The Odds at NFL Glory

According to NCAA research at ncaa.org there is a 1.8% chance that a Senior college football player will be drafted into the NFL. With those odds, you could fill a 50,000 seat capacity arena with excited senior players and only 900 of those men would make it into the NFL. That's about 1 in 50. That's a long shot. The good news is that a senior high school football player has a better chance of playing college football in the NCAA. It's not the best odds at 5.7% but it is better odds than making it into the NFL. There's over 61,000 college football players, that's a lot of scholarships (probably a bit lower because of walk-ons). These men do what many, many people in this country cannot afford to do, go to college. What's even better is that these guys are going to a university. They are attending some of the best universities in America, if not the world. At the odds of getting into the NFL, it would seem to be wise to get as much education as you can while you can. I will always feel the sorriest for that marginal student athlete that scrapes by and gets nothing from college. When that man doesn't make it into the league, the realities of life must come crashing down. I expect when one's only skill in life is football, and he can't even do that for money, life becomes very difficult. In economic terms, his labor goes from skilled to unskilled quickly. He goes from memorizing intricate plays and pushing himself to his physical limits to barely being able to sell his labor.

I am not saying that all NFL players are sentenced to this life. But, for many this must be an uncomfortable reality. These are not the stars that we see every day in our commercials, or even the ones we see playing on Sunday television. These are the back-ups that we never see, except those rare occasions that one must step in for an injured player. Even then, that's only star replacements. There are so many that we don't see, the marginal ones. For those who are only in the NFL one or two years then sent back to real life, I hope they got an education granted to too few. I hope they took advantage of a rare opportunity for anyone: Free College.