Super agent Leigh Steinberg dishes on Mahomes mania: ‘Patrick is a national phenomenon’
Leigh Steinberg is representing the NFL’s hottest player, reigning MVP and Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes. He’s represented eight Hall of Famers, including quarterbacks Troy Aikman and Steve Young, during their playing days.
Given his experience and tenure, Steinberg is among the most knowledgeable in the sports world. He’s mentored people such as TCU athletics director Jeremiah Donati and Showtime Sports president Stephen Espinoza. He’s also groomed other high-profile agents who have since broken off on their own such as Athletes First’s David Dunn and Rep1’s Bruce and Ryan Tollner.
Steinberg will share what he’s learned over the years later this month at the Steinberg Sports Career Conference on March 23 at SMU, a program he started geared toward those interested in working in sports.
The daylong seminar features speakers from, among others, the Cowboys, Texas Rangers, Dallas Mavericks and Panini, and is designed to give attendees a real-life perspective on how the industry works.
The seminar is $250 for professionals and $150 for students.
Steinberg, who inspired the Oscar-nominated film Jerry Maguire, talked about the seminars and other pressing NFL topics with the Star-Telegram.
Why’d you decide to do this seminar?
I’ve spoken on 83 campuses across the country and the hottest field is aspiring to a career in sports. This field has exploded in terms of the mass of job opportunities that exist from working for a league, a team, a conference, a sports agency, a sports marketing firm, sports television. I’ve tried to put together a program to mentor next generation of sports professionals. It’s designed for people of any age. We’ve had high school students come, college students, law students, we’ve had older people come who are out doing a career and want to know what the options are in sports.
It’s an overview, but very specifically where possible careers are and the opportunities to interact with these people. How do you get started? What’s the background? What’s my job like day to day? You’ll get a better feel for how to break into the field.
People link you to Jerry Maguire and your popular Super Bowl party and see the “fun” side of being an agent. But that’s not the day to day life, right?
Yes. The first thing you want to do is be realistic about the level of competition. There are 900 certified agents, so you want to be realistic with young people about how treacherous a path to sports agency can be. We talk about persuasion and recruiting and how to find clients, but mostly how to listen. Understanding your client’s deepest hopes and dreams. There are three central components to sports agency -- recruiting, contract negotiations and client relations.
You recruited a pretty good one in Mahomes.
He’s the hottest player in professional sports right now in some ways. He’s new. He’s gifted. He’s a wonderful person. Given the fact that he’s the MVP of the league in his first year of starting, we’ll have intense curiosity of how he got there.
Did you see him “getting” there?
You could see he was an extraordinarily gifted talent at Texas Tech. What some people failed to accurately project was they only looked at the Air Raid offense and thought he was a gunslinger. Well, Texas Tech’s defense was such that if he had to score 50-plus points a game. It put tremendous pressure on him to score every drive. But his skill set and freakishly gifted arm, his intelligence, his athletic temperament, made him an ideal franchise quarterback prospect. And, if you liked him as a player, you loved him as a person.
He’s the consummate role model.
The NFL seems to be a sport, too, where players from smaller markets can become household names like Peyton Manning in Indianapolis.
Football’s a national game. It’s followed nationally. It’s America’s sport. Who does the most endorsements? It was Peyton Manning who played in Indy and Denver, and Aaron Rodgers who plays in Green Bay and Drew Brees who plays in New Orleans.
It’s a national game and what you’ll find in a smaller market is that their passion tends to be much higher than in a city such as Los Angeles. The ‘buy rate’ for everything Mahomes is enormous. It’s like when we put a T-shirt out for Big Ben in Pittsburgh and sold more than 400,000. You get people who are much more passionate and much more focused in local markets, and then nationally we’re constructing a whole set of national endorsements.
Patrick is a national phenomenon. People are excited about him in Los Angeles and New York and all across the country.
Finally, how closely do you monitor the QB market? The Cowboys have a chance to extend Dak Prescott this offseason. The Chiefs with Mahomes next year. It seems like the QB market keeps going up?
It’s become a quarterback-centric game. It’s impossible to win right now without a franchise quarterback. That’s someone you can win because of rather than with, someone you can build a team around, someone who in critical situations can elevate their level of play.
The question becomes this — if you don’t lock that quarterback now, then who? The teams that have one, the market explodes and goes higher and higher. That one position is going to continue to explode, so the question is what’s the alternative if you don’t sign a quarterback long term? The alternative is to do what happened with Washington and Kirk Cousins, perpetually franchise tag him, which makes no one happy.
This story was originally published March 6, 2019 at 8:00 AM.
