Last year former football agent Josh Luchs caused quite a stir when his story of paying college football players appeared in Sports Illustrated. During the same time period scandals involving agents at the University of North Carolina and other high profile schools received much media attention. To add fuel to the fire, University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban compared agents to pimps. At this time last year the "hot topic" in Sports Law was discussing how to clean up the agent profession. Of course over the last nine months with lockouts, conference expansion and the usual BCS uproar most of the agent talk has settled down. In 2011 football agents are required to go through a rigorous certification process with the NFLPA, comply with various state regulations and most universities require some form of agent registration as well. With the emphasis on policing agents, agents may in fact be over regulated, the problem that exists is that all of these regulations are not very well coordinated or in some cases not very well enforced.

Considering all of the above, it's fun to go back to the 1970's and examine NFL player representation in that era.

SLT took a look in the Sports Illustrated vault and found an article on that eras controversial super-agent Mike Trope. The article spoke of the standard 10% commission for agents, last year the maximum fee for an NFLPA certified contract advisor was 3%. In 1977 the NFLPA was still five years away from starting its agent registration program.