A Q&A on the state of NIL: College agents open up about negotiations, transfer decisions, more

A Q&A on the state of NIL: College agents open up about negotiations, transfer decisions, more originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

The modern era of college football recruiting is — in some ways — the wild west. Thanks to NIL, revenue sharing and players being able to enter the transfer portal, it has become one of the most chaotic parts of the sport.

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One of the people tasked with helping players navigate it all are name, image and likeness agents. In addition to a wide variety of other responsibility, agents help players broker NIL deals, choose which school is best for them and help them maximize their market value.

The Sporting News spoke with a couple of NIL agents in Charles Cox of Red Envelope Sports and Peter Webb of QB Reps to learn more about how the industry works and about what being an NIL agent means.

Red Envelope represents several NFL, college and high school athletes, including New Orleans Saints receiver Devaughn Vele and Washington State quarterback Caden Pinnick. QB Reps, which only signs quarterbacks, features clients in USC’s Jayden Maiava, Wake Forest’s Gio Lopez, Vanderbilt’s Jared Curtis and Tennessee’s George MacIntyre as well as Los Angeles Rams rookie Ty Simpson and Denver’s Bo Nix in the NFL.

Below, both Cox and Webb discuss a number of topics, from who they negotiate with at the schools to how transfer decisions are made.

MORE: Here are college football’s 30 highest paid players

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TSN: How long have you been in the business and how did you get involved in the business?

Charles Cox: “A longtime friend Don Yee, he’s represented Tom Brady since Tom came out of Michigan, still represents Tom. He represents three NFL head coaches [Jim Harbaugh, Sean Payton and Mike McCarthy]. Don had heard I had sold my company and he had rebranded his NFL agency to Red Envelope Sports about five years ago, and wanted someone to take it over.

Long story short, [I] ended up buying the agency from him. I took over the NFL agency. We started the NIL division about two years ago. [We] just tried to approach it in the same way we approached our NFL side of the business in a boutique-like way, offering families senior agent experience.”

Peter Webb: “I’ve been a sports agent for 22 years. I’ve never done anything else in my career since graduating law school, and worked with professional athletes in a lot of different sports. I always recruited at the college level and represented them as professional athletes. Five years ago, instead of recruiting them when they’re sophomores or juniors in college, we started recruiting when they were in high school. So it’s not like my job changed, to be honest. We just started recruiting them earlier.”

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TSN: What does the process of finding a player a fit and matching that with compensation work?

Webb: “When a kid is trying to pick a school, we’re talking to Michigan, we’re talking to Notre Dame, we’re talking to Florida. We’re helping them understand what that all looks like. Not just necessarily their financial package, because we really try to stay away from that.

We’re concentrating on the school, the location, their community, their track record, their coaching staff, the quarterbacks that have come through that, their process, like their recruiting class, the development, like we’re looking at a lot, a lot of different things. The financial package for us, we try to make that come in after they’ve already selected the school they’re going to.”

Cox: “We try to focus on generating the best football outcome for the player, and if you do that, the money is highly correlated with that if you go find the best spot. In this day and age, you try to focus on head coach security, right? Because you don’t want to put a young man into a program where he could have to be there for six or 12 months and have to leave immediately. Which is hard, right? Because the coaches leave just as much as the players.”

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Webb: “Every year when we are dealing with the top programs in the country, I already can tell a kid ‘hey, if your final five are LSU, Bama, Tennessee, Georgia, and Miami, I already have a really good idea what it’s going to look like for all these schools, they’re all going to be competitive. So just go pick the best school for you, and then I’ll make it work.'”

Cox: “Obviously, the player has to build a great relationship with the position coach because that’s who they’re going to spend the vast majority of their time with, right? So all those things when you huddle up with a family and and try to figure out.”

MORE: How Michigan’s Bryce Underwood is failing to live up to massive NIL deal

TSN: Who are you typically communicating with at schools? Is it general managers, coaches or both?

Cox: “When you’re dealing with NIL, FBS, Power-Four schools, the Group of Six schools, virtually everyone has a general manager. And if it’s not a general manager on paper, it’s kind of a de facto GM.”

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Webb: “I’m talking to the head coaches. I’m talking to offensive coordinators, and I’m talking to the quarterback coaches as well as their GM and recruiting coordinator, director of player personnel.”

Cox: “I never call coaches, that isn’t my thing. I think they’re a little bit out of the loop on the money. That’s got to be frustrating for them, that they’re kind of taken out of the money piece. I don’t know if they don’t like dealing with agents or they’re kind of just annoyed by the dynamic of them being left out of such an important piece of the puzzle.”

TSN: December is a chaotic time, as the Early Signing Period coincides with the coaching carousel and the College Football Playoff. What is it like navigating that?

Cox: “I’ve got a very transactional background, so it’s not crazy to me. It’s a blast. Solving problems with a gun to your head, that’s fun to me. It’s going to be crazy for the coaches and the staff because they aren’t classically trained in this. These guys are classically trained in other things.

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They have God-given abilities to communicate and train these kids and inspire them on the field that they’re not good at this stuff, right? That doesn’t make them bad coaches or bad professionals, they’re being asked to do things they have no track record in. This is human resources.”

Webb: “A lot goes into the portal because sometimes kids don’t want to transfer, but they get recruited from other schools and other coaches. ‘hey, come here, making promises—come here, you’ll play right away. We can get you on the field. Using that angle of playing time can be very attractive. That’s that’s one. The second part is sometimes you have boosters and donors and collectives, calling and offering extremely, you know, lucrative financial package to come somewhere else and play.”

Cox: “How the portal is structured with now 10 days in the first week of January, much of [that] crosses over with some of the FBS schools starting school. It’s ridiculous that the concept of GMS and agents speaking is somehow looked down upon by the industry. It’d be ridiculous to ask these young men to go find a new place, negotiate their deal, and fly around on official visits in 10 days, yeah, and then enroll in a new school without professional help.”

MORE: Who are college football’s highest paid head coaches?

TSN: What are conversations like for players wanting to enter the transfer portal or stay put?

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Cox: “We play that role of insurance agent. That if things go bad at the last minute, when a school tells you, ‘Hey, I think you should find a new place to play—which they do, by the way—right at the end of the semester, or something changes at the last minute in November, before signing day. We can go create opportunities out of thin air because we’re always in the mix with all these FBS schools.”

Webb: “Our job is really to say ‘look, if you take the money out of it, what is the best scenario for you to develop and get on the field?’ Because if your dream is to play in the NFL, then what’s the best way to do that? Sometimes it’s not just getting up and leaving and transferring to a new school right away for playing time.”

Cox: “We’re really the most important to the client when things don’t go their way. When things go their way, then we’re able to, you know, generate, you know, leverage for them and and just put a little bit of fear into the school that ‘this young man has options.’ He’s not stuck with you.”

Webb: “We’re very big on, just because you’re not playing your first year doesn’t mean you hit the portal and chase something and start over again. I think that separates us too, is trying to make sure that our kids understand that you need to be developed. You need to give yourself a chance to learn the system, to learn the offense, to build your relationships with coaches. And it’s hard if you are changing every year.”