Between free agency in March and the draft in April, this portion of the NFL calendar is about getting ready for the future. That's exactly what a group of players were doing when they gathered in New York last week. Only they were looking even further down the road than their next game or another Super Bowl chase -- to life after pro football.
At NFL BizWeek, pros from Jeremy Chinn to Josh Uche to Baron Browning worked to prepare themselves for successful careers in business and entrepreneurship. During the three-day workshop, participants attended panels led by NFL legends such as Michael Strahan, Malcolm Jenkins and Justin Tuck, took part in a microcredential program run by Syracuse University and teamed up for a pitch-day event and networking with some of the leading executives and investors in the finance, real estate and technology industries.
Former NFL offensive lineman Justin Pugh -- who co-produced BizWeek through a company he co-founded, Athlete + Us -- described the event as being "for players, by players." The idea initially came to Pugh as a way for the league to get a jumpstart on preparing its athletes for their post-playing careers. Last March, between his final NFL snaps (in Week 18 of the 2023 season, with the New York Giants) and the announcement of his retirement in July, Pugh helped the NFL inaugurate BizWeek as one of the league's offseason player engagement programs.
"I was an active player when I started this, and we have active players now putting their fingerprints all over it," Pugh told NFL.com. "That's what make this unique."
To create BizWeek in conjunction with the league, Pugh reached out to NFL senior vice president of player operations Tracy Perlman, who asked him to craft exactly what the event would be and look like.
"He went away almost with the assignment of coming back with here's what I think it is, here's how we're gonna partner," Perlman told NFL.com. "He did a lot of due diligence asking players what they wanted to learn, what they needed to know. He also worked with a ton of other legends, asking, 'What would have been beneficial to you while you were playing that we can include in this?' … He really came back with a very well-rounded plan so that we could come behind him and support it."
Two years into putting on the summit, Perlman says exposure has grown, leading to more partners, veteran voices and applicants -- though the NFL limits the number of individual participants for programs such as BizWeek to 24 to 32, to better foster a one-on-one environment.
Partners and other companies contributing to the event included Nike, which hosted the workshop's opening sessions; RXR, a real estate company that Pugh told NFL.com spoke with participants and took them to the site of a $7 billion super skyscraper; and Core Club, which put on a networking event.
The New York Stock Exchange hosted multiple sessions with industry leaders, as well as a players-only happy hour in the NYSE vault room. Pugh's alma mater, Syracuse, provided real-world business education, laying groundwork for the pitch day event at the offices of the fintech company Ramp, during which teams of participants had four hours to build a pitch before presenting to a panel of judges made up of various CEOs.
On top of the educational aspect and the ability to get faces in front of important names high up in business, the crux of the workshop was about players learning from players, both bouncing ideas off their peers in the league and taking lessons from those who have come before.
"[It's] three days of learning about life in business. How to level up your network," Pugh said of the experience. "What are some tips and tricks to increase the network you have and the conversations you're having, getting a mentor -- how to go about getting that -- and really learning to add tools to your toolbox from greats that have done it before you. We're learning from titans in business, but we're also learning from titans from the NFL."
In future years, Perlman's aim is for BizWeek to provide an even deeper dive, allowing players to learn about the many avenues they can go down while still homing in on something that fuels them with the same passion football does.
"My hope is that they kind of get an extended experience, but they can also go deeper on some of these topics," Perlman said. "Because right now, BizWeek gives you an overview of everything that's out there, and I think our hope is, OK, is there a BizWeek 201 -- not just a 101 -- and now you get to pick your topic and go deep."
As for the future of the participants, both Pugh and Perlman recognize that BizWeek is only a springboard -- albeit an important one.
Both touched on players taking the lessons and connections they made during the summit and putting them into practice, whether that's interning somewhere in the offseason, shadowing an executive or simply keeping a line open.
"BizWeek is what you make of it," Pugh said. "It's the people that you meet, it's the hands that you shake, it's the follow-ups that you stay on top of."
Pugh, who underlined the importance of prepping for retirement long before it arrives, added: "Transition begins the day you put the pads on, not the day you take them off."