Minimum salary is $450,000$ / year and average career is 2.66 years. So most people are making at least 1 million today. https://www.si.com/nfl/2016/03/01/nfl-careers-shortened-two-...
The problem is not so much the NFL IMO, it's the 4 years of collage + 1-4 years of high school before that. Means most people get hurt without any real benefit.
Minimum salary increased relatively recently. About a decade ago you could find NFL benchwarmers on not much more than 50k.
Re:110 N.F.L. Brains
by somecontext on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @01:20AM
(#14853828)
For some context, it appears that the minimum salary in 2007 was $275k/year nominally ($325k/year inflation-adjusted) for rookies, increasing by $75k/year each year until the fifth.
My research suggests that the minimum salary first hit $50k/year nominally in 1988 (which is $100k/year inflation-adjusted). The minimum salary has always been at least $60k/year inflation-adjusted since the first collective bargaining agreement in 1968.
Hrm. I remember looking up the minimum salaries about a decade or so ago and was surprised to see that they were so low. Maybe my source was out of date.
I was around an ex NFL player at a restaurant once and he also was having trouble walking already. In contrast I played tennis a few times with Trent Tucker after he retired from the Chicago Bulls, and he was still really athletic and could even beat good D1 tennis players.
It's bad for you in general. I used to go a gym with some ex-NFL guys, and they literally could barely move most days. All of them told me they would never let their kids play football. Every single one had life long lasting ailments, and none of them were the guys who made millions.