In the late 1970’s Jack Wirth was a part-time scout for the Denver Broncos. At that time the Denver Broncos were one of four NFL clubs that had an evaluation program for rookie players that tried to take into account how long it would take the club to bring the player up to par to compete at the NFL level. The program tested the players based on their strength, speed, flexibility and agility and took into account 17 different areas of their ability to perform at the NFL level. The main thrust of the program was to find out a player’s deficiencies and work with the player to bring him up to the NFL level.

Prior to the 1980 draft Jack Wirth was approached by a group of businessmen, who wanted Wirth to be their lead man in starting a sports agency. The rationale behind the new agency was that most agents were lawyers and had little football knowledge or background. This agency would be different- it would be run by a person who was formerly a scout for the Broncos. This agency would become known as Pro Football Associates and would offer to it’s clients a workout program that would identify the players' deficiencies and prepare the players to workout for the scouts, and to be ready to go training camp after the draft.

That first year Jack Wirth had seven players taken in the NFL draft. Over the course of Wirth’s illustrious career as an agent he would go on to represent top players such as Charles Mann, Andre Reed, Phil Hansen, and Bryce Paup.

Soon after Pro Football Associates was started, Wirth was asked by his business partners how long it would be before competitors started their own training program to compete with Pro Football Associates. Jack responded that it would be “two or three years”.

Little did Jack Wirth know in the early 1980’s that there would be no agency with a competing workout program until 1992 when agents Bruce Allen and Eric Metz started recruiting clients with a workout program of their own.

In the mid 1990s, when other agencies came up with their own workout programs, Wirth said that these programs “...were not sophisticated, and agents were going about it in an amateur way.”  The main difference in these new workout programs was that most agents did not know or understand the standards of physical evaluation for players that Wirth had access to because of his former role as an NFL scout.

Jumping from the mid 1990s to 2009, the pre-draft workout mania that has swept through the agency ranks has according to Wirth become “ a necessary thing” and a “recruiting tool”

Today, as agents battle among themselves to recruit players, the workout program has become one of the main elements of most agents' recruiting pitch.

Tomorrow:  We break away from What's The Deal? for 2 days for an interview with a prominent expert on taxes and sports law.