Your transition to a professional football player is tough enough without having somebody nagging you about going out with your teammates too much or spending too little time alone.

When you enter the League, your life becomes a zero-sum game. Essentially, every moment you spend with friends or girlfriends is time you're not not spending studying your playbook or breaking down film.

Your first two to three years in the League, the only girlfriend you need to worry about is your playbook. If you learn its lessons, you can reap benefits worth millions, and lasting financial security for you and yours.

Depending on your system and your coaches your playbook will be about six inches thick. Your special teams playbook is about half that. All told, that's ten inches worth of the most complex football you've ever seen — and that's before you even start preparing for other teams.

The NFL isn't like college biology class, where maybe you've done the reading and maybe you haven't. Ignorance is a lot easier to mask in a 300-person lecture hall than in a meeting room with six players and three coaches, where you're always competing or being evaluated. Unless you're a top 15 pick and a team commits big dollars to you, the burden is on you to prove you belong.

When your coach orders you to diagram a play on the white board and explain both your responsibility and those of your fellow linebackers or DBs, you don't want to sit there thinking that maybe you'd know more and wouldn't be as tired if you hadn't stayed up all night arguing with your girlfriend — or waiting out a pregnancy scare with a girl you just met a few weeks ago.

Clayton Holmes was a member of the 1990s Dallas Cowboys football dynasty. Today he speaks for Velvet Suite and lectures young athletes. Next week he will be writing about the drug use and abuse in the National Football League.

(Photo credits: Clayton Holmes; Jonathan Hayt, WireImage.com; Dallas Cowboys)