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DJ Bien-Aime, ESPN
HOUSTON — On the morning of March 19, Houston Texans left tackle Laremy Tunsil was surrounded by a few members of his Divine Tree business team inside his condo.
Cameras for Tunsil’s video blog “Protect the Tree” rolled as music thundered leading up to a call with Texans general manager Nick Caserio. Then, the room got quiet, and when Caserio answered, everyone was on the edge of their seats.
“We got a deal, Nick,” Tunsil said.
The deal — a three-year, $75 million extension — made Tunsil the highest-paid offensive lineman in the NFL for the second time in his career.
After Tunsil ended the call, his team erupted in excitement, chanting “Let’s go!” as the group exchanged high-fives.
The Texans had locked up their “X factor” who represented himself in the negotiations coming off a 2022 season where he allowed one sack and earned Pro Bowl honors for the third time. “I don’t need an agent to do these things. I can do it myself,” Tunsil told ESPN. “I’m not bashing agents either.
“But it shows you that [players] want to empower themselves. [Players] view themselves as businessmen.”
According to the NFL Players Association, Tunsil is one of 25 players who don’t have an agent. Three of those players — Tunsil, former MVP Lamar Jackson, who reached a five-year, $260 million extension in March, and All-Pro linebacker Roquan Smith, who signed a five-year, $100 million contract extension in January, will face off Sunday when the Texans visit the Baltimore Ravens (1 p.m. ET, CBS).
“We can set up our own destiny,” Tunsil said. “My biggest thing is that we can get stuff done.”
When Tunsil was drafted No. 13 overall out of Ole Miss by the Miami Dolphins in 2016, he was represented by Jimmy Sexton of CAA. Three years later, the Texans traded first-round draft picks in 2020 and 2021 to the Dolphins for Tunsil. He allowed three sacks his first season in Houston as it reached the divisional round of the playoffs.
In 2019, Tunsil created Divine Tree with his college friend, Laolu Sanni. Sanni would eventually sell Tunsil a business vision of how he could build a team to create business opportunities in football and outside of it.
“It’s more than football,” Tunsil said. “Football is giving me opportunities in this world. I have to know how to pursue these opportunities before that window closes.”
During the 2020 offseason, Tunsil wanted a new deal from the Texans as he entered the final year of his rookie contract. He wasn’t satisfied with negotiations, so he fired Sexton. Before they parted ways, Sexton told Tunsil when the Texans acquired him that the longer they waited to agree to an extension, the more leverage he would have considering what they gave up in the deal.
Simply put, he was an asset that would be tough to lose based on their investment. Tunsil’s first contract extension came in 2020. He brokered a deal with former Texans coach and general manager Bill O’Brien worth $66 million over three years.
“I put myself in a position to make this contract negotiation fairly easy. My play on the field speaks for itself,” Tunsil said. “When I played in 2019, The Texans already gave up two first-rounders for me. So I already had the leverage on the Texans to get a deal done.”
There weren’t discussions over a contract extension with O’Brien during the season, so talks would wait until March, when the two sides would do business virtually because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to Tunsil, not having an agent saved him “$2.5 to $3 million” on the deal, which he used to reinvest into Divine Tree and purchase a house for his mom.
The negotiation process was different the second time around, with Caserio taking over in January 2021 and the Texans hiring DeMeco Ryans as coach earlier this year.
In the 2022 offseason, Caserio asked Tunsil to restructure his deal, and he agreed because his business team convinced Tunsil it would increase his leverage once again.
Tunsil told ESPN in December 2022 that he wanted to reset the tackle market and surpass San Francisco 49ers left tackle Trent Williams, who signed a six-year, $138.06 million deal in March 2021.
Caserio converted Tunsil’s 2022 base salary ($17.85 million) to a $16.815 million signing bonus, which made his base salary $1.05 million but subsequently increased his cap hit number to $35.21 million in 2023.
“My team was telling me my cap is so high because they kept restructuring [my] contract and to let them keep restructuring my contract,” Tunsil said. “But by the time it’s time to pay you, your cap hit will be high and you’ll have all the leverage.”
When the offseason rolled around, Tunsil carried leverage into negotiations once again. He called the talks with Caserio and Ryans “a smooth process,” as the discussion took about three weeks. It began in late February as they made it clear they wanted to keep the star tackle.
Caserio and Tunsil exchanged a few contract proposals through guidance of his team.
The structure was what Tunsil wanted, but the only hang-up was guaranteed money. Tunsil was happy to “meet in the middle” with Caserio’s proposal at $50 million and agreed to the deal. Locking up Tunsil was part of several moves put in motion to protect rookie quarterback C.J. Stroud, the No. 2 overall pick, this offseason.
“When [Tunsil] didn’t understand something, he was not afraid to ask questions,” Sanni said. “He overcame that obstacle by constantly studying throughout the process.”
Tunsil’s lawyers educated him on the language, but he also had to do research.
“The language in them contracts, man,” Tunsil said. “I’m laughing about it now because if I didn’t have somebody looking over it or if I didn’t have a team of lawyers looking over the contract, man, the language is hard to read.
“They’re trying to mix it all up with the words. The contract is very, very detailed. I didn’t want to go there and be clueless. The hours didn’t matter to me. I was like, ‘I got to get this done because I want to get paid. I want to make sure I have the best contract.'”
As for how Jackson worked through his negotiations with the Ravens, he leaned on his mother, Felicia Jones, to decipher the wording.
“We’ll just go back and forth on terms and stuff like that,” Jackson told reporters after signing his deal. “As I said, the language is going to overrun the numbers and stuff like that, so overtrump the numbers and stuff like that. So, it was just me and her piggybacking off of each other, and we got the deal done.”
According to NFL agent Ronald Butler, an advantage of doing your own deal is saving the 1% to 3% commission paid to agents after contract agreements. But, negotiations can be time-consuming, so Tunsil and his team didn’t discuss the plan for contract negotiations until the offseason.
“I can have those tough conversations with the club and say the offer you guys sent over doesn’t align with the goal we’re trying to meet,” Butler, who represents players such as Lavonte David, Denzel Perryman and Phillip Dorsett, told ESPN. “We can continue to negotiate until we can come to a common understanding. You can have that dialogue and not worry about the player being pissed off [about an initial offer]. And he can perform until we get a new deal done.”
Agents can also be a buffer from potential negative comments from organizations, but like Tunsil, Smith was never worried about that with the Ravens.
“A lot of times, people say players can’t negotiate without agents, and that’s not something I truly believe in,” Smith said after signing in January. “Because talking with [Ravens general manager] Eric [DeCosta], throughout the process, he was honest, kept his word. I’ve got a lot of respect for him, and I can’t thank him enough for actually being fair, seeing the value in me, making this happen.”
Caserio says his negotiating tactic is to keep everything respectful, whether it’s an agent or a player.
“A team and a club are going to have their position,” Caserio said. “The individual, agent, and representation are going to have theirs. What you are trying to do is kind of thread the needle, kind of find a happy medium.
“You never want to walk away from a negotiation where somebody leaves pissed off. It doesn’t really accomplish anything.”
Tunsil, who’s first task under his new contract will be to protect Stroud, doesn’t try to convince players to represent themselves, but he believes in the process.
“The narrative is starting to change as you see Lamar got big bank,” Tunsil said. “You are starting to see that narrative switch over quickly. The more players start coming out and doing deals with no agents. I think that whole narrative will get flipped.”
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