An agent for good? Broncos got hit by a Bus

When I was playing professional baseball, my agent was Steve Feldman, a well-respected guy in the business who became not only a business partner, but a confidant, friend, and life advocate. I could turn to Steve for advice about just about everything. We remain friends today.

For that reason, when a sport agent gets dragged through the mud, my first reaction is to almost instantly take the agent’s side – even more than just giving them the benefit of the doubt – until something shows that they’ve handled this wrong.

It’s easy to see what’s gone wrong in say, college basketball, where the stories about agents steering players towards certain schools, giving early payments, and all that, are rampant. For years, agents have been fighting amongst themselves to represent the top hoops talent, and the whole affair has become very sorted. The latest top flight school to get fingered is UConn, smack dab in the middle of March Madness.

There are obviously a lot of agents out there that are bending and/or breaking the rules, if not outright cheating. They deserve all the grief and bad publicity they can get. Perhaps the NCAA and professional sports should work together even more to find a better way to license and certify…and monitor these people.

There are also those big time agents, guys with good track records, who are above the sort of shenanigans that have hurt places like U Conn and Southern Cal. Say what you want about someone like Scott Boras, but what you can’t say is that he doesn’t do right by his clients. He’s never been implicated as a cheater – just a bare knuckles negotiator. That’s his job.

Then we have a guy like Bus Cook.

I don’t know the man, but from what we’ve learned in the last two years – and even before that – leads you to believe that Mr. Cook might be able to better serve the greater good if he went back to practicing personal injury law in Mississippi. Agents are supposed to work for the client, not be the ones getting quoted in the newspapers all the time. It’s obvious from his track record that Bus Cook has a thing for the limelight.

Cook’s fingerprints are obviously all over the Jay Cutler fiasco here in Denver. But don’t forget that he was also the agent for Steve McNair and Brett Favre, two other prominent quarterbacks whose departure from the franchise they had become closely associated with got ugly.

Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not. According to SI.com, “Bus Cook's QB clients have a history of public breakups with teams.”

McNair was a key component of a Tennessee Titans team that was a yard away from sending the Super Bowl into overtime. As he was nearing the end of his career, Cook got involved and things reached the point where McNair was being locked out of the Titans training facility. Of course all of this was made very public, the way Cook seems to like things. McNair was eventually traded to Baltimore, where he went out with a whimper, not a bang.

Responsibility for the Favre mess rests mainly with the egomaniac QB himself, of course. “I’m retired.” “Umm, wait. I’m un-retired.” “I want to be in Green Bay.” “Release me so I can go to the Vikings.” “I love New York…I just don’t want to interact with my teammates too much.” The guy became a joke because he didn’t know when to say when.

That’s certainly on Favre…but shouldn’t his agent step in at some point and advise his client that maybe he’s not doing the right things? Not our man Bus. He jumped in, stirred things up with some inflammatory quotes – that Favre eventually distanced himself from – and helped turn the whole thing into a circus. Of course, when Favre was traded to the Jets, Cook got an extra pay day out of the thing, regardless of how poorly he had ‘served’ his client.

Now the Cutler fiasco – again, largely orchestrated by Cook. Why couldn’t Cutler and new coach Josh McDaniels ever speak one-on-one, face to face, like men? Why did all communication have to go through the former ambulance chaser? What kind of agent advises his client not to return phone calls from the man who signs his checks? Cook isn’t dumb. There’s a method to his madness.

There is plenty of blame to go around on this. Everyone from Pat Bowlen on down could have handled things much better. But when it’s your job to serve the best interests of a 25-year-old who obviously has not finished growing up yet, you better do better than this.

The best advice you could give any young quarterback comes from John Elway, in a recent statement to the media: "I wish Jay would have got some better advice from whoever he was getting advice from."

It would seem that the Broncos just got hit by a Bus.

For more info: Broncos Examiner Greg Henry , Mark Kiszla Denver Post column