Players Prepare for Life After Football

The end of the football season might mean rest and relaxation for the many players of the NFL, but for more than 30 that have come to Cambridge this week, playtime is over.

The football players—who include New England Patriots defensive end Richard V. Seymour and Cleveland Browns running back Jamal L. Lewis, according to a press release—are at Harvard as part of the NFL Business Management and Entrepreneurial Program. The collaborative effort between the NFL, the NFL Players Association, and the Business School helps players prepare for professional life after their football days are over.

Michael J. Roberts ’79, executive director of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, said the players have a greater chance of business success if they start “using some of the contacts and the broad range of people they know while they’re still playing to get exposed to different areas, like restaurants or retail or financial services.”

Roberts—along with W. Carl Kester, deputy dean for academic affairs at HBS—is co-chair of the executive education program, which is now in its fourth year at Harvard. The program is also administered at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, and the Stanford Graduate School of Business, admitting a total of 114 players through an extensive application process, according to a press release.

“Players have a lot of business interests off the field,” said Dan Masonson, corporate communications manager for the NFL, “and by offering these executive education courses, players can get a better feel for those businesses that they want to get involved in or invest in after they leave the NFL.”

Charles Way, director of player development for the New York Giants, noted that the program was just one of many that the NFL had created to help players prepare for life after football.

“It often gets pushed under the rug that we care about the players’ well-being after they finish playing, with so many people thinking that the league only cares about the performance of the players on the field,” Way said. “That’s just not the case.”

As an example, Way mentioned the career internship program, which allows players to intern with different corporations around the country during the off-season.

Although each of the four schools has its own curriculum for the program, all of the schools still provide participants with an exposure to basic finance and accounting skills, according to Roberts.

After spending this week at the Business School, the players will return home for four weeks to research their own business idea. The players will then return to campus and present their ideas to each other in small working groups, according to Roberts.

“We’re not going to transform them in the space of six or seven days,” Roberts said. “But the program gives them a sense of [what’s] possible, and that, given the application of some time and analysis, they can get some better insight for the kinds of business ideas that they might have.”

—Staff writer Prateek Kumar can be reached at kumar@fas.harvard.edu.