While it’s true this column has long questioned the advisability of the National Football League’s spring rituals – rookie minicamp, organized team activities (OTA’s), veteran minicamp, and all the other injury-tempting protocols leading to maxicamp – there is, admittedly, one aspect to these next few weeks that is absolutely crucial, particularly to some of the youngest players involved.
Beginning soon, the Steelers, with some assistance from the league office, will present to their rookies and most urgently to their prized draft picks a kind of crash course in the facts of NFL life. For those draft picks, the dynamics have changed dramatically since their names were called last weekend in Nashville.
Before every draft, the Steelers interview approximately 150 players, but the post-draft interview can be very different.
“In post-draft interviews, that’s where we can say, ‘Look, we’re (no longer) buyin’ and you’re not sellin’, so let’s be truthful about some of the things in your background,’” Steelers general manager Kevin Colbert said. “It’s about who they are and where they’re coming from. That’s when Terry Cousin, our player engagement coordinator, will have sessions every day that they are here.
“We have a mandate that they have to attend. Terry will do usually an hour or an hour and a half every day. He’ll talk to them and he’ll bring in former players and industry professionals who’ll talk about everything from finances to relationships to drug and alcohol issues to counseling to social media to security, a different agenda every day.”
The multitude of insidious pratfalls that can await these young men has thorough documentation, but currently it’s the hard cash that’s providing a worsening whiplash. With research showing that incoming NFL players are coming from poorer and poorer communities all the time, what happens when you give someone with little or no experience handling money more money than they literally know what to do with?
That’s not a rhetorical question, because there are so many answers, few of them good. This is a period in a young person’s life when he might be transitioning from being essentially a homeless high school kid to having $80,000 in cash he’d almost forgotten about lying around in a backpack (next to a gun). Not to mention any examples of precisely that scenario, but Antonio Brown reported the theft of a backpack meeting that description to Florida law enforcement one day before calling back to say his Rolls Royce had been stolen.
And he was 30.
“There is such a disparity in income on an NFL roster; most people don’t last long and don’t get out with a lot of money,” said Rob Ruck, the eminent professor of sports history at Pitt. “If A.B. blows 50 million, that’s on him, but these other kids, more can be done for them.”
The kid I’m rooting hardest for from this draft might be Josh Jacobs, the Alabama running back taken 24th in the first round by the Oakland Raiders. At his official press conference in Nashville, Jacobs talked about his father and their back story, which is pretty dreadful but nowhere close to uncommon.
“He was starting to get emotional,” Jacobs said about his dad, a single parent still in the process of raising five kids in grinding poverty. “I was thinking about everything he sacrificed for me. I told him not to cry because I don’t want to cry on TV.”
Jacobs said he never saw his father sleep. He kept the family together, living in cars and ratty motels. Josh didn’t have a bed until he got to college. Soon he’ll sign a contract that will pay him around $12 million for the next four years, about $7 million of that a signing bonus. Is Josh ready for that? How could he be?
“I hope to live on endorsements; I don’t plan on touching my checks,” he said later in that conference. “I’m in the business of longevity, of having my family set for life. My father said he didn’t even want me to give him money. I’m not too flashy. I don’t really like to do too much. I don’t even have a certain thing I want to spend money on.”
That was last week. This week is when draft picks can start signing contracts and getting paid. Then they’ll get exposed to veterans, which is wonderful, and to veteran lifestyles, which might not be.
“They’ll see the lifestyles of some of the veterans who are making significant dollars and they’ll think, ‘Oh, this is me now,’” Colbert said. “When we bring them in, and Coach (Mike Tomlin) really took this process to another level by starting the post-draft interviews and bringing in the families because we started to recognize more problems. They tell us more now. In the pre-draft, they’re a little protective. Parents really like it because there are a lot of things they didn’t realize. We say, ‘Look, your son may only last 3 ½ years, that’s the average career in the NFL. If he’s fortunate enough to get a second contract, he’s beating the odds. If he does, there should be a lot of good fortune if he manages his lifestyle and we’re going to help him manage it.’”
Of course, the odds already beaten by the draft picks in next week’s seminars are even more staggering. The NCAA estimates 1.6 percent of college football players will play professionally, yet reliable studies have indicated that 39 percent of white players and 85 percent of African American college players aspire to exactly that.
Often in the case of the most financially disadvantaged in any draft pool, the NFL is their aspiration because it’s their only inspiration, if by inspiration you really mean desperation. With spectacular exceptions, football is not the answer to poverty.
Steelers Super Bowl hero Santonio Holmes, a graduate of Glades Central High School in the inland sugar cane muck of South Florida, once talked to me about the death of Pooh Griffith, the seventh kid shot and the second to die in 2008 as part of the backdrop for the rivalry between Glades Central and nearby Pahokee.
Holmes said not to blame football.
“I don’t think that’s it at all,” he said. “The violence is mostly the other kids, not the football players. They don't have any opportunity to do anything else but be in gangs. Football is the only way out. That area has no choice but to continue holding football above everything else."
That was a decade ago. A decade before that, I got to attend a draft party in the West Palm Beach backyard of Fred Taylor’s grandmother. Taylor, a running back and Holmes’ older cousin, was taken by the Jacksonville Jaguars in the first round. It was a happy time. His extended family danced and laughed into the night. One cousin wore a t-shirt with dollar signs all over it.
Four years later, Taylor was testifying in federal court that his agent, Tank Black (who also repped former Steelers first-round pick Troy Edwards) had stolen his $5 million signing bonus. Black went to prison on unrelated charges.
You might guess that with at least a couple of decades worth of unfortunate history informing this process, the new players who’ll arrive next week might be better prepared for the dangers involved. And you would be wrong about that.
“I would say no,” said Colbert, a scout, personnel director, and NFL executive for going on 35 years. “Each player has representatives and should have financial advisers, but too many times, it’s gone awry.”
And too many times, the depressed communities that generate NFL talent fail to benefit when one or two or a handful of their kids hit the football lottery.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that the economic profile of the NFL is getting lower and lower; it’s mostly poor people who are (coming into) football now,” Ruck said. “I wonder if it would be possible for the league to look at what goes back into the communities. If the league could set something up with the player, maybe set up a trust that the league could match that would go to the communities the players are coming from. Invest in social capital. I know the league is doing some things, but the more pressure they get the more likely they’ll invest in communities.”
For the moment, you new Steelers, enjoy the still dubious proposition of May football, and try not to tear anything.
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Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com and Twitter @genecollier.
First Published: May 6, 2019, 12:00 p.m.