The Philadelphia Eagles wanted Jalen Hurts to know he was their guy and rewarded him with a monumental contract. The five-year, $255 million contract extension makes him the highest-paid player annually in NFL history, per reports. With $179.304 million in total guarantees, including $110 million fully guaranteed at signing and $126.5 million fully guaranteed by March 2024, as well as the first no-trade clause in Eagles history, the 24-year-old is in good hands.
Those hands belong to a group of women who have guided the career of the former collegiate star into the NFL financial history books.
The Woman King
Nicole Lynn, the president of football operations for Klutch Sports, completed the deal. Their business relationship started three years ago with a simple DM on Instagram after his final football game at Oklahoma.
“Hey, have you picked an agent? If not, I’d love to link,” Lynn sent, and with that, Hurts’ path to building his team began.
Lynn attended OU law school, where Hurts closed out his collegiate career, and her husband played football at the institution years ahead of Hurts’ tenure. Lynn represented a dozen Alabama Crimson Tide alumni, the school where Hurts won a national championship. Hurts is from Houston, and Lynn also lives there.
“People are going to doubt her because she’s a woman in this industry,” Hurts said to Sports Illustrated back in 2022. “There was a sense of doubt. Why is she doing this? Can she represent a quarterback? What’s she going to do with him?”
He saw an underdog mentality in Lynn that mirrored his football player existence. Despite having won a national championship and being labeled a dual threat, Hurts was selected 53rd in the second round of the 2020 draft. Look at him now.
Jalen’s Pride
“That turns me up,” Hurts continued. “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.”
Aside from Lynn, Hurts’ all-female management team comprises other Black women. Chantal Romain and Shakeemah Simmons-Winter handle his communications, Jenna Malphrus handles his endorsement management, Rachel Everett is in charge of marketing the Jalen Hurts brand.
“I admire anyone who puts their head down and works for what they want,” Hurts said to SI. “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.”
