Profootballtalk.com Calls For Brady Quinn To Fire CAA's Tom Condon

Will CAA Sports Divsion's Tom Condon lose yet another high profile quarterback, having just lost Matt Leinart earlier this year. Well, there's no official word but if Profootballtalk.com has its way, it could happen. This is what Florio and his people over there are Profootballtalk.com wrote:

QUINN SHOULD FIRE CONDON

Earlier this week, a league source opined to us that Browns quarterback Brady Quinn should fire agent Tom Condon. We disagreed, due in large part to the rule that requires Quinn to wait five days before hiring a new agent.

But given the fact that Condon has displayed no sense of urgency to get the contract finalized so that Quinn can commence his career as a member of a football franchise that desperately needs to give folks in Cleveland a reason to cheer, we now believe that Quinn should write up the letter disengaging from Condon and send it to the NFLPA.

Just do it, Brady. Forget about the marketing guarantee or whatever other inducement Condon offered to get you to sign. He has given you, in our opinion, nothing but bad advice, every step of the way.

The tipping point for us was when we read that Condon only "talked briefly" with the Browns on Friday, and that Condon has invited Browns management to travel to Kansas City to get the deal done.

Condon, in our opinion, should pack his bags and get his ass to Cleveland, and stay there until there's a contract. Quinn clearly wants to play, as evidenced by his response to a question from ESPN's Collen Dominguez regarding whether he is willing to sit out the full season.

"You know, I don't think it's gonna go that far," Quinn said. "I don't think we're in that sort of situation. That's something that I don't wanna do."

Does Condon have the entire Quinn family so bamboozled that they can't see that the agent's foot-dragging does nothing to get Quinn ready to pursue his next contract? You know, the one that will pay him more than $30 million in guaranteed money, if Quinn becomes the player that he thinks he is.

With that said, there's a school of thought that Condon is holding out for the best deal possible for Quinn because Condon believes that Quinn will be a bust, and thus Condon thinks that he needs to get the most possible money for Quinn now, since there likely won't be a second big contract.

And part of Quinn's reluctance to dump Condon could be due to the fact that Quinn is unwilling to admit that he might have erred by hiring him.

Regardless, it's time for the deal to get done. It's wrong for Condon to be exercising so much control over the player. Reasonable people should be able to work something out reasonably quickly, if they all can get together and work on making it happen.

As we've previously said, we think that this is all about Condon setting the stage to attract his next crop of quarterback clients, and not about Condon taking the best possible care of his current one.

We also think that the Browns should call Condon's bluff and go to Kansas City and tell him that they are ready and willing to do whatever needs to be done to make this contract happen. That'll put even more pressure on Condon to crap or get off of the commode.

Also, why not publicly disclose the specific terms of the offer that the Browns have made, and the terms that Condon is seeking? Sure, this stuff usually happens under a veil of confidentiality, but we think that the Browns should put it all out there, so that folks can make their own assessment as to who's right, and who's wrong.

WILL QUINN AGREE TO A REBATE?

Though we continue to hear that the primary sticking point in the Brady Quinn contract is that agent Tom Condon wants to get more guaranteed money and more total dollars than Quinn's draft slot dictates, one of the other issues is the back-end incentives that Quinn will receive based on playing time and other factors.

The Quinn camp wants the triggers to be easy to meet, and the Browns want the bar to be higher than that.

But, as one league source pointed out to us, if Quinn and company are so focused on ensuring that he is paid a "fair" amount if/when he becomes the starting quarterback, is Quinn also willing to agree to reduce his future pay if he ends up being the next Ryan Leaf or Akili Smith or Cade McNown or Dan McGwire or David Klingler or Andre Ware or Tim Couch or any of the other first-round quarterbacks who got a bunch of money for, in the end, not much at all in return?

Probably not, because the player-friendly rookie compensation system never accounts for the fact that the first-round pick might be a first-class bust.

So, on one hand, Quinn and Condon want to tilt the field in their favor if Quinn becomes the starting quarterback (which most quarterbacks taken in round one are expected to do), and on the other hand they'd never agree to reduce future salaries figures if Quinn becomes the starter, but has a passer rating lower than his jersey number.

The system protects first-rounders from ever having to pay money back. So if Quinn wants to reap the benefit of that system in the event he never delivers as the Browns' quarterback, then Quinn should also respect that same system when formulating his demands.

Zennie Gets A Call From Nikke Finke!

Nikki Finke's a famous and to some infamous columnist with a colorful past having been unfairly fired by the New York Post for her writing about Disney, and who has a popular blog that I read regularly. It's called "Deadline Hollywood Daily" and first capured my attention when Finke was following Creative Artist Agency's foray into the sports business. It also features her equally interesting writing, where she once referred to Viacom's Sumner Redstone as a "geriatric Viacom jerk."

Since Nikki follows CAA, I emailed her a tidbit and to my surprise -- and without my asking in the email -- she called to follow up.

The result was a wide ranging conversation about a great many things, and I can say I learned a great deal about how Hollywood, and Ms. Finke, work. But most important to me is that she's a funny, gregarious, and nice person who I hope I'm able to get to know better in my life.

I do disagree with some of the character descriptions I've seen of her online. She does have a lot to say, and If one's smart, they'll listen. I do. But also, I'm not on the wrong side of her wrath and don't plan on being there.

She's got a book coming out, she told me. If I recall it's on Hollywood Agent / Mogul Michael Ovitz, of whom she's a total expert and can give a running account of his life and business deals in a short period of time. Impressive.

Rumor: Matt Leinart Not Happy With CAA - Profootballtalk.com

LEINART LOOKING FOR NEW A MARKETING REP

On Friday, USA Today ran a front-page story on the growing power and influence of Creative Artists Agency , which has amassed a host of A-list entertainers and athletes in the past year.

The story fails to point out one potentially relevant fact.

Per a league source, the powerhouse agency is in danger of losing its lock on the marketing dollars to be generated by former USC quarterback Matt Leinart, the 2004 Heisman winner and starting quarterback for the Arizona Cardinals.

The source tells us that Leinart recently informed CAA of his decision, but that he has not yet hired a new firm. In the interim, CAA is trying hard to keep him.

As the source observed, it could be that CAA is growing too fast without the right people in place to handle the workload.

CAA Taking A Bath On Sports Division? - Buying Matt Leinart, Tom Condon, and IMG

Someone -- perhaps Leigh Steinberg -- is reading this with glee. But if Hollywood Reporter Nikki Finke's any indication,
Creative Artists Agency , the super-firm of talent agents started by Ron Meyer and Mike Ovitz in 1975, and recently the epicenter of Hollywood's move into athletic talent mining starting with players like Arizona Cardinals QB Matt Leinart, may be losing money in its sports division.

To understand, read this post from Nikki's blog:

If CAA agents this week are looking inconsolable, it's because they now have to give up flying first class. (Those conversations you're trying to overhear at lunch in Century City are the CAA tenpercenters kvetching about it.) So what happened? My sources tell me that CAA called a big all-agents meeting and read the riot act to its spendthrift tenpercenters. To cut expenses by a whopping 20%. To start flying just business class instead of first class. And to take to heart this warning: If you want to get paid, then get your clients jobs.

I hear the motion picture agents are the most upset about the new edicts because they live the high life more and so got hit harder. Look, I've been saying this for a while now: CAA can't keep spending like drunken sailors without having cash flow issues: buying a bevy of agents from other shops and wooing clients by the hundreds, and moving into swank new headquarters while still paying rent back at the I.M. Pei building, and starting a money pit of a sports division where most of the endorsement deal money will be heading back to IMG for years, etc. Now CAA is having the same woes every other agency in town has been having: for instance, William Morris last year asked its departments to slash spending by 20%. What's next? Richard Lovett on Avenue Of The Stars with a metal detector looking for loose change and lost jewelry?



If it's true that CAA's gotten into a deal where it's giving most of its' cash from sponsorship deals back to IMG, then it's officially taking a bath in its sports division. Everyone in the sports business knows its the sponsorship deals that drive the industry, and this is especially true for NFL agents, which are limited to 3 percent takes of an athlete's contract.

By contrast, CAA comes from the world of the 20 percent deal, where they can get as much as that for an actor or actress. So they're giving up 17 percent of a deal, plus a big chunk of endorsement money? Wow. All that plus the fact that CAA and the other Hollywood agencies aren't savvy enough in new media to promote their talents to such an extent they make up for this. One firm I will not name has an extensive website, but you can't find it on Google! (They need to use SBS-ON!)

At first, I thought CAA's foray into sports would restructure the industry and cause a shakeout of some of the small-time -- at least in behavior -- agents. But given the appearance of their business model, I remain skeptical. It's now logical to me why IMG would give up its NFL operation to CAA without the appearance of a fight; they're getting paid! Moreover, it seems everyone, from Leigh Steinberg to Matt Leinart's trainer Steve Clarkson of Air 7 (which has a better website now), to IMG, and Tom Condon (who was lured from IMG to CAA) has been paid by CAA just so it could leap -- head first -- into the sports business without a battle.

In other words, CAA really did create a money pit!

Let's give it five years, and then review. Unless CAA starts making a ton of sports movies with Matt Leinart and Paris Hilton as the stars, they may see the NFL and sports as a waste of money. It's not, really. It's just that they don't really understand what they've gotten themselves into.