In an NFL game earlier this month, the Jacksonville Jaguars faced a fourth-down play on the goal line. Coaches considered several options but eliminated one of them right away. Using rookie quarterback Trevor Lawrence on a sneak would be ill-advised, they believed, given the relatively few occasions he had practiced the play following a college career spent almost exclusively in the shotgun formation. The Jaguars instead handed the ball to tailback Carlos Hyde, who was stopped short of the goal line in a 37-19 loss to the Tennessee Titans.
That sequence was all too familiar for those who follow the infrastructure of player development in football. Lawrence, of course, said he would have been comfortable running a sneak if asked. In the bigger picture, though, he is among thousands of NFL players during the past two decades who have entered the league via a college feeder system that isn't obligated to prepare them for the professional level.
"You have the most popular sports property in the world, but the talent going into it has not been trained for that game," said longtime agent Don Yee, who counts quarterback Tom Brady among his clients. "It really doesn't make sense. Literally every other sport has that. Everybody that I talk to is in agreement that there is really no developmental space around the NFL, and frankly, the quality of the game is affected. We need to fill that hole with something."
Yee, as it turns out, has an idea. Through a company known as HUB Football, based outside of Los Angeles, he is planning an enterprise he hopes will spawn a full developmental league, one that -- yes -- would give top NFL prospects an alternative to college football. HUB's football business has started small, with one-day workouts for street free agents hoping to get noticed by NFL scouts. But Yee has visions of running what would amount to a series of Senior Bowl-like events for college players who aren't yet eligible for the NFL draft, a disruptive model that would ultimately create more options for players with NFL ambitions.
"If you want to play professional football," he said, "there is actually nowhere to go to get better at your craft, other than in the NFL throwing you into the fire. So that's the first thing we want to change. Given where we are in 2021, with all of the rapid disruption and innovation going on in other industries around us, I thought that the professional football industry might be helped by a little bit of innovation."
The developmental lane has been open since NFL Europe shuttered in 2006, and in the ensuing 15 years, the football ecosystem absorbed a series of additional blows. NFL owners made no attempt to revive NFL Europe domestically, at the same time agreeing to limit and shorten offseason practices during two successive collective bargaining agreements. And while the popularity of football has spurred a series of big-money leagues hoping to tap into the revenue stream, almost all of them have focused on entertainment rather than player development.
Most recently, neither the AAF (2019) nor the XFL (2020) made it through their inaugural seasons. The Spring League operated under a developmental model for four years, but it will fold into the new USFL, which is owned by Fox Sports and is targeting a spring 2022 launch. New owners of the XFL, meanwhile, have pushed back its return to 2023.
The NFL might own the market on entertainment, given the quality of its athletes and an increasing embrace of strategies that optimize the passing game and reward aggressive playcalling. But the developmental space seems ripe for action, said Eric Galko, a former XFL executive and the current director of football operations for the East-West Shrine Bowl.
"There's enough inefficiencies out there," Galko said. "Just from an analytics perspective, football players are by far the hardest to predict. You have the largest margin for error, and when you have that, you have to find ways to hedge against it. More development is definitely part of it."
Free-agent tryouts
Yee, who began representing NFL clients in 1988, has spent the past five years navigating through this space. He initially planned to launch a league known as Pacific Pro Football, which would have focused on giving star high school graduates or young college players an alternative to playing at their schools, in return for a head start on professional compensation.
He has since geared down that model. Instead of "trying to land a helicopter on the top of Mount Everest," as Yee put it, he decided to "start with base camp" and build a football business more slowly. HUB Football's first product is not directly aimed at player development, however. Instead, it has created a new platform for unsigned players to get in front of scouts, who for the past year have faced travel restrictions because of the COVID-19 pandemic. NFL teams, meanwhile, must put street free agents through a five-day COVID-19 protocol before allowing them to work out in a traditional way at their facilities, leading to a significant drop in visits over the past two seasons.
1v1s ⚔️
— HUB Football (@HUBFootball2020) October 20, 2021
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HUB Football hosted its eighth tryout camp in the past 12 months on Wednesday. The invitation-only roster included a mix of recognizable veterans, including defensive lineman David Irving and receiver Eli Rogers, and younger players who might have been missed during the draft or preseason scouting process. Each pays a $750 registration fee. Among Wednesday's participants at Dignity Health Sports Park in Carson, California, were Anthony Gordon, an ex-Washington State quarterback who was released in training camp by the Kansas City Chiefs, and receiver Clifford Kurker, a speedy former lacrosse player who spent a post-graduate season playing football at Boston College in 2019.
The camps are designed to mimic the types of workouts that players otherwise would face during visits to the facility. A handful of NFL and CFL scouts have attended each camp, and video is distributed to all teams. According to Yee, several NFL teams have signed on as clients who receive additional reports and access to player data. "We've become sort of an outsourced pro scouting department for them," Yee said.
"A lot of guys get missed," said HUB general manager Mike Williams, who spent two decades working in the personnel departments of the San Francisco 49ers and the then-St. Louis Rams. "When I was a pro director, I always felt like there was no way I could cover everybody. There are too many guys. It's impossible. These camps are one way to help with that."
Entering this week's camp, 80 of the 352 previous participants had gone on to sign professional contracts, according to league data.
"The biggest need out there right now is a way to get eyes on and verified information on those street free agents," Galko said. "That's the biggest inefficiency I see in the area right now. If there had been a second season of the XFL, a lot of our focus was going to be, not necessarily serving as a developmental league, but doing a lot better job of making sure the NFL and CFL have access points, data and verified information."
Return of the XFL and USFL?
There was no second season of the XFL, of course, and the league is at least 18 months away from relaunching under new ownership. Its 2020 season was canceled at the midpoint because of the pandemic, and owner Vince McMahon soon sold the brand name and intellectual property to a group headed by Dany Garcia, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and RedBird Capital Partners.
Garcia spent time negotiating possible partnerships with the CFL, but talks broke down earlier this year, and the XFL pushed back its projected return to the spring of 2023. President/chief operating officer Jeffrey Pollack recently left the company, and there are no publicly known full-time employees remaining. Garcia and Johnson wrote on Instagram this month that they were heading to New York for league meetings, but a spokesperson declined comment on the XFL's current operations and future.
In the meantime, the USFL has been searching for a central location to play a 40-game regular season in April 2022. It has discussed the possibility with the city of Birmingham, Alabama, a source said in confirming an AL.com report. Talks have focused on using the 45,000-seat Protective Stadium as the league's base of operations, a model The Spring League used under founder Brian Woods, who partnered with Fox Sports to revive the USFL brand name. Fox Sports declined comment, and the league has not made public any plans to hire coaches or personnel executives, or identify a process for signing players. Any player who is under offseason contract with an NFL team would be ineligible to play next spring in the USFL.
A developmental focus
Large-scale football league models ultimately rely on television revenue, and the difficulty in procuring them largely explains why no alternative football league has succeeded since the AFL merged with the NFL in 1970. Yee, however, has not given up on his vision of disrupting the NCAA monopoly by using the lure of pro-level development and compensation, even in the burgeoning NIL era.
Take the example of Lawrence, who led Clemson to the national championship game in his freshman and sophomore seasons. Players are ineligible for the NFL draft until they are three years removed from high school, meaning Lawrence's only option as a junior was to return to Clemson. But what if there had been an option to play in a developmental league whose sole priority was to deliver him to the NFL (or CFL) with sharper professional skills while minimizing the risk to his health?
"That model has been proven in every other sport," Yee said. "If we can continue to get traction with our business and keep improving at it, we can successfully escalate into a good game product. That would allow us to attract the best rising talent in a way that you see in the [NBA] G League for basketball. If you're a rising star, you could play 12-14 games in college or you could leave the university from a football standpoint and play in HUB games for your junior year. You see it in baseball and hockey. They can go to college or the minor leagues. In golf, tennis and soccer they have the academies. All of those athletes have options and choices, and I want to create a product that gives football players some of those choices as well."
A HUB Football league, Yee said, would allow players to choose up to six games to play and practice in, all under the eyes of professional coaches and with scouts in attendance. Rosters would ideally be a mix of ages and skill level. Game rules would seek to minimize injury risk, including the elimination of kickoffs and a ban on blitzing. Quarterbacks would learn pro-level schemes. Offensive linemen could work on techniques that NFL coaches don't have time to teach.
Financing for such an operation wouldn't be as steep as, say, the $200 million that McMahon spent on restarting the XFL in 2020. But it would necessitate at least some buy-in from players who are either top-end recruits or major college stars, whom Yee said could attract media deals as well as high interest level from fans.
It could be a tough sell, but there is little doubt about two facts. First, there remains a recognized need for developing pre-NFL players. Second, there are new ideas surfacing about how to get it done.