As lunchtime gave way to early evening Saturday in Indianapolis, one of the sports world’s most daunting job interviews was unfolding for a third straight day at Lucas Oil Stadium.
The first group of wide receivers was preparing to run the 40-yard dash in what might have been the most nerve-wracking—and for some, important—part of their stint at the annual NFL scouting combine that also included a handful of media sessions, extensive medical testing and dozens of interviews with many of the league’s franchises.
Less than a mile away at the NCAA’s headquarters, Texas Longhorns linebacker Anthony Hill Jr. took advantage of a short break in his own action-packed day. Pausing from taking notes during an activity about financial decisions facing professional athletes, he pulled out his phone and called up the action on NFL Network for a few minutes in order to see just how quickly his former teammates Isaiah Bond and Matthew Golden would run.
Hill was the only one in a nondescript conference room watching the combine at the time, but he was far from the only one thinking about the event and how it would impact his own career. The rising junior was one of nearly 20 high-profile current college football players who took part in the NCAA Elite Football Student-Athlete Symposium last week, a three-day series of sessions to help educate those on the verge of the NFL, but are either not eligible for the draft or who opted to return to school for another season.
“This is my first year, of course, being able to come, but I know I’m just trying to learn some new things and to try and get ready for the process,” Hill says. “I learned a lot of new stuff from this, the latest one just being able to know that you’ve got a [players association] when you go to the next level, learning about money and savings, and kind of being myself and learning how to express yourself with [the media].”
The NCAA has been running the symposium, or a version of it, for just shy of a decade and conducts similar events for top-tier men’s and women’s basketball players later in the spring that focus on things unique to their own sport’s path to the pros.
Josh Allen, C.J. Stroud, Michael Penix Jr. and Saquon Barkley all rolled through at some point during their college careers before moving onto the NFL as first-round picks. Last year’s edition notably featured LSU Tigers tackle Will Campbell, Oregon Ducks lineman Josh Conerly Jr. and Notre Dame Fighting Irish cornerback Benjamin Morrison, who put the preview of the combine and their knowledge of the process to use as draft hopefuls this year.
“When I was on campus, and even when I came back to the national office, there was a lot of misinformation out there by individuals who were financial advisers or agents. They would approach young men and their families and tell them about the process,” says NCAA director of football enforcement Chris Howard, who helps put together the content players take in and has been involved with the series since its inception. “We built [the symposium] out trying to figure out programming that, one, can inform student-athletes, but also point them in the right direction to ask additional questions. As they go through this process, because it is a unique process not too many people go through, we are trying to help them with the transition from being here as a collegiate student-athlete to eventually becoming a professional athlete.”
The biggest highlight for many players who come is initially a trip to Lucas Oil Stadium to watch the actual combine.
Thanks to increased cooperation with the NFL, players had a quick dinner on Saturday evening before making their way over to the lower bowl of the Indianapolis Colts’ stadium to see the final set of wide receivers and quarterbacks do all of their running, agility drills and jumps. They also got an in-person look at the throwing sessions that took place under the watchful eye of numerous NFL head coaches, general managers and scouts they may be crossing paths with in the near future.
Pulling back the curtain on the experience players watched on TV at home since they were little is a key part of the symposium and the synergy between the college and pro sides of the game. Howard noted that agents and advisers would often make too big of a deal about the combine’s importance in the scouting process and that even with NFL personnel reiterating that’s not the case during guest speaker appearances, nothing beats showing future draft picks that the drills and workouts are often no different from what they might be doing in practice any given week during the season.
“Football is my way of life, it’s my passion. To actually see this stuff, to have teammates here, it’s a great experience,” Miami Hurricanes defensive lineman Rueben Bain Jr. says. “It’s my dream, and I’m getting closer and closer each day.”
Having players better prepared as they enter the league is one of the chief reasons why the NCAA has found increased cooperation easy to come by as the symposium has evolved over the past nine years. NFL executive vice president of football operations Troy Vincent has stopped by to speak several times and is a big proponent in the league office, which regularly sends at least one representative for a panel or session.
Numerous other front office executives, team scouts and current or former players have been to the national office as well to share their experiences in hopes of passing down information to the next generation.
“It’s a lot of foresight by [Howard and the NCAA] to think about how can we start to educate these guys sooner and more about the process of not just being a collegiate football player, but how they can then take this knowledge—not just for themselves but to give to their teammates—to then also be prepared later on. It’s an awesome thing,” says Los Angeles Rams senior personnel executive Ray Farmer, a frequent guest speaker at the symposium. “They have a lot more exposure than I know I had 35 years ago when I went through this process.”
That process of becoming an NFL player is also a bit different for the current crop of college players due to changing NCAA rules and the increased professionalization brought on since the arrival of NIL.
All but two of the players this year noted they already had a financial adviser and the vast majority confirmed they also retained an NIL agent to work on deals. As important as sessions were on how NFL players watch film or how teams will scout them this coming season, perhaps it was no wonder the majority of talking points at the symposium that Sports Illustrated was privy to often reiterated how to take care of the money earned while playing football.
“I’ve got a good group around me that’s always pouring in really good information,” Clemson Tigers quarterback Cade Klubnik says. “I think Clemson does a really good job of having a lot of financial literacy programs that we do as a team so you have a really good foundation about how to be smart and not just throw away the opportunity that you have.”
“The [contractual information] is big because we don’t know the language and they do,” Florida Gators offensive lineman Austin Barber says. “Reading it, helping learn it all, knowing the agents work for you—you really are your own business and I think that’s what is really important to understand.”
While some of the speakers, discussions and, particularly, the team-building exercises change from year to year, one of the more notable recurring additions to the itinerary recently has been a session devoted specifically to gambling. The NFL’s chief compliance officer, Sabrina Perel, was armed this year with a variety of eye-opening statistics and walked players through much of the league’s strict gambling policy. Los Angeles Chargers executive Arthur Hightower noted some of the nuances players needed to be aware of that might differ from some of the rules they may have been told about on campus.
Once, even mentioning gambling topics would have been taboo for players to discuss—especially at a place like the NCAA’s headquarters where the slogan, “Don’t bet on it,” was as much a rule as it was an organizational mantra.
Agents, too, were anathema around those same halls not too long ago and the subject of some enforcement cases that resulted in severe sanctions for several of the schools represented at the symposium. This year, a director at the NFLPA walked players through the standard representation agreement, discussed agent fees and engaged players on potential issues the players association has seen with clauses in NIL deals that could impact them at the next level.
Such talk is no longer brushed off and left as the responsibility for those at the campus level, but has now become part of an open dialogue where elite players you regularly see on Saturdays are encouraged—and more than eager—to follow up with additional questions about their upcoming journey to play on Sundays.
“I think you don’t know what you don’t know, so getting it from the source itself is really one of those aha! moments for them. You can see in the room they’re jotting down a whole bunch of notes,” says Ashley Jocelyn, an NCAA assistant director in the leadership development office that oversees the elite athlete program. “This is directly related to the people that they’re going to be talking to in a couple years, a couple of months.”
While much of the information is designed to be in the back of the players’ minds as they embark on what amounts to a very lengthy upcoming year, there’s also some time for practical application and a dash of fun at the symposium.
In one activity, two players had a joint interview with a role-playing financial adviser who helped the cohort think about key questions to ask. In another more strenuous test, players went one-on-one against each other in made-up sports such as football pong. Naturally, there was no beer involved in a take on the traditional college party game, but the competitive juices flowed all the same for office trash cans and toy balls.
It’s all part of a unique atmosphere, where recent College Football Playoff competitors and the next set of NFL stars came together with an eye on their fast-approaching future.
“The other thing, too, about what surprises me the most is that these young men have a certain perception of the national office. Then when they leave here, they have a totally different perception of the national office,” Howard says. “It’s one where we break down the negative myth of the national office and they don’t see us as this big ivory tower—they get to know people in the building and understand that, hey, we’re really just trying to help these individuals.”
It’s not a vast distance between the home of the NCAA and the place where the path to the draft begins in earnest for hundreds, but it can be a daunting one for players as they navigate an unfamiliar process full of pitfalls that can ultimately cost themselves millions.
For a select few, they are doing what they can to get a head start on the journey well before they get assigned a number of their own at the combine.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as How the NCAA Is Prepping College Football Players Years Before the NFL Draft.
