Episode #012: The Salary Cap Godfather (Joe Banner)

 🎙️ Negotiation Warriors – Episode #012: The Salary Cap Godfather with Joe Banner

 
In Episode #012 of Negotiation Warriors, I sit down with one of the most innovative front office executives in NFL history—Joe Banner.
 
As President of the Philadelphia Eagles and CEO of the Cleveland Browns, Joe helped reshape how NFL teams approach roster construction, contract negotiations, and salary cap management. Throughout his career, he pioneered strategies that gave his organizations a competitive advantage and influenced how front offices across the league manage the salary cap today.
 
In this conversation, Joe takes listeners inside the executive suite to explain how championship organizations are built—not just through great players, but through disciplined preparation, strategic negotiation, innovative thinking, and a relentless pursuit of competitive advantage.
 
In this episode, you'll learn:
 

•  How a chance friendship with Eagles owner Jeff Lurie launched one of the NFL's most influential executive careers. 
•  Why negotiation extends far beyond player contracts and influences every aspect of building a winning organization. 
•  How the Eagles became innovators in salary cap management, contract structure, and roster construction. 
•  Why extending core players before free agency can create millions of dollars in long-term salary cap value. 
•  How identifying undervalued talent—including Jason Peters and other overlooked players—helped build championship-caliber rosters. 
•  Why evaluation must always precede valuation. 
•  How analytics, preparation, and collaboration became competitive advantages inside the Eagles' front office. 
•  Joe's philosophy on hiring great people, empowering employees, and creating a culture where innovative ideas thrive. 
•  The leadership principles that helped build one of the NFL's most successful organizations. 
•  Why listening remains one of the most powerful—and underrated—skills in every negotiation. 

Joe also shares behind-the-scenes stories about building the Eagles into perennial contenders, creating front office innovations that spread throughout the NFL, and why the best negotiators are constantly thinking several moves ahead.
 
Whether you're an executive, coach, agent, attorney, business leader, or simply fascinated by leadership and negotiation, this episode offers an insider's look at how winning organizations think, plan, and negotiate.
 
🎧 Listen now: Search Negotiation Warriors

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Like we literally, I remember having a meeting where we literally, kind of jokingly, but not really jokingly, decided that we were gonna we were gonna treat this like we were stock investors. And what stock investors do is they look for underappreciated assets. If you had three out of 22 players, and we almost always had two or three, and you used none of your assets to get them, and they're now 10 or 15 percent of your starting players, you're gonna have a huge advantage on the cap.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Welcome to Negotiation Warriors. I am Cliff Stein, and I am on a never-ending quest to learn what it takes to be a great negotiator. In every episode, I will sit down with some of the greatest negotiators in professional sport who will share insight, knowledge, and draw upon their real-life negotiation. Negotiation Warriors is by Front Office 360. Premium at management software. To find out how we are helping college athletic programs, go to frontoffice360.com to schedule a demo. Welcome back to Negotiation Warriors, the podcast that features conversations with some of the greatest negotiators in professional sports. I am your host, Cliff Stein. Today's guest is a longtime colleague, friend, mentor. He's not known as a very tall man, but he is a giant when it comes to negotiations. He's one of the most respected professional sports executives, one of the most brilliant minds, and sharpest negotiators the NFL has ever seen. Joe Banner spent over two decades helping build winning organizations across the NFL, including serving as the president of the Philadelphia Eagles and Chief Executive Officer of the Cleveland Browns. He's widely regarded as the pioneer of the salary cap, some would even call him the Godfather, helping shape how teams think about roster construction, long-term planning, and discipline resource allocation in a cap-constrained environment. He was at the negotiating table for some of the most complex deals in the league, negotiating over billions of dollars in player contracts, also involved in front office strategy and league-wide labor issues, earned a reputation for preparation, discipline, and principled decision making. Joe created the blueprint for how to negotiate and structure deals. As a former contract negotiator and salary cap manager myself, I can say that when Joe did something, we were all watching very closely, and then we copied it. Today brings the same clarity and perspective to advising teams, executives, and leagues on leadership, negotiation, and organizational excellence. Joe, welcome to the Negotiation Warriors podcast.

SPEAKER_02 3:25

Well, I hope I deserved at least a small piece of that very kind introduction. Well, we are in the Mutual Admiration Society here, so it's almost funny for me to hear you say that because it was kind of a ditto kind of thing. Similarly, I always looked at what you were doing and was always aware that you were the small group that could be coming up with something that was kind of the next trend that you wanted to be on the front end of.

SPEAKER_00 3:49

I appreciate that. And that's why I knew I knew you'd be perfect for this podcast because um you've done so much and there's so many people out there, especially the newer ones that don't realize how much you have done in the history to when the cap started and all the negotiations really uh with agents took place. But before we get into any of that, I'm curious if you can share with us, like how did you get into sports in the first place?

SPEAKER_02 4:18

Yeah, um I guess a little interesting and hard to replicate, unfortunately. But I, Jeff Lurie, you know, the owner of the Eagles, is has been a uh friend since, you know, I think I was 15. Actually called up a friend on Sunday morning and said, Are you gonna be watching the games today? And he said, Yeah, I said you want to watch together. And he said, I'm actually already going over someone's house, but I'm sure you'd be welcome. And that was a mutual friend that Jeff Lurry and I had, and I said, sure, and had no idea the impact that was gonna happen on my life, but it was uh turned out to be a great moment and a great introduction.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

And how did that turn into you know the job that you had with the Philadelphia Eagles?

SPEAKER_02 5:02

He said, I need some help on the acquisition, and if you'd be interested and we succeed, I'd love to have you stand side by side with me and help me run the team on a day-to-day basis. I didn't need to think about it very long. I was very excited and pleased.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

Did you know at the time that he called you and asked you about that, did you know you would have involvement in uh player contracts and contract negotiations?

SPEAKER_02 5:26

No, he had some people advising him that, well, Jeff, you know, you don't really have any experience in the business. Why are you making your first key hire someone who also has no experience in the business? He had some people pressuring him a little bit to not make me that first hire and key role. But he stuck to his guns, and I'm appreciative of it because I wouldn't have had the career I had in sports, which I really loved if not for that.

SPEAKER_00 5:48

So this was again, we're dating ourselves, but 1994, one year into a new CBA, which imposed the salary cap on the NFL. And you were somehow you were assigned to be the one to learn about this collective bar agreement and salary cap?

SPEAKER_02 6:10

Yeah, so we got to the point where Jeff was kind of true to, you know, kind of doing it together and and making decisions together. Um, but didn't have a concrete, kind of specific job description for kind of what I was gonna do, how it we introduced, you know. Um and at the time the uh Eagles had a uh salary cap person who has to be as old as us, but a guy named Bob Wallace. And uh we brought in a guy, Bob Accles, who had been kind of Jimmy Johnson's right-hand man going all the way back in his career. Um and we uh decided to just, you know what, let's just start to see naturally how what gravitates to be kind of the right things for you to do. And it was obviously a couple of things, at least in our opinion, weren't being done kind of the way we wanted to. One of them was a Sally cap. So, you know, it was kind of on the list of, you know, why don't you make sure you learn this so that depending upon where this goes over time and exactly what you're gonna do, you'll have a background as opposed to, you know, learning on the fly. So I started doing that, mostly just observing at the beginning with both Bob Ackles and Bob Wallace. And there's a part of it's just almost like you're you're in school and you're just reading it and trying to remember it and start using it, which makes it, at least in my case, easier for me to remember by using it as opposed to just reading it. And then after a little bit, we did move on uh from Bob Wallace, and Bob Ackles and myself kind of shared the responsibility initially. And we got to the point where it was more clear to Jeff and I the areas and the spaces that I could make a difference in where I should kind of focus my energy. Some of it was like very long term. I mean, I started to try to figure out the dynamics of doing the stadium deal very quickly because we needed to get that going fairly fast. Some of it was longer term, like listen, I don't know if it's gonna be next year or three years from now, but you're gonna end up running the cap. So, you know, here's the short list of things you should focus on and and which ones I want to have you start sticking over sooner than rather than later. And that led to the cap. And and we were right about that. The Eagles prior ownership, they did a fine job in general, but they were really difficult, you know, creating good relationships with people and being able to get deals done and know what you were talking about. I mean, you mentioned, you know, researching deals. It was one of the things I took pride in, you know, the people that when I was initially helping Bob, and then I had people helping me. I was if I ever go into a negotiation and I come out of a feeling like the uh person I'm talking to is better prepared than I am, then you know, shame on all of us. So we became very obsessed with. I mean, I used to put proposals or letters or just describe how we're thinking about things. I had more than one person tell me, you know, this is so much more detailed than anybody else does. Um so that felt to me like that was kind of a reinforcement that this was an important thing and there was room to do it a lot better than it had been getting done.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Yeah, so you mentioned good relationships, and one of the things that I I grew up in Philadelphia. I was a Philadelphia fan at the time Jeff Laurie purchased the team and you were hired. And 1994, I'm gonna date me now. I was my first year as an agent. But one of the things that I immediately noticed that was done, and I don't know if this was your idea, if it was Jeff Laurie's idea, but I never forgot it was you guys immediately, almost immediately, invited all the agents for the current players, I believe, on the Eagles roster to the Eagles facility and had some type of event. Do you do you recall that?

SPEAKER_02 9:47

Yeah, it was actually at a I forget which, but one of the meetings that so it was not in Philadelphia, but yes, we were flagrantly breaking the rules. We got away with because we honestly didn't realize how bad a line we were crossing. So we actually had a gathering where there was some league meeting, some reason a lot of agents would be there at the hotel. So we just hosted really like a cocktail hour. And it was just it was sincerely meant like, you know, everybody else in the league knows all these people. We literally don't know any of them. We've got to kind of build a reputation, kind of build what we thought would be the Eagles' new kind of culture. So we were really just wanting to have a chance to meet people, introduce ourselves, and then you kind of know who who's on the other end of the phone. So it ended up being a bit of a commotion. And I mean, we we realized quickly that we had broken the rules. We didn't realize just how far we had crossed the line initially. And I think the consequence of our actions would have been much greater if they didn't really believe we didn't really know what the hell we were doing. So it was actually not ill-intended, just against the rules.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

So that was an interesting. Was there other agent relation tactics that you thought were important when you were negotiating?

SPEAKER_02 10:56

Well you know, this was actually my uh self-awareness of the importance. This actually came from observing you. If you like the person, you tend to like what they're selling you. So it's important to be liked and respected. It's not the whole thing, but you do have a bit of an advantage if you're you know dealing with people that you like and respect. It's one of the areas that I thought I I honestly, there was nobody in the league even close to you on the subject. Because the uniqueness of negotiating the NFL is you tend to be negotiating with the same people over and over again. And I don't care who you are, that's challenging. I mean, there's some stress and even the relatively straightforward deals and some anxiety and, you know, player and their family and and everybody in the locker room talking to each other. So I thought you did the best job by far of being able to get good deals without going through a whole bunch of stress and aggravation. Seem seemingly, maybe it was more difficult, but seemingly building the relationships with agents that seemed to cut through that. Just seemed like you were always dealing with people that liked you, respected you. And most people in the league, and I put myself in this category, you know, it's a mixed bag. I mean, some people you can sustain a friendly relationship over a lot of years and a number of negotiations with the same people. Um, and some people that just the way you're each wired, uh, you'll always have a few that uh don't appreciate, you know, your style or whatever. And I probably was personally overly aggressive at the beginning. So as I realized I realized this uh over time and saw you doing it in such a successful way, I think it made me a lot better.

SPEAKER_00 12:32

That's very interesting that I had an impact on you because I was closely watching you. But one of the things I noticed early on, and I worked with you you you guys had some good executives there that I was able to build relationships like Mike Lombardi and Bobby DePaul and even Mike McCartney, all really, really I thought good talent evaluators. But one of the things I would notice early where you were doing that no one else was doing, like, well, some of the things are like maybe four-year deals um in the second round when that wasn't a thing. Five-year deals in the first round when that wasn't a thing. Large roster bonuses in lieu of a signing bonus to avoid uh probation and dead money when you had the cap room to do it. You were the first team, and I remember writing a memo to our to our general manager in 2003, which was only one year on the job, about the Tim Hawk deal when you wrote a really large special teams playtime incentive, and you figured out that you can carry over cap room by writing a ri and special teams incentives were considered likely to be earned. And, you know, just to I know that's not common terminology for everyone, so that just means it automatically counts on the cap when you write it in.

SPEAKER_02 14:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

And so you wrote a special teams incentive that you knew the player was never gonna get, and but made it a large amount towards probably towards the end of the season so that you could carry over cap room in the next year, because that's what the league did when you had incentives, when you wrote more incentives than you than earned that were paid out, it carried over to the next year, which would increase your cap room the next year. At that time, there was an automatic carryover. But because you started doing it, and I wrote a memo to our general manager, Tim Hawk was the player, that was the first time I saw it. We started to do it, and then it became a huge league-wide trend till eventually they said, Oh, let's just do carryover.

SPEAKER_02 14:43

Just you said the notes of the league, and that although I remember the first couple of years that they did that, being scared to death that I was doing it the wrong way, and we'd figured out later that we wrote something the wrong way, because it's it's trivial now, but at the time it was considered kind of where we were headed versus where we already were. But it ended up being uh pretty pretty widely accepted. Which was surprising because it does translate into it's more money that the owner's gonna have to spend once you figure that out, and if everything just gets erased at the end of the year. We didn't really get any pushback at all from the owners. It just he started doing it. It didn't seem like uniquely and then, as you said, everybody's just like, uh, just send us a note. Put in how much money you got left or you're carrying over or whatever, and made everything much more simple. Although it did lose pretty quickly the competitive advantage of doing that amongst the earlier teams, because once everybody's doing it, it really just costs the owner more money without there really being a benefit because everybody was doing it the same way.

SPEAKER_00 15:46

Yeah, well, when I think of the term cap management, and I see that being used now even in college, and and obviously there's a lot of new different uh generation of cap people and contract people. When I think of that example, I just look at that example as here's here's someone that studied, studied the CBA very closely, didn't just take it for granted, didn't let someone else at the league tell them what it said or how to do it, and then wrote a contract based on strategic cap management. And I guess my it's a statement, but my question really is how important is that? Like, how important is it for those people in that role? Yes, they're negotiators, but they have to know the cap. How important is it for them to be strategic when they're thinking about recommending and structures to to ownership and the people that are gonna have to live with that contract?

SPEAKER_02 16:42

I mean, I was lucky in that basically my NFL career was with Jeff. And I don't want to exaggerate this, but it was almost impossible if you could make a good argument that something, and I know I was lucky and unique, if you could make a good argument that something was gonna help us win. I can't promise it, but we that's what we believe we're working on this years. I mean, I worked for an owner who said, let's do it basically 100% of the time. That not only gave us a chance to do those things, but it gave us a chance to have some runway and create some periodic answers. The other thing I did, you know, with Jeff, just Henry, we went to a phase of kind of talking about what was the best way to use me on things that we thought were important. I said to him, I I have to tell you something, I think I'll be fine with this cap, and I think we can come up with some advantages over time. I don't know what they are right now as we sit here this moment, but I actually think my skills as a negotiator over time will serve the eagles better as somebody leading all of our trade conversations than negotiating our cap deals. And I know it's gotten a lot more visibility through Howie doing this really well recently, but 25 years ago, we're leading the league in making trades. And that that was, you know, a fairly intense aspect of the negotiating skills that you need to have if you're gonna really do that job well and you're having an effect on a number of areas with the organization. We we ended up being the ones that led the negotiation for a new stadium in Philadelphia because we basically became the in-house negotiating team. You know, it did a couple of things we've mentioned here. Even if look even looking backwards, if you said to me, what was the thing that you think most impacted the organization that benefited from your negotiating skills? That's what I would say. I mean, the list of trades when nobody was doing them like that. I mean, we traded uh Trent Richardson when I was in Cleveland two weeks into the season, and he'd come he was coming off of a thousand-yard rushing season. Because by having both of those roles, it'd give you a lot of advantage and creating some flexibility. And again, we everything we did didn't work. Fortunately, enough of them did that it became noticed. But you should never have an illusion. I don't care if you're the coach to the owner, whoever you see. You hope you're making it up right that it kind of gets just assumed. But there are a lot of advantages. If we get to the point where, you know, it's December and somebody's becoming a free agent in February, that the player really has all the leverage. Now I'm talking quality players, relatively young players. That's not a rule that applies to everybody. But so we got to the point there where we probably, you know, by able being able to sell our idea, our version of the trade. I mean, we had a lot of a lot of those deals that worked out. And again, people caught on. When I traded for Trent Richardson's, everybody was like, the guy played one year, I think had something like 17 touchdowns as a rookie. He rushed a thousand yards. But we actually thought he had bad vision and that you know that would catch up with him. So we started, and when it happened, everybody was like, first of all, I thought it was stupid. How could you trade a guy one year into his career with that? That was really partially because we intended to build a team more around passing than running. So the importance of the skill set to that team building philosophy became quite important. And everybody thought we made the worst trade. Later, Mike Homgren didn't hear it myself, but a few people tell me he was doing a talk radio show in Seattle after he had left Cleveland and said this will prove to be one of the, if not the worst, trades a team has ever to give up a probably a late first-round pick, to get a first-round pick and give up. It was the third pick in the draft and it had a great rookie year. But we didn't think he had uh great vision, which we thought we we were wrong in that we did not expect him to not do well in Indianapolis. We thought he would do very well. We just he didn't really fit the type of back we were looking for. Like in Philly, we had, you know, Ryan Westbrook and Shady McCoy, and you know, a whole long list of second and third round picks or incredibly valuable players. We used to be one of the teams people said, oh, they're undervaluing the importance of running backs. And our meetings, believe me, it was the opposite. It was just a question of where we can get without overpaying. And we were very focused on having running backs that could help in the uh passing game who weren't just running backs. But everybody thought that was just a totally ignorant thing to do, but it didn't fit the team we were building. I think that's one of the other things, by the way, no one really noticed. Jeff and I both grew up in Boston. I mean, Red Araback had the most specific and openly talked about philosophy about how to build a team. He's really the one that came up with, you know, a point guard and a number two and number four, you know, this guy's the five, and all that kind of terminology. And he used to say, and we were living in Boston, so you saw it a ton. I'm sure naturally it wasn't as visible. We was, he was like, we we want to um identify what works for us. Like I used to laugh that people criticize Belichick's personnel decisions. But if you look at his personnel decisions, they weren't the best players. That was a fair criticism. But they were best players for what he wanted to do. Anyway, the point of all that was if you if you're touching all of those things versus three different people who are doing that. It's very hard to really develop that culture and stay true to it if you don't have the same thinking about it. So selling selling your version of the trade and why, which is what you're usually trying to do, it was mutually beneficial. I think I think that was a valuable attribute to having the building, whether it was me or somebody else. And it's under underestimated how many things that you actually are negotiating in your life. You know, you're going to buy a car, you're going to have a negotiation, you're going to buy a house, you're going to have a negotiation, you know, and you can go right down the list. Um and I think that was one of the things we did. I think we elevated the perception of the opportunity a good negotiator actually brought to your organization in a number of areas.

SPEAKER_00 22:38

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense, right? Like you hire these people, they're skilled negotiators, and you put them on, and they're supposedly skilled to negotiate player contracts, but then you take someone who's more an evaluator personnel, and then they're negotiating trades. So it it just would seem that they're missing some of the critical elements that you would have in someone that's trained to be a negotiator.

SPEAKER_02 23:05

Right. I mean, it's both. We've both seen there are plenty of negotiators that are general managers and have no idea how to negotiate. And there are some that are general managers and that are great negotiators. I grew fairly quickly to believe those teams had a real identifiable benefit. You know, you could rely on that in a number of areas. And by the way, we weren't, when we decided, you know, what we thought of the player, how important was he to get, or is this a position we care about? That was everybody. The negotiating part of actually getting on the phone and kind of selling the trade or thinking even of the trade ideas. I mean, I mean, probably one of the best trades we've made was we traded for Jason Peters. Definitely in the Hall of Fame in the next few years if what should happen happens. And Howie Roseman had come in with the tape of Jason Peters like four years earlier when he was on a practice squad. And he had played tight end. He wasn't even starting as a left tackle. You were really making prediction. He'd done that a little bit in Buffalo. But then I just noticed that, you know, they were having a contract dispute. Everybody in the league knew it. But Andy didn't really want to use up a roster spot right down and a guy that couldn't help us at that moment. So we passed. Four years later, I noticed, wait a second, I think this is the same guy Howie brought to me that Howie and I really liked the tape. And he was liked it but was a little less sure than we were, and decided he didn't want to use up a roster spot for a player that wasn't going to help us right then. So when I saw that, had that in my mind, and then saw that they were in a contract dispute. Um I went back and I got Andy and Howe, Howie was always there, you know, a little bit more excited and gave me the space to go try to negotiate the best deal I could. You know, we had a player who was there for like a dozen years. He'll be in the Hall of Fame. Um he was a hard worker, a good leader. He was everything you wanted to. And I'm not sure that somebody who was in that seat that I was in would necessarily have noticed the connection before this practice squad player that somebody had brought up like four years earlier that seemed to have developed pretty well, and then realized, oh, wait, this is an opportunity. I mean, it turned out in hindsight, I confirmed what seemed to be the case that nobody else had called them. We were the only team that called them. This is a guy who'd been starting in the league about three years, clearly getting better. And eventually, I think as a clear-cut Hall of Fame choice. How did a dozen teams not call? Is he available at least? Are you taking offers? And then when it became obvious to me that I didn't think the answer to that question was yes, I thought it was no. They were actually like a relief, they got a phone call. I was my negotiating brain flipped into speed. Like, if you if you're the first one at the door of a place you think a lot of people are trying to get into, there's a huge advantage in that. You know, and you can you can negotiate something like that for a week, or you can do it in one phone call. So my immediate strategy, once I realized no one else was calling, at least at that moment, no one else was competing for him. Buffalo must have been able to read very easily how badly we wanted him once we got to that point.

SPEAKER_00 26:09

Yeah, Jason Peters is definitely one of the great stories when I think about the Eagles, and you were there. Um, and I remember that really well. I remember like a college tight end and had traits to be a tackle, but really wasn't a tackle yet. And that brings me to, you know, I think there's a lot of people out there, maybe even students, that might believe that the way value is determined in a negotiation is just looking at looking at all the comps and statistics. But what you just told about Jason Peters, can you talk about the importance of evaluation in the role in a in placing value on players and ultimately in the negotiation?

SPEAKER_02 26:55

Yeah, this is uh underestimated, but it's a great example of I mean, technically in the story, I'm the negotiator, although watched a lot more tape than anyone seemed to notice. But the original evaluation, he was on nobody's radar, including Bayern, if Howie had noticed him while he was still on the you could literally like just call him up and tell him, make a deal to switch teams. You didn't have to do anything, you didn't have to use up any assets. You just had to get the player and the agent uh to agree with it. Um and the first part of the trade is is an idea. And if you have an organization where you have a developed theme of we're gonna find opportunities that no one else is even gonna kind of notice. It seemed stupid to us. It wasn't like we had any information everybody else didn't have. And I think we had good evaluation, but I don't think there's a massive difference. You know, once you get in, you know, there's a better group and not as good a group, then they're kind of clustered together after that. So this was a classic story, and it goes in with Eagles to this day. You get Howie who notices somebody. Howie is really in a position. He's basically an intern and looking to catch somebody's attention by doing some smart things. And then you, as kind of the executive, create very positive reinforcement for people not being afraid to take chances or being willing to be aggressive, even when you knew you could be wrong. It could go either way. So, you know, Howie knows this guy, I remembered it. We went back, watched the tape together, brought it all to Andy. We hadn't talked to anybody but within ourselves at that point and decided that it would be really stupid to not at least get an idea as to what they were wanting to do. Welcome an offer, or was it going to hurt their leverage for the player to know he may have another option? But if you're doing that all the time, I mean it I don't think people realize over the last 30 years how long and a bigger part of the Eagles' success is the mindset of wanting to be aggressive. Um, you know, Jeff creates comfort for his employees, so they don't, oh my God, I think this is a good idea, but if I say it and it's wrong, it's gonna stick out like a sore thumb. And you know, there shouldn't be much of that, but there is a lot, as you know, where you there's there's some element of self-interest behind a lot of this the stories. But yeah, I mean, you know, the the earlier really good teams, we had people like uh like Jason Peters and Hugh Dux. We we were probably not different than most teams. You gotta we were gotta get a quarterback and you gotta dominate the lines of scrimmage. If you're not doing those things and you think you're one of the best teams in the league, you're probably kidding yourself. Um and we weren't afraid to take chances. We and we had some misses. Your question on the evaluation is crucial. As if I'm negotiating the contract, I have to have conviction, but I also have to have people that are really understanding and frequently getting right the quality of the play you're acquiring, whether it's a negotiation of a trade or whether it's just a contract, you know, re-signing your own guy. And you have multiple people involved in that. They have an aggressive mindset, they're not fearful of getting criticized for every mistake. You have an advantage before you've done anything. I don't think most owners realize everybody working there basically wants to please them and not go too off too far from the middle of the road. So they say things innocently or casually, and it does change the conversation, whether that's what anybody meant to happen or not. So that's got to be a good conversation and a fearless conversation, or you're gonna make too many mistakes.

SPEAKER_00 30:19

I I always knew when I was a young agent, I always knew with the culture you created and the executives that you hired that that you're you were always gonna keep an open mind to the talent that was available, which helped me because I wasn't an agent that could sign and recruit the highest-rated top draft pick type of athletes. And there was one in particular, it was the it was probably the late 90s, and one of our one of my clients who was a former Eagle, uh, Jerry Crafts, who was an offensive lineman there, was playing for the New Jersey Red Dogs arena football team. And he said, Hey, you got to come up and see this player. And he was a little wide receiver, he was 5'7, 165 pounds, fast, ran a 4'2 40, but he was he never played college football and he was 29 years old. And I was like, What am I gonna do with that? So I went to the game, and when I saw him play, and he was Arena Football League rookie of the year, and he could run around, I I immediately signed him without knowing if an NFL team would even be interested. And sure enough, your team was interested because you guys had that culture of an open mind. I believe it was probably Bobby DePaul and Mike McCartney were some of your personnel executives, and you signed him. His name is Michael Lewis, famous for being a Budweiser truck driver that they called the beer man. And you you signed him and he went to training camp. And I'll never forget, I got a call at the end of the training camp when he was gonna get cut, and it was like almost like an apology because you he didn't get to play on special teams. It was a more or less a kick returner that didn't get a snap, and he went on to become a Pro Bowl kick returner for the Saints, but you guys were the first to identify him.

SPEAKER_02 32:09

This is again a mindset is so underestimated in the league. We we did a uh a study. There was kind of two studies in one, like players that were drafted in the fourth round or later. Were there any teams were consistently hitting on those picks? Because people kind of used them as throwaways and trades. So you could end up with uh three, four, even six-round picks or seventh-round picks. And then as I mentioned, I mean our team building philosophy was very, you know, line-oriented, you know, once you got the quarterback set. We, for example, we led the league in signing of undrafted free agents most years because we realized there was no science to it. It was just math. If you sign 20 undrafted free agents, you'd probably have two hits. You know, if you sign 30, you'd have more than two hits. So you it was really just uh we used to call it throw it, throw the dart at it type of decision. And that we would end up with more contributing and starting undrafted free agents merely because we kept the roster clean, so we had more space at the end of the draft to sign. And we had no illusion, like we weren't like brilliant evaluators. We just realized, I mean, this is a category that probably, you know, 28 out of the 32 teams don't really see any merit in, and you're getting it right. Well, nobody's that smart, I'm sorry. So if you if you're not pretending you're just the smartest person all the time in every room, then it's kind of obvious once you started. The other thing was this fourth round or later thing, almost every player, and this is a little dated, so I don't know if it would still hold up, but it did for a long time. Almost every player that was drafted fourth round or later that turned out to be a starting player, fell in the draft for one of three reasons. So, in other words, if you weren't doing this, your chances of actually making a specific successful signing was extremely small. First was they went to a small school that got them underestimated. Second was they had they had one of these three attributes. So they were they went to a small school, so they weren't as visible to everybody, they got hurt their CE year, or they were undersized. So if you were drafting somebody in the you're sitting a draft man and somebody says to you, uh look at we got this linebacker at Ohio State, I think he's not gonna go till the fourth round, and he's you know, stree and 245 pounds. If you pick that guy in the fourth or fifth round, the chances that he was actually gonna overachieve to the point where he became a starter. Because all right, so we only got seven picks, we can't make three of them special gamers, you know. Otherwise, we're not walking out of this draft with three, four, or five players that we want to. So, you know, so we had a we had a couple of things like that where we felt like that would have been a mistake once we realized that if the player wasn't one of those three things. Now, I'm sure you would agree with this, there were no absolute rules. Like do these four things in your winning this. Well, there were just no absolute rules. There were exceptions to anything you could come up with. But there weren't exceptions to the fact that some players or some situations actually gave you a better chance than other things. It didn't mean like, oh, if we do this list of things, you know, we'll be in the final four. If you get that kind of mindset, okay, so what can we know that if we break this rule? It's not impossible to get a player, but it's against the odds. We call it swimming upstream. We're swimming upstream. If we're taking some guy who's playing at Ohio State and has a perfect measurable, runs a great time. The whole league didn't miss that guy. I'm sorry. He didn't get to the fifth round. So we had a few rules like that. We had uh this was an interesting one that we found by accident. If you're a uh corner and you are six feet tall or older, and you don't get picked in the first two rounds, you almost never turn up because so many teams are looking for a taller, you know, so corners generally get pushed up the board a little bit because they're hard to find and they're really important. So if you're sitting in the third round in some corner who you really like on tape, but he's the perfect measurable, but he didn't get drafted high. It's a message that it happens to be right, so don't cross that line, you know. And we had you know a lot of that just incrementally, really small, sometimes incremental, increase your odds of getting the right player. And by the way, it's because we talked about this later, I thought of that all for me fell under the umbrella of negotiator. These were all just kind of fundamental questions that weren't that hard to research, that didn't mean you were picking the right guy, but it probably pushed the wrong guy down your board when that's exactly what you wanted to have happen. So that whole category, I mean, people would say, uh, I think you were the first ones in analytics. And I said, you know what, I don't know. I'm confident we were on the early end of it. But I really have no idea because nobody's telling anybody else what you're doing in that space. But I know that it's creating somewhere between a small and a medium benefit just on any given pick where one of these rules applies. So we're not gonna pick that guy in the fifth round from Ohio State. We're just not gonna pick him. And if we we say, okay, so that means there's only 20% potential players in the pool instead of being whatever number, we've increased the chance of getting the pick right just a little bit. You do that enough, I think it adds up. And again, what may really relevant is we thought of all of those things I'm mentioning there as negotiating, benefiting from having somebody who's a good negotiator doing it from, you know, whatever.

SPEAKER_00 37:53

Yeah, so that that goes back to so you were obviously when I say in the introduction, you were known for being having great precision in the preparation process. You were, you know, in analytics was not a fancy terminology initially, like it was we called it research and other things, research and development, but you were using the skills of research, preparation, analysis to not only make your negotiations better, but you were using it to help drive and help people make better decisions in acquiring talent and selecting players by looking at these trades, by studying. You were you were probably on the early end of someone that would study what happens after the fourth round or later. What happens to those players? What are the common trends among those players that we can glean into? Like you said, not an absolute rule, but what are the findings? What does the data say? So it sounds like early on, data was extremely important to you in your decision making.

SPEAKER_02 39:02

Yeah, very. I mean, I think our definition of that was a little broader than some places, but yeah, I would say absolutely. And you know, a lot of times you can tell how good or bad an idea was by how long does it stick around. So trying to think of that person who's leading that spot, mixing them together with the evaluators, kind of having a joint process, but only one person is actually talking to the person we're negotiating with is basically our negotiating expert, you know, versus their negotiating expert. There's a lot more people than was necessarily visible in that. But yeah, we and we always thought about this way, like what can we do to, you know, increase our odds. I mean, ironically, because so many people put so much emphasis on kind of being traditional, not taking risks. You know, when you go from maybe signing seven or eight undrafted free agents, because that's how many roster spots you have left. There's nothing more to it. You know, we had this number of draft picks, we had this many guys would bring it back. I mean, we we were, on the other side, we were among the lowest teams on signing what we called street free agents. I don't know if you use the same term. So somebody that had played in the league but hadn't been on a team maybe the last year, so you could literally sign them right at the end of the season, then you control their rights for the next season unless you cut them. And it was all the same thing. It was like this this pool of players. I mean, we got to the point we had a goal, which we didn't come close to achieving all the time. But we had a goal of having at least two to three starters on the team that were undrafted free agents. And it just came out of a study like, okay, we're trying to get 22 quality starters and then you know some other more targeted spots. So if we have 10 or 15 percent of that filled without using any money or any draft picks, that has to present an advantage to anybody who isn't thinking about it that way. And, you know, I think Andy was with us 14 years. I think all 14 years we had an undrafted free agent who played center. And almost every one of those years we had a safety that was an undrafted free agent. And they were, in our minds, almost, you know, this is we studied the league, this is the most likely position you're gonna find an undrafted free agent. By the way, you don't need to be an FLG. I'm sure there are a lot of fans that can figure out, you know. I mean, nobody's counting on an undrafted free agent to be a star wide receiver. But there's plenty of examples where safeties have come from that pool of undrafted free agents. So if you think of it that way and then you prioritize that, you're gonna lead the league almost every year in contributions from undrafted players, whatever that means for you. Um everybody else is treating it like we literally, I remember having a meeting where we literally, kind of jokingly, but not really jokingly, decided that we were gonna we were gonna treat this like we were stock investors. And what stock investors do is they look for underappreciated assets. In other words, they're worth more than the market assigning them in value. And that's that led to a lot of this stuff because undrafted free agents cost you nothing. At that point, it really cost you almost nothing, even in the signing bonus. Now that's a little different. But back then we don't really use up any money. And uh we didn't use up any draft picks, those are your primary assets you have to improve the team. And uh so we started making a point of emphasis. And, you know, you've seen from lots of areas, including evaluation area or cap management. If you had three out of 22 players, and we almost always had two or three, and you used none of your assets to get them, and they're now 10 or 15 percent of your starting players, you're gonna have a huge advantage on the cap. It's like, oh, I only have to fill 19 of my 10 or 22 spots with my regular assets. And now I have three other that I can add to that, and no one's even noticing what we're doing. But it was all that mindset of where can we create even a very small advantage?

SPEAKER_00 42:56

You you mentioned when your fourth round or later study, and you know, and this goes to your undrafted rookies. Some of them came from small schools or or they were hurt or they're undersized, but they fell through. So there's a lot of we know from history that there's a lot of talent, ton of talent, Hall of Famers in that undrafted free agent market, you know, from the John Randles and the Kurt Warner's, Sam Mills, you can go on and on and on, Jason Peters. But that brings me to the point where I I recently looked at this. So, because I'm working in the college uh world of NIL, and you probably are looking at stuff too. And I found that on the NFL rosters right now, there about 25% of all the players in the NFL were either zero star high school players or went to an FCS school, a group of five school, division two, division three, all of them meaning basically zero cost acquisition players. Those were your equivalent to your undrafted rookies. That being said, colleges football programs, they're chasing four and five-star players. What could your philosophy on in your goal towards having two starters that were undrafted? What can colleges learn from that when it comes to finding this talent that the NFL is obviously finding?

SPEAKER_02 44:22

Yeah, and I would say it's the same process. I doubt it's the same answer. What categories, not just the person, what categories are being undervalued by the people we're competing with? You know, the example I gave for us was obviously these undrafted free agents. I don't know. Don't even have an idea what the current answer on uh the college recruiting is. But that I just go back, where like where can we create a competitive advantage without costing anything? Don't mean cost anything in terms of actual dollars and cents, just in terms of you still have all the other resources that everybody else has and you have. Everybody knows about everybody wants to get the five-star player. No one's turning them down. But they may be so focused on him that they're missing other things that could actually make somebody work have have greater value to you. But I think you think you start with that mindset. And frankly, it starts even with the hiring. I mean, there's a lot of too many coaches in the league that are still like ridiculing analytics. I don't even like what people call it analytics because so many people attach some negativity. And when I say coaches, I said, well, you know, we've been doing like we've had quality control coaches doing a little bit less sophisticated version of this for like 50 years. Why are you making it sound like this is some, you know, evil takeover of the football mind? You know, it's it's we've been doing this forever. It it's a little more sophisticated, maybe not as some people much as some people think, but it's a little more sophisticated. Should give you a little bit more of an edge, just in at least know what the odds are. You know, if you're picking a like a running back's the opposite, they they generally actually have some benefit from uh being smaller. Um some old guys they look at 5'9, 5'10 running back. Again, this is a little dated, but I would can't imagine it would have changed. You have somebody that's like, well, you know what, if I'm looking for Brian Westbick, Shady McCoy type players, they're probably going to be anywhere from to 5'10. They're not six feet tall. Now, I can say that and know that anybody would have given anything to have Derek Henry on their roster, which is why I always say there are no absolute rules. If somebody's telling you the analytics guy is sitting down with a head coach and putting things as if if you just do this, you'll win. No, it's not you're misapplying, you know, the advantage that you're trying to take advantage of. But you could fit the 5'7 potential return guy in the larger roster, hopefully give him at least some chances to prove himself. But you're already looking at that category as we know we're gonna put a bunch of people from this category on this team one way or the other. Most coaches, as you know, would rather have somebody who played for them at some point in their career so they know their system than the undrafted guy that at least has a meaningful chance of being, you know, a better contributor to the team over time.

SPEAKER_00 47:14

I um I'm gonna shift to real quickly on the uh philosophy of contract negotiations. And when I think about your philosophy, and I actually uh pulled out a book uh written by Bill Polyan called The Game Plan. And one of the things that I always observed and did also, among many others, we tried to copy the formula when it was with the Eagles when you were there, draft, you obviously explain the value of draft picks and how it impacts the cap. Develop those players so that they become contributors starters, identify young ones that you want to keep, and then extend them. Is that accurate capture the philosophy you had at the time on on young players?

SPEAKER_02 48:01

Yeah, very much so. It came out of, I think I referenced this earlier. If you wait till December and free agencies in February, and it's a player that the personnel department and the coach have told you is very important to keep, he can almost dictate the terms, and in the end you have to cave. So we started a negotiating earlier part of our philosophy, because that kind of neutralized the leverage in the negotiation. In other words, if you do a deal early for somebody, which gets them a lot of guaranteed money and probably financial security for life, maybe for generations at this point, then they have to give a little bit too, because the player probably most players actually probably prefer to stay where they are. So if he wants to stay and you want to keep him, and the leverage is fairly neutral, then you're at least gonna get a fairer deal. We always differ, disagree on the definition of that term, but we you know, we're we're at least we're not sitting there where he may the person I'm negotiating with may against may or may not be able to tell this, but in the end, I'm gonna have to take the best deal I can. If you're doing it early and you literally, which is what we used to do, we say to the player, listen, you know, I'm sure you've seen we signed some players early, and what we basically do is we give them an above-market guarantee, is the primary benefit you get out of this little deal, is financial security. And uh and uh we we will get a little deal on the average of the deal. You give us a little discount on the deal because we're doing it early. And you know, we're promising you we will overpay you on the guaranteed money and probably underpay you at least by a little bit on the average. Um, so this is literally, and honestly, you can tell somebody this is mutually beneficial. You know, obviously, you are purposely leaving a little bit of money on the table in order to get the security, financial security be able to stay in a place, you seem to like being here. We never tried to hope they didn't notice that or we snuck something through it. We would literally, here's the idea, you've probably seen us do it with other players. And uh, here are what we think is the benefits to us, being totally transparent about them, we're going to be looking for a slightly discounted average per year. Because I I can't understand this because people still do deals like they don't notice this. If you are a 25, 26-year-old player and you're, let's say you're in the top 25, 35% of players in just terms of how well you play your position, you almost definitely will play the whole contract. So if you're an agent and you're trading off average for guarantee, you are almost definitely giving away something to the team you don't need to do. Perception was that, oh, you know, most deals they're they run longer than you know, the guaranteed money, you know, and you know that wasn't really true. It still isn't true, which is why I'm still kind of amazed that now again, I'm talking about the let's say top third, top 25% of players, and they're 25 or 26 years old. If they don't finish the deal, it's probably because they got a third contract. So if I'm giving you extra guaranteed money in return for a discounted average, and you were gonna play four years no matter what the contract says, you're basically giving up guaranteed money that you would have gotten sooner or later, anyway. So, and we would literally say to play, we are we're just telling your friend we are not gonna get a deal done if we're not gonna get some benefit from taking the risk and basically shifting it from you to us. So we're not we're not being jerks, we're not being stubborn. The the concept, this is a trade-off, you benefit, guaranteed money, long-term financial security. And I used to say, like in the office, I would say, listen, let's just say we do this with our 10 best players. At this point, these numbers are very wrong, but and our goal is to try to save two or three million dollars per contract on those top ten players, which, you know, by the time a quarterback's making $50 or $60 million, it's not even that hard to do. But if you do, if you take 10 of your players and save $3 million on that deal, you've now saved $30 million over the roster. So it's easy for each one of us to feel like no big deal. But if you stay, if you literally do it with all of your top players and you never get everybody to say yes, of making a point as opposed to an exact example, then you know you're you're in a position where you're you're gonna have $30 million more than your top competitor who isn't thinking about it this way. And, you know, as I say, you know, if you're a starter now in the NFL, you're probably making $15 million on the low end and 50 or 60. So go to the guy and say, listen, I'm gonna give you $20 million guaranteed dollars instead of, you know, whatever number you want to pick, $30 million, um, and you're gonna give me a little bit of a discount. I'm actually, you're actually not gaining anything, but it feels like, and it's a much better announcement for the newspaper that the agents used to tend tend to recruit off of. So I think if you combine those things, you're getting two to three starters a year that many other teams are getting zero or one, and you're saving just a couple of million dollars a year, you are increasing the risk because sometimes it will bite you in the ass. But for the most part, you've got a quality player who's relatively young, your own guy, you're trying to resign him. Um that extra guaranteed money you're giving him doesn't benefit him at all, it doesn't even really cost you any money. You're still gonna end up in the same place. So you basically got the discount for free. But there's still a lot of people that think that, like Bill and I have agree on a lot of this, but have a couple of consequential disagreements on the question you're bringing up and had have had interesting uh discussions, friendly debates um about which is better um to do the deal early. We were literally talking to street, I want to do the deal as early as we possibly could. He didn't want to do the deal before. And the truth is, most of the deals you do, that doesn't even matter. But at least again, if you can create a little incremental benefit here and there, add them all up, it'll be consequential.

SPEAKER_00 54:22

Yeah, and I'll read what he said. So he said uh he said he has a great deal of respect for you, first of all, but you believe that you sign players early and you got them at lower prices. He said he believed that you let players go to the very end, so you had a very good benchmark of what they were and what they would become, and then that caused you to sign them at higher prices. But then he also went on to say, and he also admitted the closer you get to free agent, the higher the price. And obviously, this gives you less room. So he went out and asked an independent service to do a study, and they found that it was equal, that each of us, the Colts and the Eagles, won about the same amount of games. And so he looked at it as a wash. What would you say to that?

SPEAKER_02 55:09

Yeah, I mean, listen, I disagree, but I don't say that and think that's like crazy or that's just absolutely wrong. Um I'd say most situations, let's say you had to do six deals, you know, you're probably benefiting three times and not. But um, but that's where I go back to this. Let's just say you take your top 10 players. And then at this point, unlike back then when you were worrying about fitting everybody in, now everybody's got more money than they know what to do with. So, you know, we also created, it was a long time to ask players to wait four or five years to get the positive reinforcement of a second contract. So we thought that was a psychological benefit too. But the root of this is the thing we were just talking about a minute ago. If you're if you are signing players consistently early, a savings of let's just say two to three million dollars per year, so you have collectively $30 million to spend, $30 million more to spend by signing it early. Now to think, because yeah, the to me, the major difference is that you do have a few players that, I mean, I had one player I did an extension on, he never even got to the extension, he was out of the league. So you do get burnt. You do there's it's not like all wins on one side or the other. But if I can really achieve two to three million dollars just for my top ten players, so think about those, you know, that's your left tackle, it's your best pass rusher, it's your quarterback. You know, in today's football, the top pass rushers making $40 million a year. It's not hard to say, listen, we'll pay you $38 and we'll overpay you on the balance to make up for it. We'd have to have a really large number of misses to make them for $30 million in benefits. In my hypothetical, you know, we saw the guy two years early, he costs a decent amount less collectively on the rock. That gives you $30 million more than the other guys have. So yeah, you can get burnt by it, or you can go for a stretch if you took, you know, let's just use whatever, these three years, let's do the whole league, see what it looks like. You could go through a piece where the math could give you a different answer than, you know, if you picked uh 2010 to 2015 versus say 2020 to 2025. Depending upon your luck with injuries or the quality of your um evaluations. Like I actually said to Bill, I said, Bill, you should like my theory better than anybody at lead, including me. And he would say, why? And I honestly mathematically watched this and studied this. He was evaluating it at a higher success rate than anybody else. So just by his being more talented than most evaluators, he was erasing a lot of the potential negative to what I was advocating. Now, you know, if most of us you're you know, we get on 50% of evaluations, maybe a little bit closer math. I'd still come out where I used to come out, but it's a little bit closer math. But if you had four guys the year before that had career-ending injuries, or the guy that I had that we thought was a really good player, that we wanted at least for like the next five years, and we just went south and didn't work out, you create these what we called miscellaneous charges, dead money, whatever everybody calls it, something a little different. So I don't look at what Bill is saying and just dismiss it as that's just ridiculous. I do think the number of injuries or players that looked to be really good and then failed, because remember, we still couldn't sign. I mean, now it's really three years before you can sign unless it's an undrafted free agent. So you had a decent amount of information, but you could still get it wrong. But uh my reasoning for believing I was is this two or three million dollars per player that you're saving equal to or less than waiting and spending that extra money? And for us, the math was in favor of the way we did it.

SPEAKER_00 58:42

I wanna uh that's awesome. I love how you also explained that you know, what you needed to do to get the agent and player to want to do a deal early, yeah, before free agent, so you would uh increase the guarantee. Would you also to get a lower average were you were you front loading cash along with that increased guarantee or just guaranteeing more of the deal, but the cash flow being more bounced?

SPEAKER_02 59:12

I would say we were probably more average in terms of that question. But we also, you know, listen, we when we tried come up with these kinds of ideas, we always had sessions where we'd, I guess I'd say, test them and see if it really held up over a number of years or not. And you just think about how, if you really think about it, don't, you know, people would focus on somebody that a five-year deal, but they really only assumed they were going to have the player for three years, they were just trying to mess a little bit with the cap number. You know, you you want to be in the position where you're making sure those numbers are are are in line. We did try to do some deals a little bit shorter, but if the deal is sustaining a guarantee for a long enough period of time, you really can't lose. You can borrow a little bit from the future, but you're never going to do much of that because it kind of contradicts everything else you're doing. And there was a time where the League actually did a study, I don't know if you remember this or not, but they tried to figure out what they could give us input almost kind of on a macro level. We were trying to, they were obviously trying to manage collective owner expenditures. And they they came back, and the only thing that the cap management they thought irrefutably connected to success in the field was that there was at one point a strong correlation between teams that had large amounts of miscellaneous charges and teams that made the playoffs. In other words, the larger your miscellaneous charges each year, the more likely you were to be missing the playoffs. Um that was and they it was a pretty sophisticated study. They came up with a lot of ideas of things to test. And the only one that mattered was your overall team, which makes sense. I mean, this year it caps $275 million. You know, if because you get a miscellaneous bunch of miscellaneous charges, your your real number is only, you know, $250 when everybody else started $275. You're pretty meaningful. I mean, back times we were talking about that was at least one Pro Bowl player less that you had. Or the other way around, if you saved enough money on these deals, as I'm talking about your top 10 players, you got an extra $25 million to play within the teams that weren't employing that strategy.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:25

And again, can you just explain that what miscellaneous charges are?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:30

Yeah, so there are ways that you can structure a deal. And what effectively happens is that you're really negotiating the timing of the payments that are due and when they hit the cap. So you can sign a player to a five-year deal for $10 million, just to use really easy numbers. And, you know, during that, again, trying to save this uh small amount of money, you know, let's say you've got some player's contract expiring in year. So you can write the contract. So let's say his cap number is two million this year and five next year, or you can write it so it's you know, five both years. You know, my math isn't perfect, but if you get the point. So by structuring when cap numbers hit, um, kind of matching it to your cash flow and all, although again, when Jeff Lurie never said, well, here's your, you know, a lot of teams say here's your cash budget for player. You know, as long as you're living within that, you don't have to check with me every time you want to do something. Jeff was never even like that. He was like, if he trusted you and you had proven to him that you weren't throwing away his money, you were really trying to use it on something that would increase your chances. Then you knew the answer was yes before you even posed. And I know that that was very lucky in that there aren't that many teams that they manage their part of the business that way. But um you we always tried to keep have cash equals cap over any given three-year period, which gives you a little flexibility. But cap was really written, so you know, you you basically conform with the rules. You always had to tweak room. We got to the point where some people were saying the cap isn't even real. Look at all the players this guy's fitting in, and he supposedly didn't even have any cap trauma. But no, the cap is very real because the cap has gone up faster and faster. You know, you have more and more room to create flexibility or have flexibility, but no, caps the cap's very real. Most of us lost a lot of sleep over how real the cap was. I like when people say that.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:23

This is all amazing. I just have two last questions. One one, I just a lot of great executives came up the ranks from the Eagles and coaches too, and went on some stays went on and have great success. I remember when I was a young agent, and you would allow me to come into the building when if one of my players signed, even though they weren't big name players. I always appreciate that. But I remember coming to your office once, and outside of your office was your assistant uh Leanne. Everyone who knew the Eagles knew Leanne. Uh she had a great personality.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:58

By the way, she's still there. She's still there? She works for for uh Jeff now and has for a while. Obviously, I haven't been there in that decade. So yeah, she's she's outlived all of us.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:13

We're we're gonna send you this when it's when it's when it's released, and we want to say how much we appreciate you. But on the corner of Luanne's desk was an individual working, an intern. A chair was kind of pulled up next to her desk. I remember meeting him for the first time, and that intern's name was Howie Roseman, who was working for you. And it made me think of today he's considered tremendous success, great, great negotiator, great one of the greatest GMs in the league. How did you what'd you look for when you were hiring developed people? And and I know there are others I'm sure you can mention that were like that, as well as coaches. You were heavily involved in finding coaches. Andy Reid was was not a coordinator. That was a very rare hiring at that time. Yeah. Talk about your process of identifying talent on the executive and coaching side and what your process was like.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:11

So we did really a couple of things that aren't that different. I had a personal philosophy that's a describe. And then we had a particular Jeff and I sat down and kind of had a discussion between us on what would we define as successful coach hire when we looked back on it. And um, you know, we we had hit uh high standards intentionally. So we decided that uh any coach that had made to at least two Super Bowls, they'd have to have won them, could have been more, but they had to go to at least and then we just did a study totally isolating all those guys. So it's the Parcells, the Bill Walsh's, the Bill Belichick's, the Andy Reids, it's all those people. And we were just curious was there anything that they had in common that we could use to replicate to some degree and increase our chances of getting a good quarterback? Uh it's funny because. Because we did this study, used a group of really smart people. And our expectation was going to be there was something very basic football. Like they were younger, or they were offensive, or they were defensive, or they had a lot of experience, or you know, we weren't sure what, but we thought there had to be some commonalities. But when we went into it, we were thinking all a list of football things. And ironically, what we realized was some of them passed a lot, some ran a lot, some blitzed, some you had a you know, buffet of on the surface things that that uh didn't detail as a thing. We accidentally realized, though, when it came to describing them as people, there was an incredible amount of overlap. Some of it was really obvious. Like everybody would know, you gotta find a head coach who's a really good leader. So we were just confirming some things that everybody would know. But also turned up some things that were surprising. Um, other than like being a leader, the top two things on our list was that all of these people that turn out really good coaches had really great coaching staffs and seemed to be really good managers of the other coaches. So that was that was one. The second was I just had my own philosophy from before being in the NFL and having hired a lot of people, that people generally sort themselves at some level into one or two categories in terms of how successful they're going to be. And so the two that were a little bit surprising was that the people that are really successful, and again, we were studying just successful NFL head coaches, tended to be really surprisingly good at evaluating and managing the other coaches. And that's at least to me, the most surprising was we couldn't come up with a name of a coach, even if we lowered the standard, who we still call a very good coach, who wasn't so detail oriented that they drove people around them crazy. They were just so every little detail, you know, the precise, you know, the joke, the Tom Coplin joke, you know, if you're if you go here on Tanya five minutes late, kind of a thing. So the few things like leadership, we thought, okay, we just found what everybody else already knew. So it was nothing about football. They didn't come more often from a background in defense or offense. They weren't necessarily younger or older. There was some little indicators, but nothing you could say, this is crucial. But if you weren't a good evaluator of other coaches and then good at managing the other coaches, you were not likely to be in the operational line of head coaches. So it was interesting. The study that was actually intended to identify some football elements that were in common actually led us in a different direction. So, you know, if you talk about how we Roseman, he's he's all of those things. He's a good evaluator, other evaluators. Um, he's fearless. You know, the whole list of things that I mentioned is he's good he hires good people because he's a good evaluator, he's not just a football player, but he knows how to evaluate people. Um so that's that we started that very search. So, you know, everybody does a search, you kind of create a master list and then you you know work it down so you get a short list. Um we're calling up people to put together our big list. Anybody you've ever worked with or you've heard about that everybody's just so annoyed by how obsessive they are with every little detail that they just start annoying people. And people are like, Why would you ask me that? What does that have to do with anything? And so it produced a couple of names. Andy Reid was one of them. And why, even though to this day there's basically no exceptions, maybe one. When I remember when you were in Chicago, Ted Joltz called me up and said he'd kind of I've told this story a few times, it's not like he said to me, I've I've kind of heard this story. Tell me exactly what you really did. I think it I think it was the time when you hired Lobby Smith on the closet. But he was interested and he had you know a tough decision from his perspective, and he was trying to learn what it was that made me think that Andy Reed with his resume actually made any sense. But it was it was really we weren't that courageous, but we just saw the research, it was just so obvious that we just put it on our list of things that needed they find people that are successful at everything in life, they don't start suddenly failing. So I used to ask people like, uh, well, what clubs were you in in grammar school? And you could literally see them, even if they weren't actually making a face, the skeptics of tell you. But if you find somebody who is the, you know, the captain of their team or the president of their debating club or started some charity in high school or whatever, you don't put a group of people that have that as part of their DNA. Like they always find ways to overcome challenges and find a way to succeed. You find five people like that, put them in the same room. There's no way you're not going to come up with really smart decisions. They won't all be right, but they'll at least be smart, you know, well thought out decisions. So that's what drove somebody asks me, and they do. I mean, for a number of years after I left, I still helped with some searches. Fortunately, they went good because that's very stressful. Somebody trusts you to help them make a decision like that, and it probably has a huge effect on their life's happiness for the next three or four years, and they're trusting your advice to at least factor in. You really don't want to get it wrong because there's somebody who's really believing in your value and your thoughts, and you want to reward that and get the right person. So those are the things I look for. People to consistently overachieve and find ways to conquer obstacles, and people that have those other attributes we're talking about with attention to detail and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:26

All right. So one last question. It's one I ask everyone. Sometimes it's to sum up. What are the key traits of being a great negotiator?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:34

Well, I'm going to sound really trite here because I I mean the first thing on my list is ability to listen. If you position the negotiation and you believe the saying that you get two eyes, two ears, one mouth for a reason, it's kind of the order of importance. I mean, the the value making the other person speak a lot. It doesn't even have to be material. The chances, the number of times I've been shocked by something that I learned in a casual way that ended up affecting negotiations. If you aren't listening really well and you aren't thinking quickly, you're missing some opportunity. The other thing, and again, I this was never my best thing, but I think it's really important. The best relationship you can have, you have to know that matters. People go into a conversation or a negotiation, whatever it is, and they think you're you're I mean, I asked somebody asked me once if you could pick the description to uh this that somebody else had of you in a negotiating football sense. I say I would like to be thought of as tough but fair. And that's what I always strove. I didn't want to create you know any bad feelings at all. If there's anything, any way to sometimes you just can't do that, but a lot of times you can. So I I think it's this open-mindedness, listening really well. If you got the gift of being a quick thinker so you can respond quickly. But I was always of the mindset that I'm succeeding at negotiating if I'm talking less than the other person. At the same time, I know I have all this information as research here. I always thought, at least I'm sure I was wrong some of the time, that I was uh I was always the most prepared person in the negotiation, even if I wasn't doing anything or saying anything, just kind of trying to gain information about how they were thinking. I always started negotiations the same way. I always said, I said, tell me which issue in this negotiation is most important to you. And most agents, it's just a very good, well, I mean, obviously the most money. Okay, in terms of structure and stuff like that. And I can't tell you how many times they would just throw out an answer like we were talking, not like we were in a negotiation. And I felt like I was learning a lot. Tough but fair.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:41

You were. Look, I really want to thank you. Obviously, first and foremost, coming on and devoting your time to this. But more important, I want to personally thank you for always being a mentor, a champion for me. I always say we we can't get anywhere in life without advocates and champions for ourselves. And those are people that do things really without asking anything in return. And so that's something that you always did for me. I want to thank you for your impact you've had on the game, contracts, cap, that that needs to be reminded and and and recognized for finding and developing leaders that have also had a huge impact on this game, needs to be recognized as well. And I know that um maintaining a relationship that you continue to um mentor for a lot of of younger and upcoming people that want to work in this business. So thank you for all you're doing and appreciate you and your friendships. And you always you're a negotiation warrior in every sense of the words. So uh appreciate you always.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:48

Oh, thank you for saying all that. As I said, it's it's mutual. It's been one of my more enjoyable relationships for my time, and I hope I deserve the accolades, but they're much appreciated.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:00

All right, thank you, everybody. Joe Banner, appreciate you.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:04

Thank you for listening to Negotiation Warriors. I hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you like what you heard, please subscribe on the negotiation warriors YouTube channel and follow us at front office 360 on Instagram and at to find out our helping other death medics. Go to frontoffice360.com