Dayton Docket

At a time when it’s not if you play fantasy football but how many teams you manage and anyone can comment online about their favorite team’s moves real and imagined, it can seem like everyone’s a walking football front office.

But for five University of Dayton School of Law students, they got to experience something only a short pass away from the real thing and left with more than the bragging rights you get for winning your fantasy league.

George Hall, Corbin Hulin, Michael Lang, Trevor Mitchell and Drew Schoen took second place in the inaugural UNLV Professional Football Trade Competition put on by the William S. Boyd School of Law Sports & Entertainment Law Association.

“We had an absolutely great time,” says Mitchell. “Being a college athlete, I got super excited I could be a GM for a weekend.”

As part of the competition, 10 teams from around the country spent two days in Las Vegas hashing out deals to improve their rosters.

Each team was assigned an NFL team and had to work with their exact roster as of the end of this year’s Super Bowl.

The UDSL team was given the Chicago Bears.

“We went in knowing we had to make use of their young roster and some of the talent they had and cap space they had as well,” Hall says.

The teams were judged by attorneys on their negotiation skills and also had to present their moves to a panel featuring a member of an NFL front office, an agent and a reporter who covers the league.

“It was awesome being able to show the thought process and vision we had for the team to the panel,” says Mitchell. “They were very happy with what we put together, especially our view of what the positional value was for given players. We were able to get players in positions of higher value by trading players in positions of lesser value.”

The UDSL team was made up of all first-year law students, and Hall says they were able to put what they have learned so far in law school to use during the competition, especially when it came to the preparation, which included reading through large parts of the NFL’s Collective Bargaining Agreement and analyzing their team.

“With litigation the facts you have matter,” Hall says. “Going into this we implemented that thought process. We understood the analytics of the players we were going to be trading.”

The team is interested in competing again next year and possibly in similar competitions focused around other sports.

“I have a special interest in contracts,” Hall says. “It was fun working with those contracts and managing the cap space for the team.”

And it’s possible they could find themselves being among those who make the real moves one day.

“Being a college athlete, I’m interested in sports and entertainment law, and a dream would be working in a front office one day in a role similar to what we did in the competition,” Mitchell says.