Welcome To The NFL, Rook! Lawyers Wrangling Elites & Egos

Overview: 

This course explores current challenges of lawyers representing and advising elite (entitled) athletes, bombastic sports agents, and flawed institutions operating in today's mercurial and shifting compliance environment. Welcome to the NFL, Rook! gives lawyers an inside look at current developments in the NFL, NCAA, and Washington's WIAA - focusing on client management, let's call it "gray-area" decision-making, and emerging regulatory trends that every sports or compliance professional should understand. 

We'll examine impactful real-world issues from the past few years, including:

• The NFLPA's leadership controversies and allegations such as 'nudging' disgruntled players to embellish injuries for trade leverage, holding 'ol timey union meetings at strip clubs and a new FBI investigation involving potential self-dealing and conflicts of interest by union leadership.
• Agent discipline and competition in a marketplace where only 1,700 NFL players are represented by roughly 1,000 circling, hungry agents (AKA - a recipe for rationalizations and bad decision making when the rent is due).
• NCAA investigations into athlete wagering and improper benefits, and what these settlements and punishments reveal about compliance lapses and risk.
• The House v. NCAA settlement, creating the first-ever revenue-sharing model in college sports, introducing new roster and scholarship rules, implementing new Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) reporting requirements, and the establishment of a third-party enforcement group (College Sports Commission).
• The February 2025 NCAA transgender athlete policy change contrasted with Washington's WIAA policy, highlighting the complexity of balancing inclusion, fairness, and eligibility.
• The expanding reach of (NIL) opportunities at the college and high school levels, and the compliance and reputational concerns they raise.

My goal is to skip the theory whenever possible.  I'll focus on providing you with practical strategies for managing difficult, competitive, high-maintenance clients and help you maintain professional credibility when advising athletes and agents with significant influence and options. Let's face it - based on the numbers, you probably need that high-profile client more than they need you. So on the front end of the program - we'll cover client management tips and the impact of clients' cognitive bias, and then we'll dive into specific issues in the NFL, NCAA, and high school athletics.

Maybe you're saying, "But I don't practice sports law." But…you might soon. 

Family Law: Your client has a daughter in high school who plays high school golf. She just accepted $500 in free golf gear from Calloway. May she accept any more corporate golf gifts over the next 12 months and protect her amateur eligibility in golf?

Business Law: You are counsel for a local yoga studio near campus. Client needs advice on NIL rules for sponsored YouTube posts to stay out of trouble. Can your client pay an NCAA gymnast $600 (two payments of $300) and avoid NIL reporting requirements? 

Course Objective: 

• Learn to counsel high maintenance clients (athletes and agents) under intense public, reputational, and financial pressure.
• Navigate confusing, fast-changing NCAA and state-level rules.
• Approach sensitive policy debates - such as transgender participation with professionalism, empathy, and legal precision.
• Provide clients with a simple, understandable framework for Name + Image + Likeness changes, limits, and timelines.  

Target Audience: 

Lawyers interested in learning about the complex and always changing, competitive, mercurial world of sports law. This includes counsel for athletes and agents, brands seeking public figures for endorsements, and NCAA or high school athletic compliance staff.  

Basic Knowledge:

No advance knowledge required. Suitable for those who practice sports law and those who have occasional, tangential sports law issues that arise such as family law (children student-athletes) and business law (NCAA regulations and athlete endorsements).