Embarrassing: HuffPost sports article about NFL player who is underpaid despite making more money than entire small countries
I’ll admit, I bit the bait and clicked this article, knowing it was going to piss me off. I get it, as a sports fan, knowing the logic and truth to why discussions about the salary of professional athletes can actually exist, and that in the grand spectrum of the game of keeping up with the Joneses, players can be “underpaid.” But as a rational human being, I also know that professional athletes, at the lowest level of skill required to make a big league roster, will still make more than most doctors, educators and people who actually make differences in the world.
So I’m reading this article, and trying to choke back the alligator tears at the plight of a large man who is good at grabbing other large men and throwing them to the ground while fighting the villainous concussion monster. I’m reading and reading, about the sacks, the tackles, the underrated rush defense efficiency, but wondering how long it’s going to take to get to the bare numbers, the ones that I know are going to piss me off.
13 paragraphs of rhetoric about how he deserves more money, as if he cured cancer but works at the Wendy’s drive-thru. 13 paragraphs, and then we finally get to the empathy-inducing pitiful numbers of a man, scraping by to get a loaf of bread and a dozen eggs to feed his wife and three children.
In the 2016-2017 season, Michael Bennett will make $5.5 million dollars, and he is in year three of an overall 4-year/$28.5 million dollar contract.
Oh the humanity! He should be picketing with the rest of the plebes, demanding $15 an hour!
Normally, I like HuffPost, but this article is downright trash. A little too involved by the writer who is clearly a little bit of a superfan to even try to insinuate that a guy who pulls in millions of dollars for playing a kid’s game is “underpaid.”
Underpaid are teachers. Underpaid are some doctors. Underpaid are civil servants, like cops and firefighters. Underpaid are the people who make sure the lights stay on, your air conditioning works in this sweltering summer, and that you have running water.
There is not a single professional football player on the face of the planet that is underpaid. Conversely, every single professional football player on the face of the planet is grossly overpaid. The end.
