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With ‘Fitz’ and Fleck Under Fire, Agent Harlan Faces the Heat

Daniel Libit
·13 min read
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Sports agent Bryan Harlan was supposed to be spending the dog days of summer along the breezy shorelines of Lake Michigan in Door County, Wisconsin, where he typically vacations during what is typically a slow time of year.

Instead, Harlan ending up working all of July at home in Illinois, and all of last week holed up in downtown Chicago conference rooms with the lawyers of his client, former Northwestern football coach Pat Fitzgerald, who was fired July 10 amid allegations that a team culture of hazing and racism ran riot under his leadership.

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“It has been very unexpected, and it changed my summer,” Harlan said of Fitzgerald’s firing and the resulting fallout. “That is part of the job and you’ve got to do that. But to say I was caught off guard is an understatement.”

In a series telephone interviews—during each of which Harlan politely responded, while repeatedly insisting that he didn’t want to be the focus of a story—he described his latest role as that of a “conduit” between the coach and his counsel.

Though not a lawyer himself, Harlan said, “I have known (Fitzgerald) for over 20 years, and nobody knows him better than I do.”

Last week, another of Harlan’s key clients, Minnesota coach P.J. Fleck, became the latest subject of public scrutiny when Front Office Sports published a story accusing him of maintaining a culture “fraught with intimidation and toxicity.” While those allegations did not appear to rise to the level of what has been alleged at Northwestern—nor have they spawned litigation—the reporting put a harsh glare on Fleck during last week’s Big Ten Media Days.

Harlan dismissed the FOS reporting as a recapitulation of allegations being pushed by a former faculty member. “He finally got a media person to bite on it,” Harlan said.

The dueling Big Ten scandals—or “challenges,” as Harlan prefers to call them—come at a watershed moment for both his business and the wider industry in which it exists. After building up Harlan Sports Management over the last two decades, he sold his company last October to Excel Sports Management and took over as the head of its coach and executive division. Harlan says that his approximately 80-person client roster includes 20 college head coaches and 35 assistants or coordinators.

“At the end of the day, when you have so many clients, somebody has a problem at all times,” said Harlan. “The challenges my clients have gone through the last few days is a very important part of the job. You don’t find out about people until things get rough.”

Now in his 60s, Harlan has seen standards and scrutiny shift in the wake of the modern athlete-rights movement that spawned NIL and has led to countless college coaches facing denunciation over the way their players are treated. Behind many of those coaches is an agent or agency trying to figure out their role in protecting clients and mitigating risk in this new epoch of intercollegiate human resources.

“I don’t know if it is healthy or not, but there is a paranoia we all have,” said Bob Lattinville of William Morris Endeavor, an attorney who serves as one of two business affairs agents for WME’s basketball coaching clients.

In decades past, Lattinville said, representatives like him imparted conventional wisdom to coaching clients based on putting “yourself in a situation where plausible deniability works.”

“That is gone, and for good reason it is gone,” Lattinville continued. “But when you think about a football coach, he is now responsible for 100 student-athletes and an entire coaching staff and their families and all the admin and, now, all the individuals that can come in contact with them.”

Harlan’s venture into professional representation began with his own personal scandal—or challenge. The son of former Green Bay Packers president Bob Harlan, Bryan worked with the Chicago Bears for 16 years, rising to director of PR. But he resigned in 2000 after admitting to betting on games. After briefly working for a Chicago PR firm, Harlan set up his shop a year later, looking to forge his clientele from the ranks of young, promising college assistant coaches.

Fitzgerald was one of Harlan’s first four signings, along with current Baltimore Ravens head coach John Harbaugh, Denver Broncos head coach Sean Payton and Wake Forest head coach Dave Clawson. All of those men have remained in Harlan’s stead, forming strong bonds and paying large dividends.

Last year, the foursome combined to bring in around $40 million in compensation, according to public reports. Given the going coach representation rate of 3% to 4%, they alone would have netted the agent seven-figures in annual fees.

“Fitz,” as his admirers call him, was a young, twenty-something linebackers coach at Northwestern when around 2003 Harlan pitched the coach at his apartment in Evanston, Ill. Barely three years later, NU head coach Randy Walker died from a heart attack, and Fitzgerald was handed the reins to the Wildcats at the age of 31.

“I knew he was going to be a head coach and wanted to be in on the front end,” said Harlan, “but I thought he would need to get a MAC job first.”

During Fitzgerald’s 17-year helm at Northwestern, Harlan says, the coach was repeatedly pursued by other teams, including eight to 10 NFL clubs, as well as Michigan, Penn State, USC and Notre Dame. In 2016, Fitzgerald’s name arose in connection with the Green Bay Packers job, in part because of Harlan’s familial connections to the team.

Being based in Chicago, Harlan first connected with Fleck in the late 2000s, when he was working as a wide receivers coach at his alma mater, Northern Illinois. Fleck eventually become head coach at Western Michigan before moving to Minnesota in 2017, following that school’s tumultuous firing of former coach Tracy Claeys. At the time of his hiring, Fleck was one of the most sought-after head coaching candidates and Minnesota has repeatedly upped the ante to keep him. His initial five-year, $18 million contract was renegotiated in 2019 to be a seven-year, $33.25 million deal. Then, last December, Fleck signed another new seven-year extension that will pay $6 million a year through 2029.

Having professional representation was once limited to an elite group of head coaches, but the NCAA coaching world has become increasingly agent-driven over the last decade. Now, it is almost a rule of thumb for coaches to find their proxy just as soon as they rise beyond graduate assistant. Sky-rocketing salaries, which can often exceed those in the NFL or NBA, have drawn the attention of the bigger agencies, who have either built out or acquired college practices.

In 2011, Creative Artists Agency came to the fore with its hiring of Jimmy Sexton, widely considered the doyen of college sports agents. In 2019, WME hired influential basketball coaching agent Bret Just away from CAA. Harlan said he had repeatedly turned down offers over the last decade before accepting Excel’s acquisition bid.

Bennett Speyer, an Ohio-based attorney who serves as legal counsel for a number of college coaches and athletic directors, questions the value proposition of the traditional kind of sports agent for the established college coach.

“It isn’t like the movie industry, it is a pretty defined market,” said Speyer. “You know what jobs are open or likely to be open, the data on compensation is pretty public … It is not that hard of a market to understand.”

Speyer adds: “If any school wants to talk to you, they are going to figure out a way, but you are still paying [an agent] 3% on $5 million every year?”

In Speyer’s mind, it’s better and far cheaper for the coach to pay for an attorney, who bills a flat fee or hourly, than an agent who charges commission. After all, he argues, whether or not you have representation, you’re still likely to need a lawyer when push comes to shove.

“I gave up that nagging thought years ago and, you know what? I have some great clients whose names are very prominent, and they have CAA as their agent and I still do a ton of legal work for them,” Speyer said.

At least one coach—and former CAA client—has taken up Speyer’s sans-agent argument: Rich Rodriguez, whose coaching career has endured plenty of controversy and litigation.

In 2017, Rodriguez hired Speyer’s firm, Shumaker Loop & Kendrick, to defend him and his wife in a breach of contract lawsuit filed by CAA, which claimed that as part of a previous oral agreement, the coach owed both back payments and an ongoing 4% fee on his existing coaching contract with Arizona. The agency ultimately decided to dismiss the case after being challenged by Rodriguez over its jurisdiction.

A few months later, however, Rodriguez was terminated without cause by U of A after a $7.5 million notice of claim was filed against him by his former administrative assistant, who accused the coach of sexual harassment. Rodriguez, who received a $6 million buyout from U of A as part of his firing, later admitted to a consensual sexual relationship with the assistant but denied her harassment claims. Speyer represented Rodriguez throughout what became a four-year ordeal and served as his spokesperson on the matter, as well.

In 2021, when the lawsuit was dismissed, Speyer told ESPN: “The scheme failed. She did not receive a single cent from my client or UA. Unfortunately, Coach Rodriguez paid a steep reputational price as the subject of publicized false allegations.”

After latching on as an offensive coordinator at Ole Miss and Louisiana-Monroe, Rodriguez returned to the head coaching ranks in 2021 when he was hired by Jacksonville State. Speyer has handled each of those contracts and since leaving CAA eight years ago, Rodriguez has eschewed the use of the traditional agent.

Or there’s the option of getting two for the price of one– an agent that is also a lawyer, such as Hal Biagas of Seven1 Sports & Entertainment Group.

“You always have to be prepared for situations to arise,” Biagas said, when asked about dealing with coaching controversies. As luck would have it, Biagas happened to be in Lubbock, Texas, this past spring visiting his client, Mark Adams, when calamity came.

On March 5, Adams was suspended as Texas Tech’s men’s basketball coach following a Stadium report that he had made a racially insensitive comment to a black player by invoking Biblical references to slaves serving their masters. According to Stadium, Adams was already under investigation over a separate incident in which he was accused of spitting on a player and later saying he could do so with impunity. Adams later told a reporter that he could not recall making such a comment and that any expectorant was the accidental byproduct of a cough he had at the time.

Those explanations–and the Red Raiders’ 16-15 record last season–failed to suffice.

Three days after being suspended, Adams resigned as part of a deal in which Texas Tech paid him $3.9 million and a $200,000 retention bonus—about half the buyout of his contract were he to be fired without cause. Biagas, who was there for the entirety of the process, believes his presence was “significant” in achieving the best outcome for Adams.

“Not only was I able to be there and provide support but I was able to put on my lawyer hat,” Biagas said.

Biagas says that situation has proven to be “totally recoverable.” Following the resignation, Biagas said he immediately reached out to search firms to gauge whether his client should lie low for a while. According to Biagas, he consistently received feedback that there was no reason why Adams couldn’t reenter the coaching market this job cycle. Sure enough, the 67-year-old coach was hired last month as an assistant at East Carolina, which finished 16-17 last year.

For Biagas, the experience exemplified how reactive the job of a coach’s agent has become.

“You can’t think of everything,” said Biagas. “I am sure Harlan wasn’t thinking his client would be brought into a hazing scandal. I didn’t think Mark was going to be brought into a racial imbroglio. You have to be ready to pivot quickly in whatever situation you are confronted with.”

That includes deciding whether or not to stand by your recently tarnished client, as Biagas did with Adams.

“There are certain things that might offend one person’s moral sensibilities and not another’s,” said Biagas. “There are certainly ethical standards we all aspire to, and if I felt a client was doing something that was morally repugnant or violated my ethical standards, that would be one thing. But, in a general sense, I am a big believer in loyalty and that is sort of where my first instinct is, to stay by my guy unless it was something that was really egregious.”

Tolerance levels can differ between independent agents and those who work for larger corporate interests. Biagas notes that with CAA currently in advance talks to sell a majority stake to French luxury goods billionaire Francois-Henri Pinault, it might be more sensitive to concerns about the company it keeps.

Agent Jason Belzer encountered his breaking point in September 2017, when his client Chuck Person, an assistant men’s basketball coach at Auburn, was arrested as part of the FBI’s college recruiting bribery dragnet. Belzer, who is also an attorney, said the first thing he did was find Person a local criminal defense lawyer in Alabama. Soon after, Belzer moved to terminate their 18-month relationship—the only time Belzer can recall having fired a client.

“I represent people to help them in their careers, and it was pretty clear he violated every norm that went along with what was necessary in becoming a successful long-term head coach,” said Belzer. “I have a very, very good reputation in this business and work hard to maintain that. When that happened, I felt violated.”

Belzer suggests that knowing when to walk away—whether it be from or with your client—is one of the most essential skills an agent can possess.

“My job is to maximize your earnings both now and in the future,” said Belzer. “I need to be able to sit there and think strategically [about their] long-term career. If you have 25 years left in your coaching career, how do we ensure you maintain as much as possible?”

That is now the question that confronts Harlan as he triages the legal and PR dilemmas facing the 48-year-old Fitzgerald.

The heat wave that took over July—which includes six lawsuits naming Fitzgerald as a defendant, and likely many more to come—will almost assuredly consume August. Still, Harlan insists his faith in Fitz’s future remains unshaken.

“I think everything is going to work out,” he said.

To whatever extent that is true, Harlan can at least bargain on the recurring reality of the modern-day college coaching scandal, controversy, imbroglio or challenge.

“I feel for Bryan now,” said Biagas, “but I am sure it won’t be long until somebody else’s client is leading the news cycle.”

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