The Value of Education in College Football
Spring is in the air. The Madness of March has come to an end; MLB is back on the diamond for another extremely long season; and the NFL is on the clock to pick the next round of elite athletes. For the past few months, the top College Football players who declared for the NFL draft have spent their days in training camps, at the NFL combine, and at their school’s pro days; all with the hope of impressing the NFL scouts and increasing their personal draft stock. These months are on top of the past 3-5 years these athletes have spent on a college campus trying to gain the respect of the public. To be selected in the NFL Player Draft means you are the cream of the crop in the College Football world. For the most part, college football players have a tendency of spending more time focusing on football than on their studies. Many athletes believe that if they do well on the field, they will never have to worry about sitting behind a desk from 9-5. Why would a NFL player need to know what ROI means? They make millions of dollars; they can just pay someone to handle their finances, right? Wrong.
A common misconception is that NFL players bring in multi-million dollars each year so it really doesn’t matter if they have a proper education or not. What many people do not know is that the average NFL career lasts about 3 ½ years and the median NFL salary is around $770,000. On top of that, close to 80% of NFL players are near bankruptcy within 2 years after retiring. It’s tough to fathom that these men blow through their 6-8 figure paychecks in such a short amount of time but that’s the reality of this game called life. The odds are stacked against these millionaires once they are out of the league; and part of that is without a doubt due to their lack of education.
Let me help break this down for you. The median NFL salary is $770,000/year in gross income. Now let’s factor in the federal tax deductions, the cost of living, agent pay, luxurious expenses (i.e. Range Rovers, extravagant homes, excessive vacations), family, etc. and you wind up with a number much lower than the gross $770,000/year. Since the average career length is just over 3 years, that luxurious lifestyle can be very short lived. Of course this is not the case for every NFL star, but the close to 80% bankruptcy within 2 years of retiring rate is the harsh reality.
Now what about those college football players that don’t make it to the NFL? In case you were unaware, in 2010 there were roughly 15,000 Division I College Football Players. Out of the 15,000, only 254 of them will be drafted in the 2011 NFL Player Draft, which means about 98% of the athletes that you rooted for or against will not have the opportunity to make a living off of their skills at the next level. This 98% had to endure the same pressure that the drafted athletes had to face on the football field, yet they will have to enter the “real-world” work force without a multi-million dollar contract. If all of these athletes energy was spent on their sport, you have to begin to question if this 98% will be prepared for the real world compared to their non-athlete classmates.
To make things clear, I do not blame the student athletes for their lack of energy on their education path. I attended a football university and was enrolled in classes with some football players. Speaking from my personal college experience, if there were a significant number of football players in a class of mine, the class was typically an easy “A”. Of course that was not the case for every class that I took but generally speaking, it was true. Do I blame the students for taking the easy “A” courses? Absolutely not (I personally loved getting an easy “A”). These athletes choose their classes through their academic advisors. So what is the reason behind placing athletes in the “easy classes”? A number of factors could play into this decision but one would have to believe that the primary factor is the revenue generation from the athletic programs. For example, in 2010 the University of Texas Football Program brought in an estimated $94 million in revenue. Even though the football players do not reap the fiscal benefits of the revenue, the pressure is on these student athletes to do the best that they can while the university hopes to grow the revenue stream. If college football players spent as much time focusing on their studies as they spend on the field, I truly believe that the success rate of college football and NFL players after hanging up their cleats would be much higher.
-Taylor Gaspar
Host of Taylor TV | OrangeBloods.com
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