A Recovering Agent Looks at the NFL Draft

After actively representing NFL players as a certified contract advisor- more commonly known as an agent- for a decade, almost every question I am asked, even today, about my time as an agent centers around the NFL Draft, which starts on Thursday night.

There is something about this non-sporting, sports event, by that I mean the only athleticism required during the draft is negotiating one’s way across the stage in a never before worn suit without splitting very tightly tailored pants while going to hug the now fully vaccinated and anxious to resume hugging commissioner, Roger Goodell, that captures the public’s attention in compelling and curious ways. Let’s begin with the simple and unusual fact the draft is perhaps the only sports event televised live on three different networks- okay since two of the three are now ABC & ESPN and both have the same parent, Disney- maybe two and a half different networks, with the NFL also airing the draft on its own NFL Network.

Last year, in the depths of the pandemic, the remote broadcast of the draft was the first live sports programming aired in nearly two months. It served as a focal point for both our hopes of a return to normalcy and fears that this crisis was much worse and would come with a far greater toll than optimistic projections allowed. It was one of the most watched events of the year, if all three broadcasts’ viewers were added together, they peaked at more than 15 million on its first night, putting the draft between the 20th and 30th most watched telecast of 2020. Not bad for what was essentially a Zoom meeting.

The NFL Draft used to be conducted in a single day. By the time I worked in the sport, it was held over a weekend with the first three, and then later two rounds, on Saturday and the remaining rounds held on Sunday. It is now split across two nights in prime time and concludes on Saturday. The later rounds, where the picks come fast and furiously, often involving players not well-known to the viewing public, the broadcasts are chock full of features some of which will be absolute tear jerkers. Not a bad bit of emotionality for an event that has its essence in limiting the economic value of entering players- imagine the contract Trevor Lawrence might sign if he could freely negotiate with all 32 teams- instead of just the one holding the top pick.

But at its best, the NFL Draft is a celebration of the sport of pro football, its history, the hopes and sacrifices of young men and their families and all the people who helped them get to this place where their dreams of professional athletic success are at least recognized. It does, often, take a village. But if the draft recognizes one’s hopes, it is merely a step in the process of realizing them, as one in three of the players drafted this week will be cut within a year and about one in five won’t make it out of training camp.

Which brings me back to the questions people would ask. Most wanted to know…
“Do you go to the draft?”
“Is it as exciting as it seems?”
“Is it the best day?”

I’d love to be able to answer yes to any of these questions but the truth is the draft is can be the worst working days of the year for an agent. I suppose the one exception is the agent who has the first overall pick, but only if that agent has just one draft eligible client, because invariably something will happen to undo all the plans and contingencies that agent has made and shared in getting his or her clients to this point and the next 72 or so hours will be nothing less than a mad scramble.

The main job of a football agent in guiding a draft-eligible prospect to draft day is to help manage and minimize unknowns in the four month process that follows signing that player at the end of the college season and builds on a recruiting process that likely began as much as a year earlier. A client, and his family, will likely only make this journey once and the rewards and risks are extreme. Think about the pressure that mounts on the last player left in the green room as the draft goes on. An agent lays out a plan, a schedule, a series of scenarios and revised scenarios in helping manage their client and his anxieties and realistic hopes. Realistic being the key word, because talented young athletes all believe in their ability to be the exception to every rule.

But not everybody can be an exception and threading the needle in becoming a successful professional athlete is a narrow and difficult pass. So while we will cheer new millionaires crossing the stage in Cleveland, let’s take a deeper look into the inner workings and emotions surrounding the draft.

1. From the Agent’s Perspective- Draft Day is Awful. It drags far too long. The agent must often manage multiple clients and their families’ anxieties. The work on draft day is usually confined to a few bursts activity when a player is about to be picked and the rest of the now three days is a long, often painful wait until the end. To paraphrase the late Ohio State coach Woody Hayes who famously said about throwing the football, something his teams rarely did, “three things can happen, and two them are bad,” for an agent during the draft “three things can happen and all of them are bad.” Your client can be picked later than he thought he should have been- which is bad. Your client can picked later than his family thought he should have been- which is worse. Finally, your client can not be picked at all- which is worst.

2. First You Hope Your Client is Drafted, Then You Hope He Isn’t Drafted. As a counterpoint to that paradigm above, there does come a point in every draft when an agent goes from believing and hoping their client will be drafted to hoping he won’t be. This happens somewhere around the end of the fifth round, when draft picks stop being considered prospects and are more projects. Signing bonus values decrease enough that being drafted in rounds 6 or 7 is much less meaningful than finding a team where the player has a realistic chance to make the team or at worst the practice squad in free agency. Agents become experts on the depth charts of every team in draft season.

3. Agents Do Their Heaviest Lifting in the Last Hours of the Draft and Immediately Thereafter. Once teams have settled on whom they are drafting, the process of signing free agents, getting undrafted players into camps and onto rosters begins. This can be chaotic. The NFL teams won’t admit to this, but this plays out in a far less scientific way than outsiders might suspect or fans will want to believe. I’ve had at least one NFL team call me and tell me they were picking my client in the next round, then call again and say they couldn’t pick him but wanted him in free agency, and then call back and say we don’t have a place for his position at all. It was hard on him, I was in the fetal position by the end of it. I think most agents hit the bed late on the last day of the draft totally spent and still worried if they might still have a player unsigned or without a chance to go to camp and for these agents the draft and its stresses might go on days more.

4. Just Because Your Client was Drafted, It Doesn’t Mean He’ll Still be Your Client When He Signs His Contract. There are a number of agents, who whether unscrupulous or just thirsty, who will try to get your drafted client to leave you before they sign a contract- usually by June or July. The stress of the draft moves immediately to the stress of negotiating a contract and this is another pressure point in the agent player relationship where anxieties can run high. You’ve put a year’s work in and you absolutely want earn your fee but you need to be wary about “claim-jumping” agents. It is not an exaggeration that most agents are still underwater financially in the first year of representing a client figuring in training expenses, recruiting costs, and client service time, and really only begin to make a profit on their clients in the second year or perhaps more accurately on the player’s second contract. That is certainly true of players drafted after the third round.

5. The Draft, Once it Begins is a Frenzied Auction Market. The draft is an exciting event that takes on a life of its own and functions as a kind of frenzied pit trading scene, with more in common with Winthorp and Valentine undoing the Duke Brothers’ attempt to corner the frozen orange juice market in the 1980s movie, “Trading Places,” than a careful, analytical exercise in team building. You’ll see runs on certain positions, you’ll see teams reach for players with known baggage, and see good players fall based on rumour or mistaken perception or often because of a late medical grade. No one is really in control of the draft and that makes it a hostile time for agents, whose job it is to manage their clients’ known unknowns. I’d never trade my experience of being an agent but I am also not anxious to do it again.