Site News

A Users Guide to OTC

Posted on by Jason Fitzgerald

With the playoffs down to the final four and many new users coming to OTC I thought this would be a good time to just give a quick overview of the website and how to navigate and use some of the tools on here for both new and current users of OTC.

For those who have never been here before OTC is (in my humble opinion) the number 1 salary cap resource on the internet. We source contracts as best as we can and have a strong fundamental understanding of contracts to fill in some of the missing numbers with relatively solid estimates. Our numbers are used in various publications and other websites and if you check out any other sites you’ll notice where they get their information from.

Our most popular pages are the team salary cap pages which you can access by clicking on the team abbreviations in the menu bar. Here we give a breakdown of a player’s yearly contract, but the columns most important to everyone are the cap number column and the dead money & cap savings column. The cap number is a player’s charge in a given year. The dead money represents the cost of cutting the player while the savings column shows how much money is saved by releasing the player.

You will also notice that you can change scenarios for the dead money calculation by selecting from a dropdown menu to see what happens to the charge if cut after June 1 or traded.

OTC menu

Every player’s name is linked to his individual cap page that may have notes on the players contract, his yearly cap charges and a similar dead money calculation option for the remaining years of a player’s contract. We also have some graphs for the player to compare his deal across the NFL.

Our salary cap pages also have a number of other menu items that you can select. Listed right under the team name you can follow a page to the teams calculator (more on that in a minute), complete contract values, free agents for each year, related articles, and some graphs and charts illustrating the teams cap situation.

OTC menu bar

The salary cap calculator gives you an opportunity to be general manager of your favorite team. Developed by Nick Korte this calculator gives you the option to cut players, restructure contracts, re-sign your own players, and add free agents to the team. Each move will reflect the decisions a team has to make and it will calculate not just the current impact but also the future impact. It is a ton of fun and very addicitive. You’ll also see how hard it can be to keep an NFL team together. You can go to the calculators by either clicking in the teams menu bar or in the blue bar underneath the teams and positions, as shown below:

otc blue menu

Using that same picture you will see every position listed above the blue menu. Clicking on a position will take you to the listing of each contract at the position. The default view will show you the total value, annual value, guaranteed value, and free agency status of the players. Above the chart you will see the option to drop down into years, which will give you the cap and cash salaries for a player in that given year.

The positional spending link will give you an overview of what your team is spending in cap dollars on each offensive and defensive position. This is presented as the top 51 players in the offseason and the full roster in the regular season.

In the top right the site you will see a red menu bar that will take you to different leaguewide views.

otc red menu

Cap Space is very simply the estimated cap room for each season. In the offseason these are set for the top 51 players on a roster….Cash spending will give an estimate as to the actual dollars committed to a roster in a given season.

The contracts link will bring you to a listing of every contract in the NFL. You can quickly just click on a section to drill down to look by team or position in one handy spot rather than using the individual links. Moving the sliders lets you filter players by various contract metrics to quickly compare players.

OTC contracts menud menu

The free agents tab will bring you to a similar view where you can drill down into position, team, and free agent status. You can quickly switch years by clicking on a tab to see who is set to be a free agent two or three years from now if you want. This is probably the most comprehensive and user friendly free agent list I’ve seen.

Finally there is the blog portion of the website, where our team gives thoughts and opinions on a number of NFL topics. Most are related to contracts, the salary cap, the draft, and the use of various analytics and metrics in valuing deals, but I also tend to give my thoughts on a number of topics ranging from predictions to fantasy to rants on the Jets. Some of these are pretty in depth and get the TLDR treatment, but feel free to give things a glance. We’ll run some different features depending on the time of year and currently we are putting up cap overviews for each team more or less every other day.

There is also the OTC podcast that I record (more or less) weekly.

We’re not perfect here and we make mistakes (especially with some free agent status’) so feel free to point any out to us by email. Any help that anyone can provie with contract information we may have missed, is wrong, or we simply don’t have is always appreciated. We are always open to suggestions for the future to help improve the site too. But have fun and explore the site to see some of the different things we have here.

If you want to keep up with our updated postings, contracts, and my own general NFL thoughts give me a follow on Twitter @Jason_OTC

Thanks again for the support as we get ready to begin our third year at OTC this February. I think we have some really good ideas already for OTC and hopefully we can keep on growing in 2015!

-Jason

The Agent’s Role in Brand Management and Business Services: Part 1

Posted on by Zack Moore

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I began writing this back in early September, but as my semester picked up, I couldn’t get my mind focused on editing the first article I wrote. Now I’ve restarted, shaping out my thoughts on the business services and brand management that a sports management firm must provide for their clients.

The first part that I’m releasing today focuses more on brand management; the next one will focus on business services. While I think these overlap, I want to split it up for the sake of keeping this shorter.

Thankfully, I’m done with my MBA at Rutgers and will begin my career working with Athlete Advocates as well as DeFranco’s Gym. I’m excited to have more time to write here as we get into the offseason, which is in-season for us at Over The Cap. I’ll also be preparing for the NFLPA certification exam that takes place on the weekend of July 23rd and 24th in Washington D.C. For any potential agents out there, you can file to take the test between January 5th and February 5th and all the details are here.

With Joe DeFranco of DeFranco’s Gym, he’ll be starting his podcast in the next few weeks and I couldn’t be more excited to work on this venture. This podcast will be a great learning experience as he brings another aspect of content creation into the fold. He’s done an absolutely incredible job in brand management during his 11 years owning DeFranco’s Gym and he knows more about the topic I’m discussing here than anyone.

It should be exciting to meet and learn something from all the unique people who he will have on. I’m going to be starting my own podcast as well that will focus on the kind of things we discuss here and I really look forward to having guests like Jason Fitzgerald and other great football minds.

A lot of what I know about the sports agent industry and entrepreneurship comes from what I learned at DeFranco’s Gym. From the brand management and business services perspective of what we need to provide our athletes with, the foundation of what I’ve learned on this comes from watching Joe DeFranco expand his business and work with people and companies that aligned with his goals. He’s done such a good job with brand and business building that he just opened a gym in Austin, Texas with the great people at Onnit, a company that we had both respected from afar since 2011 when we discovered them. For me, it’s a dream come true to see them work together because I know how much they can accomplish together– and Joe D. deserves it more than anyone. What he’s accomplished with a small crew of guys will be amplified by the HUGE staff at Onnit.

From the beginning of his career, DeFranco understood that the internet was a great tool to market yourself and develop a relationship with your prospective customers. As things get more personalized and we become more connected, much of the future of business is in branding. What’s your story? What do people feel when they think about your brand? What does your company, your brand, mean to your customers?

At the basis of the business services an NFL agent must provide his client is brand management because your brand is everything, your brand is your reputation- it’s why people love and/or hate you. Your goal can be to build an all-encompassing brand that appeals to everyone, but you’ll still have people that don’t like you, and that’s okay. Each player has something special about them and a story that makes them unique. It’s up to his agent to help him capitalize on these qualities.

As NFLPI vice president of licensing and business development, Steven Scebelo, says when discussing NFL Players Inc.’s partnership with opendorse on their Activate platform, “each player has had to work hard and overcome significant obstacles to make it to the NFL. We want to celebrate the success for all of those players. They all have a following, from their hometown to their collegiate and NFL cities. So the more we can tap into that entire fan base, the better connection there is to fans and individuals.”

When we think about ourselves, we all have positive and negative events that have impacted our lives drastically, along with unique characteristics that make us who we are. As an agent gets to understand what his player is all about, he can build a unique brand for him. Brand building is not an overnight process, there’s a foundation that you’ll build off of, but you’ll perfect the brand over time.

The consumer of today and the future wants to know who he/she is doing business with. It’s what made me such a huge fan of Onnit three years before DeFranco started working with them. They used part-owner Joe Rogan as a huge brand ambassador through his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. He and CEO, Aubrey Marcus, exemplified what the company stood for in their slogan, “Total Human Optimization.” Not only did they have a catchy slogan, but they lived it.

“Total Human Optimization” also allows them to become much more than the supplement company that they originally started out as. They now sell exercise equipment, create content, own the Onnit Academy with DeFranco, and so much more. Having a strong slogan that encompasses everything you hope to be to people can have a lasting impact far into your future and be a guiding light for everyone in your organization. I’m sure that the people who work at Onnit all understand that if it doesn’t have to do with “Total Human Optimization,” then it shouldn’t have anything to do with Onnit.

Other than being arguably the best player in the NFL, this is part of what makes JJ Watt such a powerful brand: his slogan is, “Dream Big, Work Hard,” and no one exemplifies that slogan more than him.

A fun fact I learned during one of my summer classes, was that when John F. Kennedy was running for President, the average American’s attention span was 45 seconds, by the 2008 election it was 5 seconds or less. Whether you agree or disagree with Barack Obama, he built such a powerful brand in 2008 playing off of that quick “Hope and Change” slogan that was perfect for the time. The country was in a bad place economically and politically and his brand took advantage of that in three powerful words. From a branding standpoint, you should have a goal of doing what Onnit, JJ Watt and Obama did and summarize the brand you’re selling in few words, so people can quickly grasp who you are. You must hold yourself up to the standards of the brand and message you’re projecting because no one likes a hypocrite and trust is hard to earn back after you lost it.

It’s easier than ever to get these brand messages out with platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, along with podcasts, blogs, and other media opportunities. With the internet, you can create as much content as you want rather than wait for an opportunity at an interview with some television network or radio station. Rather than waiting for an opportunity to come to you, like players had to do in the old paradigm, players can create their own opportunities.

In 2014, every company is a media company, so an agency should provide these media outlets for their clients; they should also help them manage their brand through all of the social media platforms. Derek Jeter had a fantastic idea with The Player’s Tribune because getting closer to the source is a big trend in media: fans are very interested in what their favorite players have to say.

At our agency, we’ll ensure that players will get their story out through controlled channels. One example of this is podcasting. It becomes the athlete’s platform for reaching—maybe—millions to see what he wants to say, not what fits in a small time slot on ESPN or some other outlet. Now, we’re able to hear them speak for an hour or more in a podcast you can download and listen to whenever you want or can listen to it..

The point is that an experienced brand manager and marketer can use these channels to build a brand for their agency and their athletes. As an agent, for instance, it is a benefit to be writing for the most respected NFL salary cap website on the internet; it helps me build a brand myself. Everything that a person or company puts out there publicly goes into the perception consumers have of them and their brand.

We’re in a new paradigm where fans expect to know the players they cheer for on their hometown teams and fantasy teams. It’s especially true with younger players. Guys like JJ Watt do a great job of communicating who they are through their social media sites.

A last slice of branding with NFL players involved charity work. Through charities an athlete lets people know what they stand for and what matters to them. Many times their support for a charity shows who they are as a person, what shaped them, what obstacles they overcame. This is something that’s very important to branding as it shows fans you’re giving back to people in need, which endears you to fans. They like knowing that the rich and famous have been through tough times and that they give back to people that have been in the same situations as them.

Vincent Jackson does a great job branding himself with his military background and the charities he works with; JJ Watt gives back to young kids so they can get involved in sports and learn the same lessons he did. Retired NFL running back Warrick Dunn has given homes to almost 150 single-mothers since 1997. Dunn was raised by a single-mother and was orphaned two days after his 19th birthday, as she was ambushed and killed by armed robbers, while she was working as an off-duty police officer escorting a businesswoman to a bank to make a night deposit. So helping single-mothers is a cause very near and dear to his heart, which only makes his message more impactful and gives his fans an insight into the kind of man he is. Doing good makes these men feel good, and it helps fans get a sense of the inner person as well.

To recap, some of the basic pillars of brand managing for NFL players are marketing, owning media channels and content creation, along with charity work.

In our next piece, I’m going to expand on some more of the business services that an agent should provide his client.

Twitter/Instagram: @ZackMooreNFL

The DeFranco’s Gym Combine Training Program: https://www.onnit.com/academy/facilities/defranco/

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Salary Cap Space and Roster Updates

Posted on by Jason Fitzgerald

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Well it’s been a hectic few days as teams have taken rosters down to 53, signed Practice Squad players, moved players to reserve lists, traded players, and on and on and on. Thanks for bearing with me as I’ve worked through getting the rosters up to date and continue to get them up to date.

The big news is that we have officially switched our salary cap space estimates to in-season accounting where everyone counts on the salary cap rather than just the top 51 cap hits. We’ve cross checked it against a few teams so it seems to be working correctlty, but if you see anything that looks off just let me know via email or Twitter as mistakes are easy enough to occur.

A few notes about where we are with the salary cap right now, which is very fluid:

-I currently have somewhere around 70% of the Practice Squad players online. The salaries I am using for them is just the minimum but a few players will earn more. When I find that out I’ll update accordingly.

-You will notice that there have been many added small dead money charges following cuts and a few UDFAs still listed without bonus money. I never uploaded those in part because of the time involved and in part in looking to protect the information. If I have figures for those players they will be updated by next week.

-I do not have salary information for players on the NFI lists right now. Teams do not have to play players on NFI, but many choose to do so, with salaries ranging anywhere from a Practice Squad salary to the full salary in a contract. Due to time constraints most contracts I have simply left alone. For most teams that is not a big deal but for teams like the 49ers that makes a big difference. I will try to determine those numbers this week.

-There are many injury settlements and grievances that will be accounted for eventually with an adjustment made to each teams salary cap limit

– All suspended players should have had their cap hits changed to reflect their suspensions

– I have not gotten the information or had the time to add in the latest signings/extensions/restructures. So the cap figures as of Sept 1 do not include the current figures for Alex Smith, Jurrell Casey, Kyle Orton, Alex Boone, etc… There are also some restructures that I am sure the Rams, Redskins, etc… have likely done today that I dont know about. Hopefully by the end of the week Ill get up to date

– Finally, in a shameless plus, if you plan on trying out FanDuel this year please sign up using our promotional code OTC100. Ill probably get back to doing some fantasy postings this week.

Check out the Current NFL Salary Cap Estimates for all 32 Teams

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An Introduction to being an NFL Agent: Part 2

Posted on by Zack Moore

A couple weeks ago, I started developing a “process” for myself, for the last few years, I’ve known what I want to accomplish, but I knew I needed to write down my process and refocus myself. First, I want to tell you about the man behind the process.

My mentor during my college years was a great friend by the name of Dr. Kevin Elko. He is currently the “head” coach for the Alabama Crimson Tide and the Florida State Seminoles, so he has been a part of four of the last five national championships. He’s won Super Bowls with the Dallas Cowboys, Green Bay Packers and New Orleans Saints. He’s also won national championships with LSU (2004), Miami, and the North Carolina basketball team.

Dr. Elko is the best in the business in terms of mental performance and motivational speaking. I’ve never heard him speak to a team, but friends of mine who have listened to him at Alabama, Florida State, as well as Rutgers and Pittsburgh in the 2000s discuss how he always got the team feeling that level of supreme confidence that they would win. Many of you have seen Elko’s work first hand, he is the man behind “The Chop” at Rutgers Football during the Schiano years.

Elko is someone whom we will come back to discuss later this week, if you’re interested in him, check him out at DrElko.com.

Anyway, I began developing my process because to become a great NFL agent, you’re going to have a lot of different stuff going on and I need to keep my eyes on my life goals.

As followed is a list of what I’m currently involved in as well as the relationships I’m building with businesses that will be major assets for our clients and Athlete Advocates. Of course, in turn, we believe that we will also be a major asset to the people we do business with, every business relationship should have mutual gain.

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• Like I’ve previously said, I’m an MBA student at Rutgers. I have a concentration in marketing and entrepreneurship, you’ll see why over the course of this series.

• I own a small business in AllAmericanHustle.com. Currently, we simply sell “Be American” apparel, but we’re going to pivot as I become a certified NFL agent and gain clients as we can turn it into a retail site for the products and companies that our clients are involved with. As I’ll discuss on here, we have brand management strategies that include content creation, marketing, endorsements, entrepreneurship, charities, and other business dealings.

• Over the first half of this year, I wrote a business plan with my entrepreneurship teacher to start an “Amazon style online retailer for American made goods,” but I found out that AmericanCertified.com launched during the time I was writing my plan. American Certified launched in May after 18 months of preparation as well as investing over $500,000, so I decided I should join forces with them, rather than compete.

I contacted their CEO Marvin Weinberger and have begun working with them as an intern. They like my marketing strategies that I’ve presented them with as well as my strategies of endorsements through athletes, celebrities, and content creators. American Certified will be a major asset for my clients for endorsement deals from American manufacturers and my clients will be an asset for these businesses and American Certified. This is something I will go into in a business blog this week.

• I sell Onnit products on my website and I’m always and I’m always trying to stay abreast with everything happening with them. I discovered them on the Joe Rogan Experience, which opened my eyes to marketing strategies that we will be using with our athletes. They are also a part of the future plans of our agency as we see the potential for endorsement deals for our clients along with supplements. (Onnit)

• Off of the lessons I’ve learned from Joe Rogan and Onnit, I should mention our content creation strategies that we hope to implement with our players. If you’ve followed MMQB.SI.com, then you’ve seen some great guest articles from players like Russell Wilson, Vernon Davis and many other players. The NFL is full of highly intelligent guys and our firm intends on helping our clients take advantage of their unique life experience and build their brands.

As we’ve seen, many players enter into post-football careers in jobs on radio, TV, podcasting, writing among other media outlets. When I was a kid, I knew I wanted to be a professional football, basketball and baseball player, then I wanted to host SportsCenter after my career. Which red-blooded American boy didn’t have those kinds of dreams?

Instead, with the Internet, we can have so much more fun creating our own content in our own voice and Athlete Advocates will help players create their own content. There is such a large market of NFL fans out there just begging for more football content for them to consume all year round. The NFL has become the biggest sport in the country because of crazy people like us! We’re always looking for content to learn about the game, learn about the business of the game or just learn about fantasy football.

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(As a side note, I do a podcast myself and I would love to have some guests on in the near future, if you know anyone who might be interested in coming on a podcast that discusses the NFL, current events, economics, business, political issues, entrepreneurship, American manufacturing or anything else of that nature, please e-mail me at PresidentMoore@AllAmericanHustle.com. I have a lot of different passions and I want to make my podcast a sort of Joe Rogan Experience on the east coast with a football flavor to it as well rather than the MMA.)

• Of course, DeFranco’s Gym is a major part of our business plan, so continuing to build our relationship with my friend Joe DeFranco is key to our success. Again, like I said yesterday, Joe D. is the best in the world at what he does and he’s a better person. At Athlete Advocate’s we couldn’t be more blessed to work with a guy like Joe. It’s an honor to be surrounded by so many high quality people, it motivates you to let you know that you can accomplish great things. (www.defrancostraining.com)

• And of course, writing here at OverTheCap.com. This is an opportunity for me to not only build my own personal brand as a writer and agent, but, more importantly, it’s a chance for me to learn about the most important aspect of being an agent: player contracts. By learning from Jason and the rest of the staff here, if I just keep plugging away reading and learning about contracts, I’ll be able to understand player values, market values, free agency, and all salary cap issues. Your job as an agent is to get your player a fair value for his worth and this opportunity will help me improve my knowledge in this field and, thus, help me with negotiations in the future.

Going back to what I started this article off with, I’ve been developing my process for my goals and at the top of that sheet I have this in big bold letters:

How do I become the best me that I can be? How can I become the best NFL agent of all time? What activities will help me get to where I want to go? What do I have to know?

Below that, at the top of my list, my goal is to be the first NFL agent inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame. Obviously, guys like Leigh Steinberg, Tom Condon, Jimmy Sexton, Drew Rosenhaus or even Happy Walters (the inspiration for Happy Gilmore and an overall cool guy, check out his story) might beat me there first, but that’s the attitude I want to have going into this business.

When I focus on that one goal of being the best agent of all time, everything else falls into place. If you’re a young aspiring NFL agent, this is exactly how you should think.

When I was going to the Sports Law Symposiums this winter, I met a lot of nice kids, a lot of kids thinking about getting into being an agent and a lot of kids who knew they wanted to be in the business.

What struck me most was that many of these kids were in law school, but they didn’t have a plan for how they were going to be an agent, start their firm or get a job with one of the big firms (a very difficult task and a route I personally did not want to take as I want to create my own thing rather than be a cog in a huge machine). One thing I learned in starting my own small business already is that you have to have a plan. My idea with All American Hustle was simple, but I had no plan other than just start selling t-shirts, that is why I have made my fair share of poor decisions.

Granted, those lessons I learned at a cheap cost, all things considered, will help me greatly in the long run. I started AAH in 2011 when I had very little formal education in business or even just through reading. Over the last year, since I started at Rutgers, I’ve begun just consuming as much information as possible in the fields I’m interested in, things I know I’ll need to understand to be a great agent. This is critical. Understand as much as you can about an industry before you put the money up to dive into it.

A t-shirt business is the simplest form of business ever, so it’s been a great learning tool. I’ve gotten the lessons that I’ll be able to put into my future ventures and I’ve been able to form an LLC, secure a domain and get some other finances out of the way.

Another piece of advice to anyone trying to get into this industry, which is something I heard reiterated by Leigh Steinberg was to make yourself stand out to potential employers. Like I said yesterday, I got my job with Athlete Advocates because I began discussing my business plan with Ryan during last fall and I eventually sent him the completed version of it and let him know I’d love to work with him. I later met Jeff Dobin and was really excited to see that we had another great agent on our team. Ryan was more than open to the idea of me working for them and after a few months of going back and forth with him on some projects, he let me know that he’d love to bring me on as a partner.

Do you understand how many kids must ask agents how to break into the industry? Do you understand how many times they give kids advice that they know probably isn’t being followed up on? Never before have so many people been competing to get into this industry as, like entrepreneurship, being an agent has gotten a lot of great publicity over the last few years as the industry has grown and many kids see it as an avenue to follow their passion for sports in an exciting way. What are you doing to make yourself stand out? Over the last eight months, I’ve gotten involved with three businesses I’m very passionate about in Athlete Advocate’s, American Certified and Over The Cap and not a single one of them asked me for my resume. They saw the work I had put in already. I had written a business plan for the first two businesses and Jason had seen some of my previous writing on my personal blog and we had communicated about some salary cap issues through Twitter and e-mail.

If any of that sounds like too much work, then you’re not passionate enough about the business you think you want to get into. You’ll never work a day in your life if it’s something you would be willing to do for free. That’s what a dream job is, your dream should be to get paid for doing something you love.

Like I said above, develop your process. Dr. Elko states in Touchdown, that “the first step in implementing your vision is developing a process, a step-by-step plan you use consistently everyday to get to the desired outcome.”

Right, so you want to be an NFL agent, how are you going to get there? What do you have to know? Where can you find information that will help you get there? Look at the industry and ask yourself questions about it that you then have to answer.

At some point, I will probably share with you guys the questions I’ve been asking myself over the last few months as a way of making sure I stay on task and learn the things that I need to learn to become a better agent.

So, moving forward this week, I’m going to break down the various services an agent needs to provide for their clients and I’m going to detail how everything I’ve detailed above fits into these categories of services.

As always, #BeAmerican out there my friends.

Zack Moore
@ZackMooreNFL
www.AllAmericanHustle.com
Supplements: Onnit

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An Introduction to Being an NFL Agent

Posted on by Zack Moore

I want to introduce myself to the Over The Cap reader, so that I can give you an idea of the perspective I hope to bring to this website. I also want to open myself up to topics brought forth by the reader and I’m always open to exploring an idea that you guys bring up in the comment section or through contacting me through Twitter or e-mail.

There’s so much to learn and explore in the game of football and so often, across all fields, we get zoned into our own way of thinking and don’t look at things from a fresh, new perspective. This is why a guy like Mike Leach transformed the game of football with the spread offense after coming from a background as a lawyer.

In marketing, I’ve learned of a concept called “the curse of knowledge,” which is a cognitive bias that leads better-informed parties to find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed parties.

It’s a great concept when you think from an entrepreneurial or business perspective. Sometimes, the big corporations are so caught up in doing what’s always worked for them, that they become blind to new opportunities in their industry. Think about the old cable companies that are missing out on the wave of new technologies that will eventually overtake cable. Companies like Netflix and Hulu have capitalized on the areas that the cable company left open. NFL teams have capitalized by doing things in a way that hadn’t been done before as well. Without people approaching football from a different perspective, we’d still be playing the same game we played in the early days of the NFL.

Point being, you all have something to offer those of us who write for Over The Cap and I’d love to hear from you in the comment section for concepts you’d like to see explored or questions you want answered.

Anyway, to give you an idea of what I want to bring to Over The Cap…

I’m currently an MBA student at Rutgers and upon graduation, I’m going to become a partner at Athlete Advocates with Ryan Scarpa and Jeffrey Dobin, two certified NFL agents. I met Scarpa through his representation my good friend and teammate, Matt Hansen from the University of Rhode Island.

Matt Hansen was an undrafted free agent in 2011 and was signed to the Atlanta Falcons practice squad late in the 2011 season and looked like he was on his way to making the 53-man roster in 2012 after a great performance in OTAs. Unfortunately, he tore his patella tendon during that summer and hasn’t been able to make it back into the NFL since.

One thing that always stuck out in my mind was that, throughout the process, was that Matt was always happy with his agents. Many players get frustrated with their agent when they aren’t getting an opportunity to play, they feel like their agent is letting them down, but through it all, Matt knew his agents were doing their best. The kind of loyalty that Ryan displayed to Matt really stuck out to me and was what drew me to working with Athlete Advocates. Even when it began to look like Matt wouldn’t give them the kind of return on investment they had hoped to have, Ryan was always available and positive in his communication with Matt.

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So, last fall, during my first semester at Rutgers, I wrote a business plan in my entrepreneurship class for “All American Hustle Sports,” which would be attached to my retail website AllAmericanHustle.com that I’ve had hopes of expanding, something we’ll discuss in later blogs.

During the fall semester, I would spend a lot of time discussing the business plan with my former trainer from when I was playing college football and entrepreneurial mentor, Joe DeFranco of DeFranco’s Gym. We would talk business as he trained my friends Matt Hansen and Jason Foster, who were both staying at my house in hopes of returning to the NFL. While Matt hasn’t been able to get back into the league, Jason found his home playing guard for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

During this time, Joe would tell me how he thinks Ryan is going to be a very successful agent and, seeing how much I already knew about Ryan, I decided to try and join forces with Athlete Advocates rather than start my own firm. So once I finished my business plan, I sent it over to Ryan.

He was impressed by my business plan and realized that I could be an asset to Athlete Advocates. Ever since then, we’ve all been discussing strategies and the future of our business together. Currently, we’re representing Darren Woodard of the St. Louis Rams and Lew Toler of the Pittsburgh Steelers, we also handle some of the marketing deals that Kyle Arrington of the New England Patriots has. We’re a young firm, but I’m confident that we are building a team that will be able to compete with the big boys.

I became intrigued with the prospect of being an NFL agent because my quarterback from Ramapo High School, Andrew Weiss’s father, Art Weiss, was Wayne Cherbet’s agent. Art has been one of the best in the business at finding D1AA talent and getting them an opportunity in the NFL. He’s currently representing Chris Hogan of “7-Eleven” Hard Knock’s fame who also went to Ramapo.

I decided that I wanted to be an NFL agent when I was playing at URI. I saw my good friends Victor Adesanya and Matt Hansen finish playing at URI and try to take their game to the next level after my junior season.

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Going into that season, I had just earned a scholarship, which had stoked my aspirations of maybe playing in Canada once I graduated, but an ankle injury had rendered me basically useless during my junior year as I couldn’t cut on the ligaments and tendons that I had torn during spring ball, but had gone undiagnosed and untreated due to our shoddy training staff at URI. I got a surgery after the season, so I was rehabbing while I was watching my friends try to go to the NFL and it made me realize that I could get involved in a career path that would still keep me involved in football.

And that’s led me to where I am now.

(I want to make a quick comment on the training staff at URI. I had three undiagnosed injuries during my time at URI. I tore ligaments in my ankle, to which their medical advice was to ice and stretch it. After I herniated two disks in a spring game, something I wouldn’t find out until an MRI years later because their only advice was to stretch my neck…seriously, that’s all they told me to do on a neck injury. Then, I had a broken bone in the ball of my foot for the entirety of my college football career, which instead of getting an MRI or x-ray on, we just put padding in my cleat. I say this because this is a major issue across the country, we have college training staffs that do not take care of players to the best of their ability because they are either uninspired and/or incompetent or they do not have the funding to do their jobs correctly. As an agent, this is an issue that I will focus on and campaign for. There are hundreds of kids being untreated with far more debilitating issues than mine and the NCAA owes it to these kids to make sure they’re taken care of. I’m in favor of some kind of medical fund that allows former athletes to treat college injuries, but that’s an issue for another day.)

I tell you all this because I find a lot of other young people trying to break into this industry and I hope to impart some of the things I’ve learned so far and continue to share more knowledge as we go along.

Personally, I decided to get an MBA because I saw an opportunity in the industry as most agents have law degrees and player representation is changing, in football specifically. This was confirmed to me at the three Sports Law Symposiums I went to this spring as guys like Darren Heitner from the Sports Agent Blog noted that the future of representation is going to be in marketing, endorsements and business deals.

This is largely because of the rookie wage scale put forth in the 2011 CBA, which makes agents less valuable because of the lack of negotiations. Where an agent now needs to prove his worth is in providing players with good training facilities to prepare for the NFL combine and everything that goes along with that, endorsement deals, business experience and entrepreneurial expertise, knowledge of the NFL marketplace and player value, marketing opportunities and brand management. The player needs an agent for his negotiating skills in later contracts as well.

When I decided upon getting my MBA, I also knew that my good friend, Will Gattoni (an avid Over The Cap reader), would be getting his law degree from St. John’s and we’ve always spoken about working together, something we still hope to do, but my attitude was, I’ll become the best business minded agent I can be and find partners with law degrees. Thankfully, that’s worked out well.

Over the last year, I’ve been putting together the things I need to be the best agent in the NFL. I don’t say that out of arrogance, I say that because this is simply too fun to half ass and you’ll get eaten alive if you’re not trying to be the best. This industry is in the stage of consolidation, everyone is merging into a few big firms like CAA, Rosenhaus Sports, and Relativity Sports, so if you want to compete, you have to find your niche, build your network and work your ass off.

So, to give other young agents out there an idea of how to get into this business and everything it entails, I am going to go into detail this week on how I’ve approached it and what we’re going to do over at Athlete Advocates.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more information coming this week. As always, feel free to tweet me if you have any questions or comments.

Zack Moore
@ZackMooreNFL
www.AllAmericanHustle.com
Supplements: Onnit

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Welcome to the redesigned Over The Cap

Posted on by Nick

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When I discovered Over The Cap last year, I immediately appreciated all of the hard work that Jason put into providing outstanding information of NFL contracts and the salary cap. I soon realized how much more potential OTC has to further that goal. Given my common knowledge of how financials in the league work, as well as my knowledge on website building and database management, I’ve set out to help Jason make some of that potential reality. This new design is another step that I feel will work toward making OTC the premiere location to learn and understand how contracts and the cap work in the NFL.

The core of the redesign is the dashboard that I have introduced at the top of every page. This dashboard should make navigation to OTC’s features much easier, as well as adding a little power to them as well. Here are some aspects of particular note:
–You will see some familiar links on the red and blue bars on the top, such as total salary cap space, active contracts, free agency, the calculator, and more. Inside these links, you will find respective data that will be broken down in convenient views, such as tabbed yearly sections, or filters by team, position, and more.
–The player search box has been enhanced to make finding a player’s contract much quicker. Each player’s page contains his basic information, contract data, and financial comparisons.
–Each team has its own dedicated page; you will be first taken to see its year-by-year salary cap commitments and total player liabilities. Links on its bar will take you to team-specific versions of the site, ranging from its calculator to pending free agents and more.
–There are also dedicated pages for each position, in case you’re curious how players at a specific position financially compare to each other.

As this is a brand new design, there will inevitably be some kinks that need to be straightened out. I would greatly appreciate any feedback on how to fix or improve the new design. You may do so in the content section of this post, and you may use the contact form on the calculator if you prefer to reach me directly (I will soon place a copy of this form on the dashboard as well). Aspects in particular that would be good to hear about include:
–Any bugs in the tools or design that simply aren’t working as they should
–Opinions on the layout and managing navigation across the site
–Opinions on the visual and artistic feel of the design
–Suggestions for additional features in the future

I hope you enjoy the new design, and that it makes the upcoming 2014 NFL season even more enjoyable!

Announcing Partnership with FanDuel for 2014 Season

Posted on by Jason Fitzgerald

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Since launching Over The Cap in February of 2013, our website has been able to attract a great (and growing) base of football fans who really are some of the most knowledgeable and diehard fans that the NFL has to offer.  OTC isn’t really a small little hidden gem in the internet anymore and I often get asked about sponsored advertising which I never felt was the best fit for the website. After all you guys come here to read about the NFL or use the various resources we have, not be hit over the head with me trying to sell you something that doesn’t really fit our audience.

But after speaking with some of the people at FanDuel and researching their product I think we now have something that not only fits with OTC but will provide you all with something that makes Sunday’s much more fun.

For those of you unfamiliar with FanDuel, it’s a really innovative fantasy football platform where you have an opportunity to compete for real money in a number of different one-week NFL fantasy football leagues. The selection process is pretty unique as teams are not built through the draft but via a salary cap style format. For all of us wannabe GM’s and salary cap managers at OTC it’s an opportunity to put our skills to the test and see just how difficult it is to build a strong team within a budget.

What’s great about FanDuel’s format is that the games are new each and every week, so you never lose hope in the fantasy season. Nothing is worse than having your big star get injured or selecting players who played well in 2013 only to see them be a dud in 2014 and then losing interest in the game by week 6.  If you make a mistake one week with FanDuel you just move on and get started on the following week’s roster.

I think this format works incredibly well for our readers. There is a lot of strategy involved with weekly matchups and valuation of players. It’ really no different than what we do on the website when we identify real bargains and busts in the NFL based on their contracts versus their performance. You get to do the same thing with FanDuel’s salary cap numbers as you try to uncover the true value plays each week that will hopefully get you some of that prize money. FanDuel will pay out over $10 million a week in prize money this year, so there are many prizes to win.

You’ll find all kinds of games at FanDuel that fit your appetite for NFL fantasy football. Do you want to challenge someone head to head in a winner take all matchup?  It’s there. Do you want to enter a league that ranges from 3 to 20 people?  No problem. FanDuel has big tournaments, 50/50 leagues, and the ability to create your own contests and challenge friends. You can play for as little as $1 per game or as much as $500 a game.  You can enter as many competitions as you like each week and you can decide what weeks you do or do not want to compete. And if you want to play for free there are free games too!

As part of this partnership, FanDuel is offering the readers of OTC a special 100% deposit bonus up to $200. To claim that offer simply click here to sign up and click the “Play Now” button which will automatically enter our OTC100 promo code to collect the bonus.

You’ll be able to find me during the season playing under the name “overthecap” (yes I know very difficult to remember). While it’s a little early in the preseason for weekly fantasy games, I have already signed up for the 50K Sun NFL Rush which costs just $5 to enter. So if you want to jump in and get the chance to finish better than me it’s a good place to start.

As part of the countdown to the regular season we’ll post on two positions each week where we look at some contract situations that could have either a positive or a negative effect on some fantasy (and real NFL) situations. As part of the partnership I’ll be trying to do a weekly fantasy post in the regular season sometime during the latter half of the week where I give some thoughts on some of the better (and worse) values for the week.

If enough people have interest in an OTC league just let me know and I’ll see about putting that together each week for at a few level that encourages participation. If not, I’ll post each week a game that I will be playing in and I’ll also link to a free weekly game for everyone who just wants to try FanDuel out.

Click Here to Sign Up for FanDuel