MOBILE, Ala. – Jim Nagy always knew he wanted to be an NFL scout, and he thought the best way to do that was being around the biggest college football program he could find. So Nagy, a Traverse City native who now runs the Senior Bowl , turned down opportunities to play small-college football coming out of high school in order to attend the University of Michigan. He worked for the athletic department, made a few bucks on the side keeping stats at basketball games for ESPN, and eventually parlayed those jobs into an internship in the public relations department with the Green Bay Packers. Twenty-two years later, Nagy’s scouting career has taken him down a unique path running college football’s premier all-star game — one that he hopes will help prepare him to one day be an NFL general manager. “I hope so,” Nagy told the Free Press on Monday. “I mean, I love what I do now. Shoot, I took this job because my wife and kids are here and my son’s going to play high school sports and I want to be around. But yeah, someday. Obviously, that’s been a goal for a long time.” Nagy played quarterback at Traverse City in the early 1990s and said some of his earliest memories are of being around the high school team his father coached in Frankfort “just hanging around, running out and getting the tee after kickoffs, scraping cleats with a screwdriver on muddy games and laying around on tackling dummies during two-a-days.” “Just being around the game and loving it,” Nagy said. At Michigan, Nagy said he sent resumes and cover letters to every team in the NFL looking for a job in public relations – there were no scouting internships available at the time – and received rejection letters from every team but one: The Green Bay Packers. As fate would have it, Nagy worked for the team during the 1996 season, when the Packers beat the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl. “It’s one of those things, you work hard, you meet the right people, so I was really fortunate,” Nagy said. “John Schneider was on that staff, Reggie McKenzie was on that staff, Scott McLoughan, John Dorsey. So there was like four or five future GMs.” Schneider and McKenzie shared an office at the time, and Nagy said he spent most of his free time “up there wearing them out.” “Can I sit in here? Can I watch tape? And just trying to be around it,” he said. When Schneider was hired as vice president of player personnel for Washington in 2001, he brought Nagy along with him, and Nagy spent most of the last 17 years as a college scout working in the West, Midwest and Southeast regions. He joined the Senior Bowl as executive director in May, replacing former NFL general manager Phil Savage, and will oversee his first game on Saturday. Nagy said the biggest thing that’s surprised about his new job is he didn’t realize how much administrative work went into running the game, but that’s also part of what made the gig attractive in the first place. “You’re just wearing a lot of different hats,” Nagy said. “And again, take nothing away from what I was doing before, but really until you get that GM job, you’re really, no matter what title they give you or how much they pay you, you’re a high-priced evaluator. And again, nothing wrong with that. I loved it. That’s what I love to do. But you don’t get any preparation (for other parts of the GM job). The public peaking, the media, managing a staff, dealing with a budget, just everything that’s wrapped up in like a GM job. “I’ve had a lot of friends become GMs, and I’ll hear them on the radio, just even doing a radio interview and I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ Like one particular guy, he just got his job and I’m driving around and he came on and I’m like I got to hear this. And it was like 30 seconds in I had to turn it off. I felt so bad for it. They’re unprepared. You’re just not prepared for that job because here you are, you’re grinding tape one day and the next thing you know you’re thrust into doing all these other things and you’re like, ‘Holy (expletive).’ So it’s been great.” Lions defensive tackle Damon Harrison recently changed agents, signing Monday with Drew Rosenhaus, and some league observers believe he wants a new contract that will pay him more in line with the top nose tackles in the NFL. Harrison, whom the Lions acquired in a trade with the New York Giants in October, has two years left on the contract he signed in 2016. He’s scheduled to make $6.75 million in base salary for the 2019 season and $9 million in base salary for 2020. In 10 games with the Lions this season, Harrison had 50 tackles and 3.5 sacks. He was named “Run Defender of the Year” by Pro Football Focus. Linval Joseph of the Minnesota Vikings ($12.5 million) and Michael Brockers of the Los Angeles Rams ($11.1 million) are among the nose tackles who make more than Harrison. Contact Dave Birkett: dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett. Download our Lions Xtra app for free on Apple and Android!