The rest of your post, especially the part about supporting families, has been addressed. But I wanted to highlight this part. Folks. People. Buddies. Friends. In the NFL, ticket revenues do not pay player salaries. Ticket sales simply do not generate enough revenue to cover player salaries. Here's a basic mathematical exercise to prove this: According to Forbes, the average ticket price of a Dolphins home game is $66. Sun Life Stadium holds 75,540 people when configured for football. $66 x 75,540 = $4,985,640. $4,985,640 x 8 home games = $39,885,120. Guys, the 2009 salary cap was $127,000,000. Would someone care to explain how approximately $40 million in ticket revenue can pay for a salary cap of $127 million? The answer: it doesn't. NFL franchises get the majority of their revenue from television broadcast contracts. NBC, CBS, and FOX pay NFL players' salaries, not us. So can we stop blasting players for being "greedy" on the justification that we're supposedly paying their salaries and therefore they should just shut up and take the paycheck? Because they aren't being greedy and we aren't paying them.
To me, high end athletes deserve their millions but not as excessively as they are starting to get paid. Its becoming a bit too much to be honest. Im not against some sort of restriction, ESPECIALLY for the rookies who have not played a down, but it'll never happen.
Yep, that was it brah. Didn't read the other three pages yet I honestly don't begrudge the players getting everything they can out of the NFL while they can. And the average player does for however long he plays. Throw in the fact that most of these men were REQUIRED to get a free college education first and the argument that they have no marketable skills doesn't hold water for me. With the rare exception of the drugg addicts who are wired internally to throw away everything, the majority of NFL players who get to argue for that huge second contract doing just fine. I just don't want to hear that whining about a multi million dollar contract anymore when millions of us would love to have a job as the mascot.
WOW, I read all the responses and this topic certainly generates a lot of discussion. I don't really have a side and the posters thinking I'm ripping on the players for wanting to get paid as much as they can are wrong and missing my point as you so eloquently state. In my op i specifically mentioned the holdouts from practices and guys refusing to show up for work. The distinction is a large one for me. You have a contract, you signed it, man up and go to work for your money. Negotiate all you want for more, if you're worth it you'll get it. Just don't sit there crying about it, that's all I'm sayin.
