The NFL…Impossible Odds

Greg Beale
2 min readSep 8, 2024

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I saw this Sacramento Bee article on the Sacramento Bee app and thought you’d be interested.

Jake Browning, Arik Armstead, Shaq Thompson among Sacramento-area players on NFL rosters

What many don’t realize, and that is usually kids, is getting a football scholarship, or even walking on: has the possibility of seeing a solar eclipse…than making the NFL for any time at all; is about 1% of all NCAA players…and the odds of staying in the NFL over 5 years is about 2%!

In short, if you play football the best place to excel is in the classroom. About 60% of all high school students go to any college…that is high, when I was a teenager (in the 1960s) it was about 10%…

Then the odds of graduating from college is about 80% give or take.

Now…the average salary of a NFL player is close to 200 million dollars a year…and the average playing span for a NFL player is 4 years.

Again, back to the college thing…note the high college graduating number. Why?

Because the almost the only way is to get a college, or electronics work, is to spend up to 10 years after high school.

In short, the longer and better you go to post high school education, and that includes job oriented learning, is EDUCATION IS THE ANSWER.

I live close to Sac State…I walk by the students almost every week. I see the kids, to me, who are rushing to and fro classrooms…I see some students who are in their 30s….

When I was a kid, a small percentage finished college, now it is again over 50%.

So, you teenagers out there, stay in school. If you are the rare one to get a college football scholarship then take advantage, realizing that going NFL is virtually impossible.

What do I know: I was one of those NCAA players…and the closest I got to the NFL was filling out a form that all senior football players made…only .5 percent of Stanford seniors that year (1969) got even a try out with what was then the NFL and AFC…

Study!

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Greg Beale
Greg Beale

Written by Greg Beale

Stanford grad, BA Political Science, MA from Sac State, Varsity Football Player, in public education as teacher, coach, athletic director, and administrator.

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