Voyageur
Cheesehead
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Spot on. If we think in terms of the reality of who gets to move on from college playing football, we need to remember that there are 7 rounds in each draft, and 32 teams. That's 224 picks. Add in the additional picks for guys who jump from one team to another, and we end up with 256 picks in this year's NFL draft. Add in another..... let's say 120 free agents having a shot at making teams, and you have 376 players trying to latch on to one of few jobs that will be available. There are 1,760 players on NFL rosters. There are 320 of them that make practice squads. The rest, if good enough, might make an XFL team, but that's not easy either.So let's change the focus, because none of us are really calling all student-athletes dumb. Let's just focus on football for now - since this is a football forum. Yes all athletes are able to get NIL money. Yes there are extremely bright athletes. Yes there are very talented young people that get a hard-earned athletic scholarship and also receive a hard-earned degree in many great fields.
However, football is a different animal. Quite a lot of them come from substandard schools and got substandard grades. Big universities are tough places to learn. I remember taking calculus from a professor who spoke zero English. He just wrote math problems on a board and pointed. The dean said that they couldn't afford English-speaking professors and TAs. We all had to teach ourselves calculus out of the textbooks. It was no great struggle for me, but my brother who struggled in school, would have failed. Toss in daily practices and team meetings and it puts a lot of these kids at a great disadvantage. There are tons of resources available and tutors which is great. However, from what I saw and the people that I knew when I was in college, many of those guys were just trying to get by and "keep their grades up" so that they didn't get kicked off the team. Their focus was football.
As older adults, we can sit back and talk about how precious a scholarship education is from the luxury of our hindsight perspective. Not all 17-21 year olds have that perspective until it's too late. Opportunity and scholarships pass them by and then it's too late.
In the NFL, there is roughly a 25% turnover in personnel each year. That means that there are roughly 440 jobs opening up on rosters, and on practice squads, less than half getting call backs for a second year.
So, essentially, there are about 440 jobs opening up on NFL rosters, and maybe as many as 160 on practice squads. That's, at best a 600 player turn over. Every year, roughly 1.6% of those players ending their eligibility will be drafted, or offered a viable chance to make a roster. Many will fail. Of them, it will be less than a dozen that fall below DI football who will get a shot at the brass ring.
With that low of a chance to make it into the NFL, it's understandable why these players will do everything they can to make some money while still in college, so they can at least have a fighting chance to make it in the real world, after they leave school.
The NCAA is bragging how the "graduation rate" has gone up from the low 70% range over 20 years ago, to a little over 90% today. I buy that's great. But I'm also very aware of the fact that the majors being reported, and the minors, are something made out of a storybook of simplification to insure these kids have a shot at playing through their time of eligibility. It's obvious, when you see how so many struggle after college, that their time there did little, if anything, to give them a viable career. Part of this is due to the player not having the mental ability to do better, but then there's the pressure surrounding the game itself. It takes up a lot of time.
I don't begrudge these kids the money they get. I just wish it was shared more with the players who aren't going to be getting that huge contract from the NLF, which is most of them.