After playing the final game of his collegiate career for Oklahoma in January 2020, Jalen Hurts checked his Instagram messages. One of them was from NFL agent Nicole Lynn: “Hey, have you picked an agent? If not, I’d love to link.”
“A total Hail Mary,” is how Lynn describes it.
It was beyond a long shot. Most players entering the draft have long since picked an agent by January.
Lynn went to OU law school and her husband played football there, years before Hurts. Before becoming a Sooner, Hurts won a national championship with Alabama; Lynn already represented about a dozen Crimson Tide alumni, including offensive tackle Quinnen Williams, the highest drafted player in the school’s history. Lynn also lives in Houston, where Hurts is from.
“All this synergy,” she recalls now. So she fired off the DM on impulse. “I didn’t expect him to even see it.”
Hurts saw it; he was still in the process of finding an agent. “I wanted to hear her out,” he says now.
Lynn met with Hurts’s father for three hours, then with Hurts himself at his dad’s high school—all while sick with the flu. She didn’t know what to expect after the meeting. “Jalen has a poker face. He doesn’t show a ton of emotion,” she says.
In short, it went well: “People had doubts on me,” Hurts says. “People still have doubts on me.”
Despite having won a national championship and being one of the best college quarterbacks in the game as a dual-threat both through the air and on the ground, Hurts was projected to be a mid-to-late draft pick, at least in the second if not third or later rounds; he was selected 53rd. “He’s just not the guy,” one analyst said, summing up the way most of the football world seemed to view him.
“That turns me up,” Hurts says. “It lights a fire in me. It does something to me, because I know I’ll prove you wrong. But I saw that same fire in Nicole. She said, ‘I’m a woman. People are going to overlook me. People are going to doubt me. They’re not going to give me the due respect. But I’m overcoming it, just like you do.’ And that’s where we really hit it off. We had the same vision.”
Lynn was at the Senior Bowl with Hurts and his dad soon after signing him when another agent—a man—said to them, “Hey, if baby girl doesn’t work out, give us a call. She’s sweet, but—you know.”
Hurts didn’t care for that. “How much of this do you deal with?” he asked Lynn later. “Why would it matter that you’re a woman?”
“Oh, Jay,” she said, laughing. “This is just my life.”
Hurts cared about her résumé, her experience and how he trusted her. He thought: What the hell else mattered? “People are going to doubt her because she’s a woman in this industry,” he says. “There was a sense of doubt. Why is she doing this? Can she represent a quarterback? What’s she going to do with him?”
As Hurts began his pro career—he started his rookie season as the third-string quarterback on the Eagles’ depth chart—he found himself looking around the world of sports and feeling more and more bothered by the way women were treated.
Nathan Ray Seebeck/USA TODAY Sports
“I know the agent world in the NFL, and all sports, is very male-dominated,” he says. “But Nicole was really on top of her stuff. She was prepared. She knew what she was talking about. She was hungry. And she was determined. And I feel that determination like that never rests. Once you come across such a determined individual, that just hits me a little different.”
Same for the women he already knew, and the women he was getting to know. Hurts says he saw his mother, Pamela, working hard throughout his upbringing—going to work, coming home to care for the family and going to school to get her master’s degree.
“I admire anyone who puts their head down and works for what they want. And I know women who do that daily, but they don’t get the same praise as men—they don’t get the praise that they deserve,” Hurts says. “I’ve seen that now with tons of different women in my life that are hustlers. Athletes, coaches, women in the business world of sports. I see it all the time. And they deserve their flowers too. So if me saying something about it brings more attention to it, then I’m all for that.”
Hurts, who has an older brother, also has a younger sister, Kynnedy, who’s starting her senior year of high school in Houston and is an aspiring volleyball player. “She’s the smartest one of the three of us,” Hurts says. “And I watch her put in an endless amount of work. I grew up in the weight room, going outside on the street, walking through things in my head, playing catch with my brother and my dad, putting in work. … She’s hitting the volleyball against the side of the house, she’s in the garage lifting weights, she’s doing all of these same sorts of things with the same hunger. She has the same hunger, the same passion for what she wants to do. She’s putting in the work. … Anything she decides to do, I got her back.”
As Hurts began laying the groundwork for his career, he hired women to run his life around football. Choosing Lynn as his agent was just the start. From media relations to marketing to brand client services support, women run things for him across the board. “I’ve put a lot of trust and faith in a female-driven team,” he says, pointing to Lynn and naming others such as Chantal Romain, Shakeemah Simmons-Winter and Jenna Malphrus on his media relations and client services management team, along with Rachel Everett, who handles some of his marketing.
Courtesy of Var Turner
“I have a team of straight hustlers. … They get things done. And that’s how I am on the field and off the field,” he says. “We’re all trying to accomplish something.”
Hurts kept talking with Lynn about her experience as a woman who works as an NFL agent, his curiosity growing the more he learned. They talked a lot about how hard it can be to garner trust of players and their parents. “Someone like a white male,” Lynn says, “as long as they have the look, immediately it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re an agent.’ I have to first prove that I’m an agent, which takes a long time, and also prove that I know what I’m doing. And then, depending on the player’s personality, there are usually still a couple of extra steps that men just don’t have to deal with.”
Hurts doesn’t usually voice his opinions or engage in the discourse of the day; he prefers to focus on football. But seeing what he’s seen, and thinking about his sister coming up as an athlete, and simply growing up and becoming more aware of how many people in the world treat women—well, he wants to add his voice to that conversation. “My goal in speaking out on this is to advocate for and support the investment in women in sports,” he says.
Then there’s his own team, starting with Lynn. “Regardless of what stands in our way, regardless of what we want, we’re gonna conquer all. We’re gonna conquer everything in front of us. And I think we’ve gotten off to a good start in three years.”
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