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| ROSTER MAN: A former player representative, Brandt now negotiates contracts from the other side of the table. |
| Mike Roemerl |
ONE NIGHT LAST FEBRUARY, Andrew Brandt was frantic. Treading close to a firm deadline, the Green Bay Packers’ director of player finance had to convince three-time MVP quarterback Brett Favre to restructure his $100 million contract—or feel the wrath of the NFL salary cap and cut several other highly paid players.
To close the deal, Brandt, ’82, had to tackle Favre’s wandering attention. Since the 2000-01 football season had ended several weeks earlier, Favre had shifted to off-season mode, tramping through the woods of his Mississippi hometown, conquering the golf course, watching copious amounts of TV.
Favre’s agent, Bus Cook, had been working with Brandt on the details for weeks when Cook received a late-night phone call. It was Brandt, and his voice was steady and calm: “Bus, go over to Brett’s house, go through the contract with him, and call me from there.”
Cook obliged. “All right, I’m here,” he said, “but Brett’s watching Animal Planet.”
“Can you talk to him while he watches Animal Planet?”
“I’m not gonna talk to him while he watches Animal Planet.”
Brandt pushed on. “Just talk to him. See if he can sign it.” The following day, Favre finally signed the contract—on a golf cart.
A few months and dozens of negotiations later, Brandt’s efforts paid off. The Packers had restructured key player contracts, retained several top free agents and agreed on salary reductions for many veteran players. Brandt helped orchestrate a successful off-season that gave stability and continuity to the team roster—no easy feat in today’s volatile, free-market-driven NFL. And his bosses noticed. In October, he was promoted to vice president of player finance and general counsel.
Brandt does a lot of juggling to create contracts that are attractive to players while keeping his team intact and retaining the monetary flexibility to sign other top talent. And he has to do all of this while minding the pesky salary cap—the NFL-designated team payroll limit. The job “is like stuffing an octopus in a box: it seems there’s always something hanging out,” he says.
Packers president and CEO Bob Harlan calls him “a tremendous asset . . . outstanding with the salary cap, and an excellent negotiator.” Harlan also reveals Brandt’s secret: “Andrew is a former [player] agent, so he has been on both sides of the table.”
Brandt says his life as a sports agent mirrored the one Tom Cruise depicted in Jerry Maguire. Cell phone affixed to his ear, Brandt used to spend long hours catering to clients and longer hours chasing new ones. “Life was tougher as an agent,” he says. “I had more highs and lows. And it was harder on my wife [Lisa] and little boy [Sam, 5].”
But the experience certainly helped him in his new role. He knows what agents want for their clients and what they’ll say or do to get it. He knows he’s always negotiating with two personalities: player and agent. He knows his seat at the bargaining table is less tumultuous than the one on the other side. Working as part of management, he says, is more “steady as she goes.”
And Brandt says his dad—a Washington Redskins fan who took him to his first game at age 4—couldn’t be happier. “This is the first job I’ve had that my father hasn’t asked me when I’m going to get a real job.”
Not that Brandt has avoided the working world. On the contrary, he has taken jobs from Boston to Barcelona. It’s just that, for a lifelong sports nut, some of them were almost too good to be true.
Growing up in Washington, D.C., he was the self-described “guy in high school who always ran the football pools.” His own athletic skills were best suited for the tennis court, where he earned an East Coast ranking and won a few tournaments. Then, having “never been west of West Virginia,” Brandt came to Stanford with sports in mind. “I wasn’t good enough to play for Stanford, but the idea of going to a great school and being able to play tennis outside year-round was just too good to pass up.” He majored in American studies, played tournament tennis and worked as a sports announcer at campus radio station KZSU.
After graduation he tried, unsuccessfully, to get a radio job or break into professional tennis. But practicality kicked in, and he headed home to attend law school at Georgetown University. One summer he landed an internship with ProServ, one of the nation’s top sports management and marketing firms. He later signed on as a representative with ProServ and began working under pioneering “super-agent” David Falk.
Suddenly, Brandt found himself managing the financial well-being of basketball stars Michael Jordan and Patrick Ewing and football stars Boomer Esiason and James Lofton, ’78. Yet the novelty of working with famous athletes quickly wore off, he notes. “They’re hiring you to do a job. The experience gave me a more realistic approach to athletes that’s helped in later years. Now, when I meet a Brett Favre, it’s, ‘Okay, hi,’ and not the starstruck nature that it was before.”
In 1992, Brandt was offered the chance to run his own football franchise. Just one catch: the team was in Spain. The NFL was developing a subsidiary called the World League of American Football, and Brandt agreed to become the first general manager of the Barcelona Dragons. Three months before opening day, he had “no coaches, no players, no staff, no stadium—in a country that knew nothing about American football.”
“Nothing” was right. The Spanish fans cheered during routine extra-point attempts, not touchdowns. They performed “the wave” all game long. And the cheerleaders, Las Chicas del Dragons, were more popular than the players, booking performances all over town. The league lasted only two seasons, but Brandt enjoyed it and emerged confident that management was in his future.
Returning to the States, he took a job representing players for Bob Woolf Associates in Boston. It wasn’t team management, but he was back on the U.S. sports scene. Then, in 1999, his prize client of two years, eventual Heisman Trophy winner Ricky Williams, began to slip away. Williams wanted Brandt to leave the firm and join forces with rapper/producer Master P, who was looking to start a player representation firm of his own. At the same time, Brandt got a call from then-Packers general manager Ron Wolf, who asked him to switch sides.
“I was very impressed with him because he was a man of his word and he knew how to maneuver things,” Wolf recalls.
Brandt chuckles at the timing. “I don’t want to get spiritual in all of this, but things seem to happen for a reason. At the exact time I lose the watershed client of my career, the Green Bay Packers open a door and tell me to walk through.” And when the opening appeared, Brandt—like the running backs he idolized as a child—burst through in full stride.
After Boston, Barcelona, New York and D.C., he has settled comfortably in Green Bay, Wis., a city of about 100,000. It might be the only NFL city in the country where Brandt—the guy who tosses around salary figures, not footballs—can’t go unnoticed. “I’m pumping gas last year,” he recalls, “and some guy taps me on the shoulder and says, ‘Are we going to sign Darren Sharper?’ It’s unbelievable. There’s no place like it in sports.”
Brandt says he relishes his role with one of the sports world’s most storied franchises. “In any job, you want to feel part of something and you want to feel like you matter,” he says. “To think that the little kid going to Redskins games is now in high-level meetings about which players to keep, which to cut, how much to pay them, which coaches to hire—that’s just exciting for me.”