After playing the final game of his collegiate career for Oklahoma in January 2020, Jalen Hurts took a look at his Instagram posts. One of them was from NFL agent Nicole Lynn: “Hello, have you chosen an agent? If not, I will be happy to connect.”
Lynn explains it by saying: “Oh Mary completely.
It was a long time ago. Many players entering the draft long ago chose an agent in January.
Lynn went to OU law school and her husband played football there, years before Hurts. Before becoming an All-Star, Hurts won a national championship with Alabama; Lynn already represents Crimson Tide alumni, including Quinnen Williams, the top scorer in school history. Lynn also lives in Houston, where Hurts is from.
Now he remembers: “All these interactions. So he fired the DM on impulse. “I didn’t expect you to see it.”
Hurts saw; he was still in the process of finding an agent. He says: “I wanted to hear him.
Lynn met Hurts’ father for three hours, and met Hurts himself at his father’s high school—all the while suffering from the flu. He did not know what to expect after the meeting. “Jalen has a poker face. He doesn’t show much emotion,” she says.
In short, things went well: “People had doubts about me,” Hurts says. People still have doubts about me.
Despite winning a national championship and becoming one of the best college players in the game as a dual threat through the air and on the ground, Hurts was projected to be a mid-to-back option, at least in the second season. if not the third cycle or later; he was chosen 53rd. “He’s not the guy,” one analyst said, summing up how much of the football world seemed to view him.
“That helped me,” Hurts says. “It lights a fire in me. It does something to me, because I know I will prove you wrong. But I saw that fire in Nicole. He said, ‘I am a woman. People will ignore me. People are praying for me. They won’t give me the respect I deserve. But I’m getting over it, just like you.’ And that’s where we really got to. We had the same vision.”
Lynn was at the Senior Bowl with Hurts and his dad shortly after signing him when another agent — a man — said to them, “Hey, if the girl doesn’t work out, give us a call. She’s nice, but– he knows.”
Hurts didn’t care about that. “How many things do you deal with?” he asked Lynn later. “Why is it important that you are a woman?”
“Oh, Jay,” he said with a laugh. “This is just my life.”
Hurts cared about his CV, his experience and how he trusted him. He thought: What else is there? She says: “People will doubt her because she is a woman in this industry. There was a sense of suspicion. Why is she doing this? She can wait for a quarter? What are you going to do with her?”
When Hurts began his pro career—he began his rookie season as the third-string quarterback on the Eagles’ depth chart—he found himself looking around the sports world and feeling anxious. even more so is the way women are treated.
Nathan Ray Seebeck/USA TODAY Sports
“I know the world of an agent in the NFL, and all sports are very male-dominated,” he says. “But Nicole was really good at her stuff. She was prepared. She knew what she was talking about. . He was hungry. And he was determined. And I feel like that determination never rests. Once you meet someone who’s that determined, it affects me a little bit differently.”
It’s the same with the women he already knew, and the women he still knew. Hurts said she saw her mother, Pamela, work hard throughout her upbringing—going to work, coming home to take care of the family and going to school to get her master’s degree.
“I admire any person who keeps his head down and works for what he wants. And I know women who do that every day, but they don’t get the same praise as men—they don’t get the praise they deserve,” says Hurts. “I’ve seen that now with tons of different women in my active life. Athletes, coaches, women in the sports business world. I see it all the time. And they deserve their flowers too. So if I say something about it brings more attention to it, so thank you.”
Hurts, who has an older brother, also has a younger sister, Kynnedy, who is starting her senior year in high school in Houston and is an aspiring volleyball player. “He’s one of the smartest of the three of us,” Hurts says. And I watch him do endless work. I grew up in the weight room, going out on the street, going through things in my head, playing catch with my brother and my dad, putting in the work. … He’s hitting volleyball on the side of the house, he’s in the garage lifting weights, he’s doing all these kinds of things with the same hunger. He has the same hunger, the same desire for what he wants to do. He is still working. … Whatever he decides to do, I got him.”
When Hurts first laid the foundation for his career, he hired women to run his life around football. Choosing Lynn as his agent was just the beginning. From media relations to marketing to brand customer service support, women run things for him everywhere. “I put a lot of trust and faith in a team driven by women,” she says, pointing to Lynn and calling out others like Chantal Romain, Shakeemah Simmons-Winter and Jenna Malphrus for her media relations with the team. of customer service management, along with Rachel Everett, who handles some of her marketing.
Klutch Sports Group’s Shakeemah Simmons-Winter (left) and Nicole Lynn are two members of Hurts’ all-female team.
“I have a group of straight hustlers. … They do things. That’s how I am on the field and off the field,” he says. “We’re all trying to do something.”
Hurts continued to talk to Lynn about her experience as a woman working as an NFL agent, her interest growing as she learned more. They talked a lot about how difficult it can be to get the players and their parents to trust them. Lynn says: “Someone like a white man, as long as they have the look, it’s immediately like, ‘Oh, you’re an agent.’ take a long time. time, and I also prove that I know what I’m doing. And, depending on the character of the player, there are often still a few extra steps that men don’t have to deal with. ”
Hurts rarely speaks his mind or joins the conversation of the day; he chooses to focus on football. But seeing what she’s seen, and thinking about her younger sister becoming an athlete, and just growing up and knowing more about how many people in the world treat women well, she wants to add her voice to the conversation. yes. He says: “My goal in speaking about this is to advocate and support women’s investment in sports.
Then there’s his team, starting with Lynn. “No matter what stands in our way, no matter what we want, we will overcome everything. We will overcome all that is before us. And I think we’re off to a good start after three years. “
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