Kudos, Tom Condon

When it comes to sports and my opinions on them, I think my views and thoughts are as insightful and informative as any (Editors Note: Someone is a little confident…). In my first article for SportsAgentBlog.com, I wrote about rookie holdouts and how agents need to do a better job at getting their clients in camp on time. At the time I did not think there was any way for my opinion on this view to change. But the recent work of Tom Condon has changed my view a little bit on the rookie holdout.

Mr. Condon knew of the Cleveland Browns quarterback situation, and he knew that when camp got under way and the coaches saw that Charlie Frye and Derek Anderson just weren’t the answer, they would have to sign Quinn and get him in camp. If Quinn signed and made it to camp on time, there would have been no way he got the contract he received. For weeks we heard analyst after analyst blast Condon, saying Quinn deserves to get paid like a number 22 pick, not a top 10. But Condon knew the likelihood of his client being a rookie starting quarterback as well as the franchise savior.

So he waited and waited and waited, until the Browns began to panic to get his guy in camp. While as a fan you hate to see rookies holdout, in the end the NFL is a business and it’s the agent’s job to get his/her client the most money possible. In a lot of cases the hold out leads to missing out on playing time. As it looks now, Brady should be playing by week 3, if not earlier.

In the long run this holdout will do nothing to harm the career for Brady Quinn. It definitely made life tough for Quinn for a while, but 5 years from now he will look at the contract Condon got him and smile. The bottom line is as an agent your job is to better the career of your client in any way possible. If you have to holdout for a little while to accomplish that goal then so be it. From start to finish, Tom Condon had a goal and executed it to perfection.

-Paul Schackman