A Q&A on the state of NIL: College agents open up about negotiations, transfer decisions, more originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
The modern era of college football recruiting is -- in some ways -- the wild west. Thanks to NIL, revenue sharing and players being able to enter the transfer portal, it has become one of the most chaotic parts of the sport.
One of the people tasked with helping players navigate it all are name, image and likeness agents. In addition to a wide variety of other responsibility, agents help players broker NIL deals, choose which school is best for them and help them maximize their market value.
The Sporting News spoke with a couple of NIL agents in Charles Cox of Red Envelope Sports and Peter Webb of QB Reps to learn more about how the industry works and about what being an NIL agent means.
Red Envelope represents several NFL, college and high school athletes, including New Orleans Saints receiver Devaughn Vele and Washington State quarterback Caden Pinnick. QB Reps, which only signs quarterbacks, features clients in USC's Jayden Maiava, Wake Forest's Gio Lopez, Vanderbilt's Jared Curtis and Tennessee's George MacIntyre as well as Los Angeles Rams rookie Ty Simpson and Denver's Bo Nix in the NFL.
Below, both Cox and Webb discuss a number of topics, from who they negotiate with at the schools to how transfer decisions are made.
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TSN: How long have you been in the business and how did you get involved in the business?
Charles Cox: "A longtime friend Don Yee, he's represented Tom Brady since Tom came out of Michigan, still represents Tom. He represents three NFL head coaches [Jim Harbaugh, Sean Payton and Mike McCarthy]. Don had heard I had sold my company and he had rebranded his NFL agency to Red Envelope Sports about five years ago, and wanted someone to take it over.
Long story short, [I] ended up buying the agency from him. I took over the NFL agency. We started the NIL division about two years ago. [We] just tried to approach it in the same way we approached our NFL side of the business in a boutique-like way, offering families senior agent experience."
Peter Webb: "I've been a sports agent for 22 years. I've never done anything else in my career since graduating law school, and worked with professional athletes in a lot of different sports. I always recruited at the college level and represented them as professional athletes. Five years ago, instead of recruiting them when they're sophomores or juniors in college, we started recruiting when they were in high school. So it's not like my job changed, to be honest. We just started recruiting them earlier."
TSN: What does the process of finding a player a fit and matching that with compensation work?
Webb: "When a kid is trying to pick a school, we're talking to Michigan, we're talking to Notre Dame, we're talking to Florida. We're helping them understand what that all looks like. Not just necessarily their financial package, because we really try to stay away from that.
We're concentrating on the school, the location, their community, their track record, their coaching staff, the quarterbacks that have come through that, their process, like their recruiting class, the development, like we're looking at a lot, a lot of different things. The financial package for us, we try to make that come in after they've already selected the school they're going to."
Cox: "We try to focus on generating the best football outcome for the player, and if you do that, the money is highly correlated with that if you go find the best spot. In this day and age, you try to focus on head coach security, right? Because you don't want to put a young man into a program where he could have to be there for six or 12 months and have to leave immediately. Which is hard, right? Because the coaches leave just as much as the players."
Webb: "Every year when we are dealing with the top programs in the country, I already can tell a kid 'hey, if your final five are LSU, Bama, Tennessee, Georgia, and Miami, I already have a really good idea what it's going to look like for all these schools, they're all going to be competitive. So just go pick the best school for you, and then I'll make it work.'"
Cox: "Obviously, the player has to build a great relationship with the position coach because that's who they're going to spend the vast majority of their time with, right? So all those things when you huddle up with a family and and try to figure out."
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TSN: Who are you typically communicating with at schools? Is it general managers, coaches or both?
Cox: "When you're dealing with NIL, FBS, Power-Four schools, the Group of Six schools, virtually everyone has a general manager. And if it's not a general manager on paper, it's kind of a de facto GM."
Webb: "I'm talking to the head coaches. I'm talking to offensive coordinators, and I'm talking to the quarterback coaches as well as their GM and recruiting coordinator, director of player personnel."
Cox: "I never call coaches, that isn't my thing. I think they're a little bit out of the loop on the money. That's got to be frustrating for them, that they're kind of taken out of the money piece. I don't know if they don't like dealing with agents or they're kind of just annoyed by the dynamic of them being left out of such an important piece of the puzzle."
TSN: December is a chaotic time, as the Early Signing Period coincides with the coaching carousel and the College Football Playoff. What is it like navigating that?
Cox: "I've got a very transactional background, so it's not crazy to me. It's a blast. Solving problems with a gun to your head, that's fun to me. It's going to be crazy for the coaches and the staff because they aren't classically trained in this. These guys are classically trained in other things.
They have God-given abilities to communicate and train these kids and inspire them on the field that they're not good at this stuff, right? That doesn't make them bad coaches or bad professionals, they're being asked to do things they have no track record in. This is human resources."
Webb: "A lot goes into the portal because sometimes kids don't want to transfer, but they get recruited from other schools and other coaches. 'hey, come here, making promises—come here, you'll play right away. We can get you on the field. Using that angle of playing time can be very attractive. That's that's one. The second part is sometimes you have boosters and donors and collectives, calling and offering extremely, you know, lucrative financial package to come somewhere else and play."
Cox: "How the portal is structured with now 10 days in the first week of January, much of [that] crosses over with some of the FBS schools starting school. It's ridiculous that the concept of GMS and agents speaking is somehow looked down upon by the industry. It'd be ridiculous to ask these young men to go find a new place, negotiate their deal, and fly around on official visits in 10 days, yeah, and then enroll in a new school without professional help."
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TSN: What are conversations like for players wanting to enter the transfer portal or stay put?
Cox: "We play that role of insurance agent. That if things go bad at the last minute, when a school tells you, 'Hey, I think you should find a new place to play—which they do, by the way—right at the end of the semester, or something changes at the last minute in November, before signing day. We can go create opportunities out of thin air because we're always in the mix with all these FBS schools."
Webb: "Our job is really to say 'look, if you take the money out of it, what is the best scenario for you to develop and get on the field?' Because if your dream is to play in the NFL, then what's the best way to do that? Sometimes it's not just getting up and leaving and transferring to a new school right away for playing time."
Cox: "We're really the most important to the client when things don't go their way. When things go their way, then we're able to, you know, generate, you know, leverage for them and and just put a little bit of fear into the school that 'this young man has options.' He's not stuck with you."
Webb: "We're very big on, just because you're not playing your first year doesn't mean you hit the portal and chase something and start over again. I think that separates us too, is trying to make sure that our kids understand that you need to be developed. You need to give yourself a chance to learn the system, to learn the offense, to build your relationships with coaches. And it's hard if you are changing every year."
Week 6 of CFB for our guys.... pic.twitter.com/shyhRRJp6Y
— Red Envelope Sports (@Red_Env_Sports) October 13, 2026
TSN: What would you say to players who want to represent themselves or avoid having an agent?
Cox: "I feel very strongly that we will be able to get more money for you, Mr. Player and his family, than you will be able to get for yourself.
I don't care who you are. I don't care if you're a CEO of a Fortune 100 company, or you're a freshman, you know, college football player, representing yourself with respect to money and employment is very difficult, right? It's awkward, it gets emotional, and if it doesn't go perfectly, you know, you're starting the relationship off on a bad foot."
Webb: "Take a five-star quarterback who goes to a college, and let's say he's getting a million dollars. $100,000 out a million dollars might be from rev-share, which means $900,000—90% of his money—is going to come through endorsement deals. It's going to come through multimedia rights partners.
So that kid then has to work with the school and fulfill tons of obligations for the school providing these endorsement services. So does a dad or a mom or a kid want to have a phone call every week discussing the soft drink deal, the automobile deal, the insurance deal, the banking deal, the apparel deal? They're all part of his package. 'Hey, you have this shoot. You got to do this social media post. You have this appearance.'"
TSN: What are some of the biggest misconceptions about what you do?
Webb: "People in the industry think, 'Why are these agents taking commissions off of deals that the kids are getting while they're in college, they should get that money anyway.' For quarterbacks and skill guys, it's just completely inaccurate. To make up the money that the school's paying them. There are a lot of obligations and deliverables that they have to fulfill, and having an agent to make sure that this deal for this brand is good for you. This deal is not good for you. This deal takes too much time. This isn't fair market value. So just because a school says, 'Hey, we want you to do this Pepsi deal, and we're going to give you $25,000, you need an agent to say, 'That deal is actually worth $125,000. Here's why.'"
Cox: "There's different kinds of programs, that are evolving from, this program used to be a program that developed young players, and now because of the economics, just can't justify developing young players. We've heard FBS programs say, 'I'm not recruiting high school players anymore. I'm just doing portal and Junior College.
And you understand why because these coaches are being asked to do a lot. They're being asked to coach a position, they're being asked to recruit. They're being asked to manage a team. They're being asked to now deal with the portal, which is hundreds and hundreds of names and extra work and review. So, you kind of have to use your time wisely, and not to mention the overall pressure of only having three to five,years to build something."
Excited to make some #MaiavaMagic with one of the nation’s best! Welcoming USC QB Jayden Maiava to the QB Reps squad. pic.twitter.com/5s6tlwfFZK
— QB Reps (@QBReps) February 24, 2026
TSN: Describe some of the biggest challenges about your job.
Webb: "When kids get to school, other schools recruiting them through coaches, collectives and street guys trying to recruit them to switch schools to hit the portal because it's not for their the kids' best interest.
Our job is to serve the kids' best interest, and a lot of people that are recruiting our quarterbacks to flip or to transfer or whatever it is, they're not doing it for the kid's best interest."
Cox: "The most challenging parts revolve around the parents usually. Their expectations are out of whack with reality or they don’t quite understand how much work is involved on our end. Sometimes the clients who are raised very well find it very difficult to do the “smart football business” things you need to do in order to prepare for changed circumstances out of their control like visiting other schools while they’re committed to a school, etc."
TSN: What are some of the most rewarding parts of the job?
Cox: "Typically when you have a client who may not have been an elite recruit in high school and you help them make the right moves, whether that be to FCS or JUCO in their first one to two years that allows them to develop on and off the field and achieve their dreams at playing at a higher level at a bigger school for their last two to three years of college. Obviously, seeing a college player you’ve had a long-term relationship with make the NFL is an awesome feeling as well."
Webb: "For me there was a lot of reward signing Ty Simpson in high school. Being a part of that process to Alabama, and then that whole why he waited, he sat, he developed. He didn't take the easy road, he didn't go transfer for millions of dollars. He continued to put his head down and grind and trust the process. That got him on the field, and he was a first-round pick.
Those are the most rewarding things for me to see kids go through adversity, but stick it out and trust the process. And I think that's kind of what our agency is kind of founded on: Don't run when adversity hits you, don't chase the money. What's going to give you the best chance for success for the long term?"
TSN: What changes do you think could be made to improve the NIL Agent industry or what would you like to see added?
Cox: "I don't think you get to a solution without coming up with some hybrid student-athlete employee classification for everyone, so they can collectively bargain. And they can create some parameters that that actually you know include the voice of the student athletes themselves."
Webb: "Number one is there's got to be agent certification. That's number one. That's one of the biggest problems is that you have runners and street guys and coaches doing multi-million-dollar deals for kids with zero experience, zero background, zero resume. They're not registered in the state. They're not registered with the school. They're not registered. There's no compliance checks."