By Stu Woo, Wall Street Journal
Being a professional football player requires incredible sharpness. Imagine trying to sniff out a screen pass or figuring out whether the defense is in zone coverage while dodging 300-pound linemen.
Despite all the intricate blocking schemes and blitz packages NFL players must memorize, though, one thing still vexes many of them off the field: How best to utilize their LinkedIn accounts.
“I don’t really know how LinkedIn fully works,” said Jets safety Dion Bailey, who started a profile on the professional networking site with the idea of propelling his real-estate career. “My girlfriend’s real familiar with it. I’m going to ask her to help me figure it out.”
It makes sense that dozens of NFL players have LinkedIn profiles. They have college experience, long off-seasons and careers that average just over three years, according to the players’ union.
“You can only do this for so long,” said Jets receiver Brandon Marshall, who created a profile before the 2015 season to help promote his non-Jets endeavors, which include broadcasting, training prospective NFL draftees and running a nonprofit focused on mental illness.
But while LinkedIn has been indispensable to job recruiters and office workers, its benefits to NFL players, whose work experiences tend to be more unique and limited than those of the typical college graduate, are murkier.
“I’m still learning,” Marshall said. “I haven’t done much on it because I haven’t had that much time. I’ll play around with it.”
Julie Inouye, a spokeswoman for LinkedIn Corp., said even professional athletes can transfer their skills to professional settings by emphasizing skills in leadership, strategy and team building.
After an NFL player enters a name, password and ZIP Code to sign up for a LinkedIn account, the network asks for a “job title” and “company.”
“They asked for a job title, so I put down ‘safety,’ ” said Giants safety Cooper Taylor.
When choosing a “company,” players often take one of two approaches. Marshall opted to list his as the National Football League, and added that he had worked there as an “All Pro Wide Receiver” since 2006. Indianapolis Colts quarterback Matt Hasselbeck was more specific, saying he had played the position of “Quarterback” at four different companies: the Colts, the Tennessee Titans, the Seattle Seahawks and the Green Bay Packers.
Then there’s the question of which non-football work experiences to list. Taylor included an internship he held with the security firm Stroz Friedberg. Giants offensive lineman Dallas Reynolds went back even further, listing on his account his experience as “Lawn Care Manager” at Reynolds Lawn, a Utah lawn-mowing service he inherited from his older brother when he was a teenager.
“Provided all lawn care services for Orem Community. Provided the manual labor, billing, and collection of accounts,” Reynolds wrote.
Reynolds said he didn’t know why he chose to list that work experience. In fact, until he was recently reminded of his profile, he had forgotten that he had created it.
Players typically don't list their football statistics on LinkedIn. “That doesn’t help someone grow their business,” said Giants kicker Josh Brown, an off-season intern with property giant Jones Lang LaSalle Inc., who uses his profile to stay connected with prospective real-estate clients.
For networking, it’s hard enough just to figure out who’s who. Unlike Facebook or Twitter,LinkedIn doesn’t verify celebrity accounts. As of Tuesday evening, there were profiles for Jets quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick, who is listed as a “Sideline towel waver” for the Houston Texans, and for Kansas City passer Alex Smith, whose company was the Chiefs, but whose job title was “Awful Quarterback.”
Inouye said the social network makes regular efforts to scan for fake profiles.
Celebrities might also deal with a deluge of fans requesting to connect with them on LinkedIn, but Brown, for example, has used a feature that requires people to know his email address to do so.
Bailey, a Jets safety who has used LinkedIn to search for fellow University of Southern California alums in real estate and broadcasting, hasn’t used that feature. Instead, he has been amused by fans who have written him LinkedIn endorsements.
“People who don’t even know me are endorsing me for different stuff, like marketing,” Bailey said. “I don’t really know what it does for me, but I appreciate it, I guess.”