Trailblazing Agent Nicole Lynn’s Rise Was Not Sudden

How the representative for Jalen Hurts and other NFL stars fought her way into the game.

Nicole Lynn is an influencer of elevating influence. Lawyer, agent, author, public speaker and president of football at Klutch Sports Group. She’s only 34, or relatively young for a power broker who counts Jalen Hurts, Quinnen Williams, Myles Garrett, Will Anderson Jr. and Bijan Robinson as clients.

Still, the totality of her accomplishments can create unintended consequences. All are first-world problems, to be sure, the product of what can seem like sudden and outsized success. Within that calculus, Lynn can be reduced to the same set of facts, figures and anecdotes—young innovator upending an industry through empowerment; a “trailblazer,” Hurts says. But the CliffsNotes version leaves out all the toiling, the doors slammed shut, the improbable odds surmounted. “People are just getting the highlight reel,” she says. “That part is frustrating.”

Truth is, Lynn’s rise wasn’t sudden, not to her. She didn’t bring this subject up. Nor did her career start with Williams, her first client projected as a top-five pick. She represented a million undrafted free agents before the Alabama defensive tackle climbed so many prospect boards; her roster a mishmash of players few had heard of and fewer still remember. This path, from the NFL hinterlands to influencer, took 10 years. A full decade that sometimes felt interminable, that saw Lynn go back to college, intern, scuffle and scrap, change jobs, partner with perhaps the most famous rapper alive and land an MVP candidate through an Instagram DM. Year after year was necessary to infiltrate a landscape where the best players went to the same agencies for representation, especially elite quarterbacks.

Anyone who didn’t know her story might view those 10 years as lacking any influence. That’s not true. Lynn influenced a lot of things, until the reductive nature of a life explained in highlight-reel form took control of the narrative, making how she arrived at her now lofty perch seem simple or predestined, making her into anything other than what she is: one of the top agents—regardless of gender, race, ethnicity or any other qualifier—in pro sports.

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Lynn may seem like she has exploded onto the scene as a superagent, but it was a grind to build up her group of clients :: Leon Bennett/WireImage/Getty Images

Lynn grew up in Tulsa, raised around sports and in communities that embraced them. She pursued cheerleading and rugby and went to Oklahoma to study business management. She didn’t yet plan to make sports her career. But while on campus, she met her husband, Gabe, a cornerback for the Sooners who played briefly in the NFL and recently joined Deion Sanders’s staff at Colorado. Their friends were mostly athletes, some with professional ambitions.

Those who told their stories painted a bleak, uneven, distrustful picture. Lynn still recalls the first time she heard one, from an older football player who was drafted into the NFL but affirmed the Not For Long nature of the league as more than a trusty cliché. This player was well known, highly regarded, beloved at OU. But after one or two middling seasons, the player returned to Norman, the last place where his life made sense. He wanted to finish his degree. He needed to figure out no less than the rest of his life. This player told Lynn he had already spent all the money he made in pro football. He no longer had anyone advising him. He would struggle, for years, with his mental health. Lynn heard recently he might be “living on the streets.” And, because she is Nicole Lynn, powered by ambition, unafraid to tackle problems without obvious answers, she looked at a “really terrible, terrible, terrible situation” and thought, I’m gonna be an agent.

“The minute he was down and out, nobody was there to help him,” she says now. “I was shocked by that. I told everyone, This is ridiculous. I’m gonna change this. Somebody has to be their advocate.

Which is how the most unlikely agent career in NFL history was born. Lynn wanted to teach players financial literacy, so she completed her business degree, became a financial analyst and went to work on Wall Street. But the financial advisers she met who worked with athletes trafficked primarily in portfolio management. They took heaping piles of cash and invested, while their clients learned next to nothing about how to manage their finances themselves.

Lynn went back to school: to Oklahoma, to study law and complete her degree. She interned with the NFL Players Association while in law school, then went to Norton Rose Fulbright, a Houston-based law firm, then the fifth largest in the world. Which led to a bona fide agent job at PlayersRep, which led to a gig with Young Money APAA Sports, the agency owned by Lil Wayne. Which led to Williams and Klutch and Hurts and … there goes the highlight reel once again.

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Let’s back up.

Long before anyone called Lynn an influencer, she began to sign clients, mostly talented prospects from smaller schools or major-conference players many predicted would fall down draft boards. She was 26 years old then.

Among the first: Seth Roberts, a speedy wideout from West Alabama. He went undrafted but signed with the Raiders in 2015 and played six solid NFL seasons (183 receptions, 15 touchdowns) for three franchises. Roberts, Lynn says, was among the first legitimate pro football players who took a shot on me. Their first meeting resulted from serendipity, the kind indicative of Lynn’s early years. Her husband happened to train with Roberts, who casually mentioned he didn’t have an agent yet. Lynn flew coach to Oakland to meet with him, became his agent and procured the Raiders deal. Which led to more players, more contracts, more everything—except the break she needed more than anything else.

Lynn believes Jordan Evans was the first draft choice she represented. The Bengals selected the Oklahoma linebacker in the sixth round, No. 193. He played five NFL seasons, all with Cincinnati. Lynn still remembers the day they heard his name called. “You could not tell me that wasn’t the greatest thing in the world,” she says.

While this part of her career proved long and arduous, but not soul-crushing, what mattered was how Lynn represented clients. She did empower them. She prepared them for the NFL and life after football, which, for most, would come faster than anticipated. She created a program called Fishers of Men to connect prospects with mentors. She started a “rookie school,” where she taught adulting skills, everything from how much to tip at restaurants to how to draft professional emails to financial literacy and how to check credit scores. Before this year’s draft, in which she represented Anderson (No. 3 pick) and Robinson (No. 8), all prospects met once a week for one to two hours in their nonfootball class. As part of the same philosophy, Lynn found enough “spare” time to write a book, which doubled as a similar blueprint that wasn’t similar to anything else in sports.

Her goal? That one day they don’t need me.

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Lynn with Hurts, for whom she negotiated a monster contract this offseason / Courtesy of Klutch Sports Group

Lynn’s client list expanded, then ballooned, then shifted into other sports. She came to represent a softball luminary who was nominated for an ESPY, along with a performer for the American Ballet Theatre.

The elusive break came with Williams, whom the Jets took No. 3 in 2019. The groundwork Lynn had laid would soon pay off, when Williams embraced her process, developed into a cornerstone for a revamped contender, made the Pro Bowl and, throughout, told anyone who asked how much he loved his agent. Such as: his former teammate at Alabama. Hurts.

More unintended consequences resulted from Lynn’s ascending to another level of success. Asked whether she knew her life would change on draft day in 2019, she says no, not at first. Instead, she flashes the vulnerability her clients love. On that day, she admits, she was afraid that she would fail. Not because she doubted her competence or ability. Because she had to “see it through first” and “was walking on eggshells, thinking, I have no idea what the heck I’m doing here.” This elevated the pressure she internalized while reminding Lynn of the first time she did a deposition after law school. Nerves were simply part of the equation.

Through Williams, Lynn could dream bigger, aim higher, and not just at building out a client roster or making enough money to prove her improbable career path wasn’t that improbable at all. No, Lynn wanted to change existing paradigms. She knew that something like 90% of NFL players were repped by a fraction of agencies, meaning most players—and a percentage of the bulk of the league’s highest contract fees—went to 10% of all agents. She resolved to find players of high character, good humans, and indoctrinate them with her rookie school. She hired an all-female staff; just three employees, similar in minds and missions.

As the 2020 draft approached, Lynn watched the Peach Bowl, LSU vs. Oklahoma in the College Football Playoff semifinals, from her living room. When she watched the latest OU quarterback, Hurts, valiantly attempt to topple a better team, she remembered what everyone remembered, his infamous benching as a player for Alabama in the national title game, and she connected that moment to the resilience baked into what she saw unspooling. She went to another bowl game but fell ill before kickoff and stayed in her hotel room, lamenting flying to Florida to sign a player she could no longer meet with that day.

On a whim, she logged onto Instagram and fired off a message she didn’t expect Hurts would return. Lynn figured he had already hired representation, like most every other elite QB. But she emphasized their shared connections—Houston, where he grew up and she lived; Oklahoma; Alabama football; deep and impenetrable fortitude. She tapped all that out and, Hey, just wondering if you’ve already chosen an agent, and hit SEND.

Hurts did respond—that day. He had lasered his focus on his final season and forsaken the typical route of choosing an agent before it started. I’d love to hear more. Can you give my dad a call?

Lynn flew back to Houston and went to see Averion Hurts Sr. at his longtime office, the football facilities at Channelview High. The elder Hurts played lawyer that day, interrogating Lynn for more than three hours. She was so sick she could hardly maintain focus. At multiple points, she thought, “I’m gonna pass out” and “I’m probably not going to get this kid because I’m about to throw up.” She tried focusing on her separator: strategy, thought process and mindset; all geared to empower players.

As Lynn walked out, one of the top agents at one of the top agencies walked in.

She got the job. Not him.

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If you liked the movie Jerry Maguire, Lynn’s narrative echoes that one, except it’s not “based on a true story.” It just is. Hurts elevated from second-round question mark to MVP candidate in only his third NFL season. He nearly won MVP honors in Super Bowl LVII.

Lynn negotiated his extension this spring—after asking on social media whether anyone knew where to find a Brink’s truck—and netted a critical no-trade clause (the first ever granted in Philadelphia) and $179.3 million in guaranteed cash. The deal briefly marked the largest average annual value in league history, at $51 million, above Aaron Rodgers, Kyler Murray and the albatross Denver handed Russell Wilson before last season.

At that point, the influencer of ever-more influence also represented Garrett, Evan Neal, Ed Ingram, Malik Jefferson and many others. She repped a white quarterback in Bailey Zappe. Many of those players, like her, were overlooked, discounted, questioned. All, Hurts says, understood Lynn’s vision, which she brought to Klutch in 2021. “That’s how she connects,” he says.

Did we not mention that Lynn is Black and a woman? That’s intentional. Screw the highlight reel. Both, of course, are far more important. They’re why Hurts calls Lynn a trailblazer in the first place. They’re why his agent has represented female athletes and analysts for free. Why she chose to empower clients, rather than dictate to them. Why she wrote a book, inspires, takes sledgehammers to stereotypes.

Still, for all of her firsts, and there are many—first Black woman to land a top-three pick; first Black female agent with a player in the Super Bowl; arguably the most successful female agent in sports history, already, at 34—Lynn is more than a Black agent and more than a female one. Being both matters. Of course, undoubtedly, that matters. But when presented as part of her CliffsNotes, they can become more like qualifiers. She requires no qualifications, beyond elite agent.

“It is really significant,” she says. “But doing the highest average contract in NFL history would be that way, even for a white male. It’s very rare. There aren’t many people who can say they’ve done that.”

Lynn, then, sees her career in two distinct ways. She’s competing with many who look nothing like her, changing paradigms and lives. She’s also doing a whole lot more than competing, which means her makeup matters—until it no longer does.