NFL Agent’s Pitch To Players And Joint Representation Of Jim Harbaugh

Jack Bechta should be praised for opening up a lot of his practice for the world to understand how he recruits and maintains his clientele (even though he recently ignored my multiple requests for information regarding the representation of coach Jim Harbaugh up until yesterday, but I will get into that story later in this article).  Recently, Bechta wrote about his practice of making a pitch to athletes bound for the draft.  And I give him major kudos for writing the following line -“The fact is that, players make agents, agents don’t make players.”

Thus far, I am aware of Bechta securing the right to represent tight-end Will Yeatman from the University of Maryland.  Yeatman is not highly coveted, and currently is projected to go undrafted, but that can certainly change with a good Pro Day and/or Combine performance.

Bechta likely picked a place familiar to Yeatman, where there were few distractions, to make his pitch to the TE.  The fact that Yeatman is from San Diego, California probably played in Bechta’s favor, as he is based in the same city.  Thus, it is likely that Bechta did not even have to fly out to Maryland to make his pitch.

Back to Harbaugh.  Bechta used to make a point to let the world know that he represented Jim Harbaugh.  When the entire world wanted to know what Harbaugh would do after Stanford beat Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl, Bechta did not say a peep about Harbaugh.  He also refused to answer any questions about who was Harbaugh’s agent of record.  Many people speculated that Harbaugh switched from Bechta to David Dunn of Athletes First roughly a month prior to the Orange Bowl victory.  But then this article explained that Harbaugh was actually being represented by Bechta and Dunn – competing agents – at the same time.  It appears that Bechta was designated as Harbaugh’s rep for negotiations concerning Stanford and Dunn was handling all negotiations with NFL teams.