren’t that bad after a few years, and the facilities and stadiums are very nice: two high school facilities (Galena Park ISD Stadium outside Houston and Eagles Stadium in Allen, outside Dallas) have hosted college football all-star games since 2007. Meanwhile, high school coaches here often use their careers as platforms into college and pro football. Fun fact: as recently as 1997, four of the hottest coaches in college football — Baylor head coach Art Briles, Texas Tech head coach Kliff Kingsbury, Arizona State head coach Todd Graham and Clemson offensive coordinator Chad Morris — were coaching or playing Texas high school football. That same year, Jets Director of College Scouting Jeff Bauer was coaching high school football in the Houston area.

We’ve been fortunate to have helped schools hire more than 30 coaches in the last eight years, plus one college coach. Typically, we’re engaged by the school and we help them through the hiring process, conducting interviews and doing background checks, and then recommend a predetermined number of finalists. The school then picks the candidate it feels is the best fit.

We’ll have more on our firm and keep you posted on the clinic here later this week, so stay tuned.

Finding my ‘champion’

13 Friday Jun 2014

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I didn’t really start this week with the idea of talking about finding mentors (and in one case, going in the exact opposite direction), but since we’re here, I thought I’d close the week talking about my mentor in the game of football, John Paul Young.

I met John Paul in the summer of 2002. At the time, I was a low-level writer/editor at the Houston Chronicle, and I had heard of a football clinic that took place every June in San Angelo, Texas, called Angelo Football Clinic. It was one of the best-kept secrets in football, even in Texas. San Angelo, like most of West Texas, is a pretty remote place, but coaches came from all around (some as far north as Minnesota) to come hear the lineup of coaches who would come in and speak for 90 minutes about the nuances of the game, then retreat to a classroom afterwards to answer questions for hours afterwards. Name a notable head coach in college or pro football over the last 30 years, from Bill Walsh to Nick Saban, and he’s spoken at Angelo Clinic.

Anyway, I made my way to west Texas that year knowing I would launch ITL in a few short months, and I was looking to make contacts. As someone with a black-and-gold heart shaped like a fleur-de-lis, I felt John Paul, one of the clinic’s founders, would make a great one. He’d been Bum Phillips’ right-hand man at nearly every coaching stop, from the Luv Ya Blue days with the Oilers to the frustrating seasons with the Saints. Then, following Bum’s retirement, he’d coached with Bum’s son, Wade, in Denver, as well as Kansas City. He was a coaching veteran and a man I knew would have a thousand stories. There was one problem: he had no idea who Neil Stratton was and absolutely no reason to care.

After hanging around for three days with few connections, I’d arrived at the last day of the clinic. Poised to leave within hours, I happened upon John Paul in a small group of other coaches, laughing and telling stories. I could tell he was busy, but I knew it was now-or-never time, so I approached him, interrupting him mid-conversation, and introduced myself as a guy from the Houston Chronicle who was in town seeking stories about the clinic.

Instead of brushing me off with a “not now, son,” he greeted me warmly. and we exchanged a few friendly words as we traded business cards. Sensitive to taking too much of his time, I awkwardly thanked him and excused myself, then got back on the road. I’d been traveling about three hours when my phone rang. To my shock, it was John Paul. “You never gave me chance to tell you more about the clinic,” he said, and we launched into a lengthy conversation about the history of the clinic, that year’s speaker lineup, his time with the Saints and Oilers, and a number of other topics. From there, we forged a friendship that is entering its second decade, and helped launch Inside the League as well as a number of other projects.

One of them is Champions Search Firm, the company we work with in helping high schools across Texas fill their athletic vacancies, especially at the head coach/AD position. As two of the firm’s six partners, we help good coaches find good situations leading young men on the football field and in life. In my capacity as a Champions partner, I’ll be among the speakers at Angelo Clinic next week alongside Lane Kiffin, Wade Phillips and other recognizable football names. It’ll be a true career highlight for me, but there’s really only reason it’s happening, and it’s because John Paul was willing to help a young man who was eager, respectful and most of all, grateful for his help.

But this story is more than just a sweet reminiscence. If you’re hoping to fight your way to the top of the football world, I encourage you to do what I did. Take a chance and go to out-of-the-way places. Be willing to put yourself in front of influential people, even if you don’t have a clear plan on what to say when you get there. In short, go for it and be aggressive about creating opportunities, but cultivate the relationships around you once you create them.

Perspectives on personnel jobs

09 Monday Jun 2014

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I just texted a friend of mine. He’s got about four decades of scouting under his belt, but despite having as much or more experience than virtually any personnel man out there, he’s been out of the NFL for about five years now. He’s hoping (and I’m hoping, because he’s been a great friend) to get the news this week that he’s been hired on with a new team.

Meanwhile, I have still another friend who’s got about the same level of experience, and who’s looking around. His prospects are few, and he’s getting concerned. What’s more, he knows that if something doesn’t happen in the next 2-3 weeks, it’s probably not going to happen, and he’s looking at selling insurance. I try to allay his fears, but knowing how hard it is to get a job, I don’t know what to say.

So what does this have to do with educating young people about working in the NFL? Sometimes it’s better to start at the end of the story to illustrate a point. Today let’s talk about scouting, and what you need to know if you’re hoping to be an NFL GM some day.

There is no specific pipeline into NFL scouting, despite programs that promise to enhance your chances. Typically, teams start looking for interns in the spring and summer, hoping to begin filling these unpaid positions by mid-summer. Who handles the process? It varies. I know a few years ago the 49ers’ GM was handling entreaties himself. Other teams have applicants go through their Directors of College Scouting, while others have everything sent directly to Human Resources. That’s one of the things that make applying to teams tricky; there’s a trial-and-error element just to find out where to send your resume.

Interns may start anywhere. There are probably a dozen NFL scouts who started out as training camp aides, telling fans to get behind the velvet rope or dragging water jugs around. Arizona’s John Mancini started out in tickets, then merchandise, before finally getting his chance in personnel. One way or another, you can expect to put in a year or two before you really get a chance to go out on the road and put a watch on someone.

The profile of a young person being hired into scouting departments today is probably an ex-college football player who’s 23-25 years old. Chances are he already lives in or has a background in the city of the team that hired him (we’ll discuss geography and its importance later). Typically, he was picked from 200-300 applicants.

Now for the discouraging part. He’s also almost surely got a connection to someone on the team. Not always, but very often. I remember a few years ago calling a scouting friend who’s actually now a GM. I wanted to learn more about the hiring process for young scouts, so I asked him, how does a kid get hired as a scouting assistant? He answered by asking, ‘Why, you got someone?’ That was the tone as I continued to ask other friends in the business. Most of the time, if you’re trying to get into the business, you need a ‘champion.’ That’s something else we’ll develop more later.

There’s one more aspect of the business to discuss that’s become a bit of a trend. The Patriots’ success over the past decade-plus has had a major impact on the way teams do things, and that includes scouting. Historically, teams hired seasoned ex-coaches as scouts, expecting them to not only gather 40 times and background info from their contacts but also to develop opinions about players. From there, they’d make recommendations. The Patriots, however, have always centralized their decision-making at the upper-management level in tandem with head coach Bill Belichick. They only want their scouts to gather facts, finite things with little wiggle room like heights, weights, whether a player has been suspended, how many kids he has, etc.

The Patriots count on their experts to have opinions. Other teams have seen this, and in many cases have adopted this philosophy. This is good news if you’re fresh out of college and hoping to become a scout. However, it’s driven down scouting salaries, devalued experience, and lowered expectations for people in personnel. It’s really ramped up turnover in scouting departments; we tracked more than 100 changes in scouting departments last year and almost 150 in 2012. It’s also made it way harder for scouts who came up before the Patriots’ Way to find a new job. That’s why I’m really hoping my friend lands back in the NFL today, and my other friend can beat the odds before he has to launch a late career in insurance.

Options

06 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by in Getting started

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When I tell people what I do, they usually think I’m one of two things. Either an agent or a scout. Of course, I’m neither, though even most of the people close to me have trouble explaining just what it is I do. But the point is, most laymen think of all football-related off-field jobs as fitting into one of these two categories.

I guess that’s fair enough. Ever since the movie ‘Jerry Maguire’ came out in 1996, the job of football agent has become almost mythical. Every year, people register to take the agent exam in January, then travel to Washington, D.C., at the end of July to take it, and all the while know very little about the business except that they want to be part of it. I’ve talked to people who are bartenders; who don’t even live in the United States; and who want to use the business as a means to managing pro wrestlers. The expenses of being an agent, the difficulty of contacting young athletes, the hoops that schools make you jump through to sign these young men are all alien to them. Still, they have a singular focus, one that perhaps you share. It’s hard to question their passion, of course, but I wonder if they’ve done the proper research.

Then there’s scouting. Most people think of NFL scouting as fantasy football on the atomic level. Many football enthusiasts see scouts as part king-maker, part guru. These men are paid to watch and talk about football, and hold the deepest, darkest secrets of the young men who fascinate the American public on Saturdays and Sundays in the fall. I used to subscribe to this belief, too, before I began to understand all the nuances of the game, and where scouts fit into the puzzle. We’ll go into depth on both the agent and scouting fields as we go forward.

However, there are other paths into the game that are worth pursuing. The business of combine preparation has seen major growth in the last decade, and there are new facilities diving into combine prep almost every day. Very often these jobs can be parlayed into positions with major schools. High school coaching may not have the glamor of negotiating contracts or making picks on draft day, but it’s not an uncommon first step for those interested in scouting. What’s more, good coaches in Texas at the Class 5A and 6A level can make $100,000/year. If you’re more of an entrepreneurial sort, you can launch your own website. That’s one more possible path to NFL scouting (or, if you’re open to working in other leagues, even CFL scouting for Russ Lande and John Murphy). The key is to have a strategy, work a plan, and set goals.

Speaking of goals, our goal in launching this blog is to help you find your path to the football profession. We’ll start by going into greater depth on the ‘glamor’ fields of football, the agent business and the job of being a scout for an NFL team. We’ll talk about the sacrifices that must be made and the odds you’ll face, as well as the rewards at the end of the rainbow for those who succeed. We’ll also develop the other professions that have gained traction as cottage industries, talking to people who’ve had success with it. We’ve been blessed to build relationships with people of all stripes who’ve ‘made it’ in football, and we’re eager to pass along what we’ve learned, as well as what they’ve learned.

We’re happy you’ve joined us, and we hope you’ll tell a friend who’s also interested in succeeding in football about us. Happy weekend. See you Monday.

 

 

Kicking off

05 Thursday Jun 2014

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Well, where should I begin? I guess I’ll just dive right in.

If you’re here, you probably follow me on Twitter, or have met me at an all-star game, or have heard I’m some guy that talks about how to get a job in football. You may be an aspiring NFL agent or scout. You may have received one of our newsletters series specifically for NFL financial advisors, NFL contract advisors, parents of prospective NFL players or combine prep trainers. You might also know me from my work with Champions Search Firm, which helps schools fill vacancies on their athletic staffs, especially in Texas. If you’re any of these people, welcome.

If you’re not any of them but you’ve found this page, welcome just the same. As you may or may not know, Inside the League, my regular site, is widely read by people in the business of football, college and pro. Here’s a brief bio. We’ve been blessed to work with the contract advisors for about two-thirds of players in the NFL plus most of the major financial firms and top combine prep facilities. We don’t do mock drafts, or player rankings, or rants, or stats. Just straight talk and info for people in the business. However, until now, I didn’t really have a platform for speaking to those who don’t need the directed, somewhat nuanced information we provide at ITL. Many folks, young and old, are serious about being a sports management professional but don’t quite know where to get started. Well, we want to help.

We’ve started to offer hands-on aid to people who are trying to get a leg up on the industry, and we’ll share what we’ve learned here. We’ll also share words of wisdom and experience from people who are already living their football dreams. That might take the form of interviews, or YouTube videos, or whatever. The main thing is, we are excited about people who are excited about making football their profession, and we want to help.

Rather than droning on and on, I’ll close for now. But I’ll be back. If you have any ideas on topics, or want to talk further about the industry, or anything else, you can reach me here.

Thanks for joining me on this ride, wherever it takes us. It’s gonna be fun. I can hardly wait for tomorrow.