Tag: Coaching

CHICAGO — The crowd of 59,419 cheered as beloved Chicago Bears kick returner Devin Hester ran out of the tunnel at Soldier Field wearing his gold jacket. Hester took the podium to address the crowd, his newly earned Pro Football Hall of Fame bust on display at his right, Bears team president Kevin Warren, team chairman George McCaskey and board member Patrick McCaskey seated to his left.

Hester started his speech by thanking the Bears organization and the McCaskey family, and what should have been a positive moment turned sour. Hester’s mention of the McCaskey name briefly turned the cheers to boos. It was Week 11 of the 2024 season, and Chicago had lost three straight games and already had fired its first-year offensive coordinator. Frustration with ownership was boiling over.

On Dec. 26, less than a month after the team fired coach Matt Eberflus, fans took it further. “Sell the team! Sell the team!” they yelled during Chicago’s home finale, continuing the chant as the Prime Video postgame panel rehashed the Bears’ unsightly 6-3 loss to the Seahawks.

The fans knew George McCaskey and the Bears would soon hire Eberflus’ replacement, and they had seen enough to dread the implications of the next move. In the 14-year span since McCaskey took over as chairman in 2011, the Bears have had four general managers and six head coaches (including interim coach Thomas Brown). Most recently, McCaskey fired Eberflus one day after an epic Thanksgiving Day meltdown against the Lions, the first time the traditionally conservative franchise replaced a head coach during the season.

Whatever the timing, Eberflus’ firing followed a trend of failed Bears coaches. But his 2022 hiring was part of another pattern, too, one that both the Bears’ fan base and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell have now clocked — with concern.

Since 2018, agent and ex-Chicago defensive end Trace Armstrong and his agency, Athletes First, have represented two fired Bears head coaches, Matt Nagy and Eberflus; three fired offensive coordinators, Mark Helfrich, Luke Getsy and Shane Waldron; as well as current general manager Ryan Poles.

“I’ve never seen one agent have so much influence on one team and had so little success, but they keep going back and taking his guys,” said one coaching agent, who requested anonymity to speak freely on the topic. “And we all kind of shake our heads like, have they not figured this out yet?”

Per the league office’s internal data, Armstrong is one of six coaching agents who represented more than one head coach, coordinator or general manager for the same club going into the 2023 season, the most recent data available. The others are Frank Bauer, Richmond Flowers III, Bob Lamonte, Jimmy Sexton and Rick Smith.

The influence of agents on team hiring has become a talking point not just among fans or within the agent community but at the NFL level. The appearance of “package deals,” whereby an agent places multiple clients in coaching or front office roles with the same team, has made its way to Goodell’s office and into cautionary literature distributed by the league office to its clubs.

Some owners are making agents an outsized part of their hiring process, the league believes, in a way that has the potential to obscure the process of finding the most qualified candidates. Multiple NFL club executives told ESPN there’s a growing pressure for up-and-coming coaches and scouts to align with a power agency, such as Athletes First or CAA, to benefit from their media influence and connections to other coaches and scouts. And league data reveals that minority candidates, in particular, are less represented in a landscape where the most influential coaching agents predominantly represent white clients.

As another hiring season continues, the league office is looking at McCaskey’s Bears and the NFL’s other remaining coach and GM suitors with particular scrutiny.

“Everybody is abundantly aware of it,” a league office source said.

AHEAD OF THE 2023 NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis, six coaching agents — Armstrong, Lamonte, Sexton, Jason Fletcher, Brian Levy and Kennard McGuire — attended a closed-door discussion with Goodell; the league’s diversity, equity and inclusion staff; and the Fritz Pollard Alliance, which promotes diversity, equity and inclusion among NFL coaching, front office and scouting staff. The meeting, held on the lower level of the J.W. Marriott, was the first time the league office had intentionally gathered agents together to talk about hiring equity and how the process could be better. The NFL also met with head coaches, coordinators, general managers and front office executives for similar conversations.

The meeting was small, as there are fewer agents in the coach and front office executive representation business than the player business, and just a handful who represent the majority of those who become head coaches and general managers. At the start of the 2024 NFL season, per ESPN’s data, three agencies — CAA, Athletes First and Pro Sports Representation — represented 20 head coaches and 20 general managers. The request to meet was also unusual because these competitors don’t normally convene as a group.

The agents were seated at a long table configured in a horseshoe shape, and each had a chance to speak before the group landed on a topic that an agent described as “dicey” because no one wants to lift the curtain to reveal their process — the pairing and packaging of head coaches and general managers in the hiring process.

“We are all in very powerful positions,” Fletcher, who owns the agency Business First Sports, told ESPN he said that day. “If I represent an individual and he gets a GM job, I don’t want to force a narrative of, ‘Hey, he should be with this head coach.’”

“The fix is in,” Fletcher said. “I think that, a lot of guys — I’m not pointing fingers — I think there is a strong energy where if this person gets a GM job, he is going to hire someone from that same brand. That happens a lot in this business.”

Fletcher said several agents shifted uncomfortably in their seats as he talked.

Multiple sources in the combine meeting said Goodell asked the agents a specific question.

How many of your clients are minorities?

Goodell’s office already had a sense of the answer. Of 24 coaches and general managers the league had identified in internal 2023 literature obtained by ESPN as being part of “package deals,” just four (16.6%) were people of color.

Per league office data, at the time of that February 2023 meeting, Lamonte represented 22 clients in supervisory roles (head coach, general manager, coordinators), and none were people of color. Armstrong represented one person of color out of nine candidates in supervisory roles in 2023: Poles. And Sexton represented two people of color out of 12.

Multiple sources in the room said McGuire and Fletcher, the only two minority agents of the six in the room, recognized that packaging was an issue that put minority candidates at a disadvantage. Yet two people present at the meeting remembered discussion from some in the room about whether packaging was a real thing.

Although the NFL does not keep data that speaks specifically to the consequences of packaging, the 2023 NFL Racial and Gender Report Card released by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida (UCF) gave the league a C for racial hiring practices among head coaches and a B-plus for general manager hiring in its most recent report, while noting “there is still room for improvement in the disparities in the racial and gender hiring practices between the NFL league office and the 32 teams.”

“The business is completely contaminated,” Fletcher told ESPN. “It is a relationship-driven business, and you are going to have individuals that are experienced and deserve opportunities not receive them. And then you are going to get people who didn’t deserve these opportunities, get opportunities.”

The NFL’s football operations department has been tracking agency representation for several years. The 2023 hiring cycle debrief produced by the league office for internal use included a slide titled: “AGENT CONNECTIONS: PACKAGE DEALS.”

The slide featured the headshots of six coaching agents: Armstrong, Bauer, Flowers, Lamonte, Sexton and Smith, and listed them as representing more than one person in a supervisory role at the same club going into the 2023 season, the most recent data available revealed. Per the league office’s data (based on 110 known agents of a pool of 153 supervisory roles), at least 14 clubs had multiple supervisors repped by the same agency in 2020, and at least 12 in 2023. And the biggest practitioner going into the 2023 season was Lamonte, who represented the head coach and at least one other person in a supervisory role at four different clubs (Bengals, Jaguars, Chiefs and Giants). Lamonte did not return calls for this story.

NFL chief diversity and inclusion officer Jonathan Beane, who was part of the combine meeting, provided a statement to ESPN: “Our role is to encourage agents to build a strong pipeline of candidates, including the next generation of top tier talent. We see agents as essential stakeholders in identifying and representing the best candidates, ensuring representation of various backgrounds, and adapting to the evolving landscape of talent identification, recruitment, and eventual placement in top positions.”

A year after the combine meeting, not much had changed. Per ESPN’s data, at least five NFL teams started the 2024 season with head coaches and general managers represented by the same agent or agency: Arizona, Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City and the New York Giants. Of those five, the Bears and the Browns have had the same agent or agency represent the head coach or general manager in the past two hiring cycles. The Chiefs are the only member of that group to finish with a winning record in 2024.

Of the five teams that have one agent or agency representing the head coach and general manager, all five head coaches are white. Of the general managers, Poles and Cleveland’s Andrew Berry are Black.

The CAA influence in Cleveland is similar to Athletes First in Chicago. Sexton, who declined to comment for this story, has represented the past two Browns head coaches, Freddie Kitchens and Kevin Stefanski, and another CAA agent represents Berry. Cleveland’s 2024 offensive and defensive coordinators were also repped by CAA. Offensive coordinator Ken Dorsey was fired Jan. 5 in the wake of a 3-14 season, but the rest of the Browns’ staff is reportedly safe. (Tommy Rees, elevated from tight ends coach to OC on Jan. 15, is represented by Excel Sports Management).

Per ESPN’s data, four teams went into 2024 with the same agent representing the head coach and two coordinators at the time the club hired them: Cincinnati (Lamonte) Cleveland (Sexton), Miami (Flowers) and the New York Jets (Flowers).

The league believes the process would be better if there was more than a handful of coaching agents dominating the business.

Through conversations with individual agents, the league office is working to get more player agents, particularly player agents who are people of color, involved in representing coaches and front office executives.

“Anytime you have power and influence in the hands of a few, it’s a problem,” a league office source said.

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The scarcity exists, in part, because representing NFL coaches isn’t as lucrative as representing players. A good quarterback makes $40 million to $50 million per year, whereas the average head coach makes $8 million to $10 million. And an agent is typically taking 4-5% of those coaching deals.

“You need five coaches to equal one player,” one coaching agent said. “So you just volume it up, and you sell these guys like this bill of goods [as a package].”

“Pairing or packaging … is a system that has left many deserving and qualified individuals out of legitimate consideration,” McGuire, who owns the agency MS World, told ESPN. “Minorities are tremendously affected and operating at an overwhelmingly large disadvantage. We have to be mindful where information, like who the candidate should be, and opinions of their character comes from.”

The league’s conversations about the hiring process with agents, general managers and coaches in 2023 informed the hiring guide it makes available to all 32 clubs. The “Inclusive Best Practices Guidebook” lists the steps an owner should take when they have an open position, beginning with basics such as “make a plan” and “write a job description.” The guide encourages clubs to build a diverse hiring team and specifically mentions coaching agents in section 2C, which instructs clubs to “get broad recommendations.”

“Look outside of your ‘usual suspects’ or the ‘hot person’ of the season. … Ask specifically for a diverse set of names. … Pay attention to conflicts of interest and bias from any referrals, particularly agents or media.”

It also encourages clubs to blind-screen applications and remove identifiers to consider candidate résumés without possible “subconscious preference towards particular teams, coaches, agent hype, and media evaluations.”

THE BEARS’ PAST two hiring search committees included two constants, both of whom have long-standing relationships with Armstrong: McCaskey, the team’s chairman, and former team president Ted Phillips, who began his 41-year career in Chicago as an accountant and rose to team president in 1999. Although he didn’t have a coaching or scouting background, as team president, Phillips oversaw football operations until Poles and Eberflus were hired in 2022.

At the end of the 2021 season, just before the Bears fired GM Ryan Pace and head coach Matt Nagy, CBS reported that Armstrong had discussed “a top management position” with the Bears. Armstrong denied the report via Twitter.

“Armstrong has had more influence with the Bears than any other team,” a coaching agent said. “That’s because he was dealing with an accountant that really didn’t know football people, and he took advantage of that, and I give him credit for that.”

Phillips did not return multiple calls or a text, and Armstrong declined to comment. The Bears declined to make McCaskey available for this story.

In 1989, when Armstrong was drafted by the Bears out of the University of Florida with the 12th overall pick, Phillips was in his third season negotiating player contracts, and Armstrong’s rookie holdout was one of the early disputes Phillips resolved.

After retiring from a 15-year NFL career, Armstrong started working for CAA Sports in 2007 to help the agency develop a coaches’ representation arm. He then joined the agency Athletes First in 2016 to lead their coaching and broadcasting division.

When Ron Rivera was looking for new representation at the end of his tenure as coach of the Commanders in 2023, he said he hired his former Bears teammate Armstrong because it seemed like every time he’d interview assistants for a position, most of them were represented by Armstrong.

“The guy had a lot of connections, and that’s what you look for, is a guy that can get you in front of other people,” said the two-time NFL head coach, who interviewed for the Jets job in December and the Bears job Jan. 12. “The guy’s a hustler. The guy works really hard.”

Agents have become what the league calls “essential stakeholders” in the hiring process. Many owners are not involved in the day-to-day football decisions, so when it comes to filling a football role, they look to someone else to inform and advise them during the hiring search.

One recent former NFL head coach, who interviewed multiple times for head coaching vacancies, said he doesn’t think many owners have a specific idea of what they’re looking for when they enter a coaching search. Only one owner of the more than 10 he interviewed with gave him a list of specific qualities he wanted in a head coach. The former head coach said Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie explained to him why he preferred hiring offensive-minded head coaches and laid out all the factors that he thought can derail a head coach.

“The dude knew exactly what he wanted,” the former coach said. “If I were to ask other owners, it was like, well, we are looking for a good leadership guy or a guy who can make the quarterback better. It’s not the all-encompassing criteria.”

“[Owners] know what they read,” a former general manager said, “but that’s not their area of expertise.”

In 2015, and again in 2022, when the Bears needed to hire both a general manager and a head coach, McCaskey relied on outside football experts — former Giants general manager Ernie Accorsi and former Colts general manager Bill Polian — to advise the simultaneous searches for both positions. Accorsi declined to comment for this story.

Polian keeps his own lists of candidates and updates them annually, as he is often called to consult on hiring processes. Although he was a featured speaker at an Athletes First coaches summit in 2021, in Orlando, Florida, that was attended by Poles and Eberflus as well as the firm’s agents, Polian told ESPN he never spoke to an agent at any point during the Bears’ search process in 2022. “And that was absolutely purposeful,” he said. “They add nothing to the process. They’re advocates.”

“Please make very clear that my position is I never have involved agents in any coaching search I’ve ever been involved with, including the Bears. Unequivocal statement, full stop.”

No one interviewed for this story suggested any duplicitous or conspiratorial intent on the part of Armstrong, Polian or any agent or consultant in a position to make hiring recommendations to owners. An agent’s role is to get their client a job. A hiring consultant’s role is to identify candidates who can perform and help burnish the consultant’s track record. But honorable intentions don’t shield those figures from outside or league office perception that some qualified candidates aren’t getting fair looks.

“Owners are not as in touch with some of the candidates and the candidate pools, and so what they try to do is go to their network of people who have potentially done it successfully when they were in the seats or people who can talk them through what they’re looking for,” said a front office executive who has interviewed for general manager jobs. “A lot of times, these are older former-GM-type guys. The problem with that is there are older former GM guys that aren’t connected as much as well. So what they do is they pull from their network and who they’re comfortable with, and so you end up cutting the pool to the comfort level of the person that the owner chose.”

“It’s a very unsophisticated system, especially for a billion-dollar business,” said Rod Graves, who leads the Fritz Pollard Alliance. “There should be more of a measure of merit based on criteria, based on information from those who actually are in the position of evaluating. Head coaches and coordinators should be evaluating their staff, and that information should be made available to the league.

“I think the agents are just filling that void,” he said.

The league has designed plenty of programming aimed at expanding the candidates owners consider for jobs. It sends a “ready list” of coaching and general manager candidates to clubs every season and seeks club recommendations for diverse coaching and front office staff to participate in its accelerator program, where participants network with NFL owners.

But Graves doesn’t think those measures are sufficient to override the human instinct that leads decision-makers to hire people they are familiar with.

“We don’t have a system that adequately identifies, nurtures and positions our top people for recognition,” Graves said. “We don’t have a system that is based on criteria we can measure and criteria that’s credible.”

WHEN RIVERA FIRST was hired as a head coach in 2011, he said many of the coaches on his Carolina staff didn’t have agents. Those who did, like himself, were represented mostly by agents such as Bauer who worked independently and had smaller agencies. Lamonte is still a lone wolf, the only coaching agent at his company, Pro Sports Representation, as are Flowers, Fletcher and McGuire. CAA and Athletes First are large companies with multiple coaching agents.

“[It’s] one of the biggest problems, more than anything else,” Rivera said, before correcting himself. “I shouldn’t say ‘biggest problem.’ It’s one of the things that people don’t realize is that there aren’t a lot of firms that handle coaches.”

Per the league office’s data, Athletes First represented four of the seven candidates who interviewed for the Titans’ general manager position in 2023, including Ran Carthon, eventually hired to the position and fired Jan. 7. The agency also represented the head coach and general manager in Chicago (Poles and Eberflus), Arizona (Monti Ossenfort and Jonathan Gannon) and Las Vegas (Dave Ziegler and Josh McDaniels, both fired in November 2023). Armstrong currently represents Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell, Seattle general manager John Schneider and Atlanta general manager Terry Fontenot, who do not work alongside GM or coach counterparts represented by Athletes First.

“[Athletes First is] playing the percentage game,” said a coaching agent who works for another firm. “I’m going to go get 10 young guys, and if two hit, it’s good. [The business has] changed a lot. We’ve gotten bigger, too. I’m looking at names on there [that our company represents] and I’m like, we’re representing this guy?”

As part of their services, many agencies host a summit during the offseason for their coaching and front office clients to meet. The Bears team website reported that Poles and Eberflus first met on the golf course at an event in 2020 (described as an “NFL growth and development summit,” though the NFL office confirmed the league did not hold such an event in 2020, meaning it was likely an agency summit), and Poles has said his intuition told him Eberflus was the right hire.

“In the last five years or so, agents have been very aggressive about networking their clients,” Graves said. “They bring all of their people together to spend three or four days networking and talking football. People leave there with an impression about people that they may want to hire or work with. … It makes it much easier for these people to make a decision based on those that they’ve been introduced to.”

Graves was a featured speaker at Athletes First’s 2021 summit, and the summit’s bio book listed Poles and Eberflus among the 68 coach and admin/executive attendees. Graves said his presentation to the Athletes First guests focused on the need to create a more informative hiring system and “ensuring that you’re hiring from a broad pool of information that really goes beyond those people that you’re familiar with.”

Just two days after the 36-year-old Poles was hired by the Bears in 2022 for his first general manager job, he chose Eberflus as his head coach. Poles also interviewed veteran head coaches Dan Quinn and Jim Caldwell but he felt most comfortable with the first-time head coach, who was represented by Poles’ own agent, a similar setup to the successful leadership and pattern of representation he’d been around in the Kansas City front office. Chiefs coach Andy Reid, general manager Brett Veach and defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo are all represented by Lamonte.

At Poles and Eberflus’ introductory news conference in January 2022, a reporter asked if sharing the same agent had anything to do with them knowing each other prior or throughout the hiring process. Eberflus turned to Poles, and Poles paused before answering. “I mean, I’m sure in terms of just getting a hold of each other and in contact with each other, that plays a part.”

“Yeah, it was an easy transition, or easier, I should say,” Eberflus added.

About a year before Eberflus got the Bears job, he met Getsy, who was Green Bay’s quarterbacks coach and passing game coordinator, also at an Athletes First summit. The two never made any official agreement or pact to work together, but they talked about their football philosophies and kept in touch, according to a source who was present.

When Eberflus got his chance to hire his own staff, he chose Getsy, also an Armstrong client. Just like Poles and Eberflus, the two had never worked together. Eberflus did not return calls for this story. Getsy declined to comment, and the Bears declined to make Poles available.

In addition to Poles, Eberflus and Getsy, Armstrong represented the previous Bears head coach, Nagy, who was fired after four seasons, and Nagy’s first offensive coordinator Helfrich, who was fired after two seasons. Waldron, fired as OC midway through his only season in Chicago, is represented by another Athletes First agent, as is Bears special teams coordinator Richard Hightower and quarterbacks coach Kerry Joseph.

“Trace Armstrong basically sells that he’s got all these clients, and he’s got a whole pool of people to choose from,” said another coaching agent, who has represented clients who have previously worked with Armstrong. “And he’ll help you put your staff together. And a lot of these coaches don’t know people in the league. They’re very insulated, and they don’t have their own network, and so they rely on agents.”

“During the season, we’re all pretty introverted guys,” one former Athletes First coaching client said. “We’re all bad at getting out there and meeting people. Most of us are very bad marketers of ourselves. … So for a young head coach that maybe doesn’t know a lot of people, [agents] can be pretty persuasive.”

One former NFL general manager said that when he interviewed coaches for jobs, he’d ask them to explain why they wanted to hire each coach on their dream staff list. Sometimes, the coach’s answer to the question was simply a shared agent.

“It was a little bit of a red flag,” the former general manager said. “Is his agent putting his staff together, or is he putting his staff together?

“[Arranging your coach’s staff is] a way to absolutely bury your coach,” one coaching agent said. “This [Chicago situation] is proof positive of it. … Believe me, we’re not in the building every day. We don’t know, really, how good or bad our guys really are. They all talk a good game, but we don’t know.”

One front office executive who has interviewed for general manager jobs said he thinks he hasn’t gotten the top job yet because he hasn’t been open to being paired with a head coach candidate. He said he wants to do it his way without having to enter into a strategic alliance, and he thinks that has hurt him in the process.

Another front office executive who doesn’t have representation said that this season, agents have been wearing him out “because they want to tie their coaching candidates with someone.”

Some coaching agents intentionally avoid representing general managers and coaches because they don’t feel comfortable with the potential conflict of the closely intertwined roles. One agent said he represented one general manager and then immediately stopped because several of his coaching clients fired him when he didn’t push his GM client to interview the coaching clients. Because of the agent connection, the coaches expected to get interviews. Another agent said he lost a front office client after a head coaching client recently landed a job and didn’t hire that front office client.

Armstrong told the “All 4 Gators” podcast that as of November 2023, Athletes First represented about 300 NFL players and “quite a few” NFL head coaches, general managers and NCAA head coaches.

“Still connected to the game, still helping the players out,” one of the hosts said.

“As I say,” Armstrong said on the podcast. “We’re all robbing the same train.”

ARMSTRONG’S RUN ON Chicago hiring might end at two consecutive head coaches. There’s a new team president who replaced Phillips and has assumed control over football operations. Kevin Warren joined the Bears in the 2023 offseason, primarily to run point on building a new stadium. But Warren has yet to make his mark on football hiring in Chicago. The Bears declined to make Warren available for this story.

In early December, Warren and Poles held a joint news conference where Warren did most of the talking and said Poles will be running the search, but when reporters pressed Warren on who would have final say over the coach hire if there were conflicting opinions, he didn’t give a clear answer and said they would work together to come to an agreement.

In January, following the regular season, Poles appeared solo at the podium to take his own questions first. McCaskey told reporters in an off-podium scrum after Poles’ news conference: “With guidance from Kevin, Ryan is going to make the best decision going forward.”

Still, the perception of Armstrong’s influence on Poles and the extent of Warren’s control over Poles, as well as Poles’ own job security (he declined to comment about his contract situation when asked in his January news conference) means head coaching candidates who have options, such as Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson, are going to have questions about this job.

On the Tuesday following the regular season, Poles said the Bears’ hiring committee includes McCaskey; Warren; director of football administration Matt Feinstein; senior director of player personnel Jeff King; executive vice president of people and culture and chief HR officer Liz Geist; and several business-side executives he did not mention by name. ESPN later reported that chief administrative officer Ted Crews will be part of the process, as will assistant general manager Ian Cunningham as he seeks general manager opportunities.

When asked if he would be using any “outside help,” Poles said: “Background yes, just to do some background work.”

He did not say who the outside help would be, and when McCaskey was asked specifically about that he said, “Whatever Ryan picks, that’s entirely up to him.”

Among the candidates with whom the Bears requested interviews was Bills offensive coordinator Joe Brady, who has won praise for his work in Buffalo and has a longstanding connection to Bears quarterback Caleb Williams. He’s represented by Armstrong.