Damn, That's A Lot of Money

Are athletes overpaid?

Well, there are good arguments on both sides.

  • How can someone playing a game earn millions of dollars? There is no real societal value compared to doctors, teachers and the police.

  • The money is there, the athletes are the ones we pay to see, they deserve the money.

I guess I tend to lean towards the latter; I mean the money is there and the athletes are the ones we care about, at least compared to the old rich owners that have more money than God.

But I was thinking……..man these athletes get paid a lot.

I mean really a lot.

The other day on the local radio, the talk about how much certain free agents were demanding in the NFL. Number like 4 year at $55 million, 2 year at $15 million, 1 year at $3 million, were just being thrown around like this is not real money. I mean you hear these figures over and over, you almost get immune to the actual fact that a bottom of the line NFL player gets more in one year than any police officer in every state will make in their entire lifetime. When I taught, I was paid $40K per year. That is 100x less than DJ Fluker will get next season, and that is considered underpaid. Know who he is? Probably not. But yeah, he has more money than you will ever see in your life.

I mean I guess they ‘deserve’ this money in a way, I mean if you believe in capitalism you certainly have to believe these athletes deserve this money. But man, I don’t know. It really makes me question a lot of things in this world. If you just made these franchises give back to the city and help, just think the economic boom we would all share in. But I guess that is not what our economic system is all about.

It would be nice from time to time to hear that these athletes are grateful for this absurd amount of money. I mean the only reason that they make soooo much money is fan attention. Without that, NFL/NBA/MLB players would be paid like bowlers. But they typically don’t. Maybe a disingenuous text to ‘the fans’ that states some version ‘thank you’. But that really isn’t a lot of pay back.

Yeah, this stuff makes me fade away from sports (and don’t even get started on college sports). I’ll still pay attention, but I’ll try not to think about the economics too much. It just makes me sad.