Realizing the Fruits of Your Educational Labor

By Patrick Kerney
VP of Player Benefits and NFL Legends Operations, NFL Player Engagement

To All Aspiring NFL Players:

Let’s forget all of the odds that say how unlikely it is you will reach, let alone make a career out of, the NFL.  Let’s assume all of you will be taken in the first round, make multiple Pro Bowls and play 12 years.  Because you end up being the best of the best, you will make tens of millions of dollars before you decide to retire.  You will probably be 34 or 35 years old at this point and life will be great… or will it?

The answer to this question often seems to be dependent on one variable: your education.  What does an education count for when you will have made, for example, $75 million?  To be certain, a lack of education is, more often than not, a surplus of ignorance.  And there is no amount of money that is safe from ignorance. While former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson’s path from $300 million in earnings to a painful bankruptcy has been well publicized, such downfalls are not isolated to professional athletes.  Just recently, Brazilian entrepreneur Eike Batista “went from being ranked the world's seventh richest man, worth some $30 billion, to being off the billionaire's list.”[1]  That’s over $29 billion lost.  To earn this much money at his 2013 salary, this year’s highest NFL money-maker would have to keep up his level of play for about 1,400 years.  That’s not a typo.  1,400 years.

Does this mean every aspiring professional athlete needs to be an accounting major and read nothing but books on finance?  While this is a useful educational path, it is far from a requirement for success.  For instance, had Mr. Batista shown an interest in Greek mythology, he may have kept the story of Icarus in mind and not taken on the risks he did.  There are an uncountable number of stories such as this which relate to protecting money, very few of which have numbers in them.  They’re everywhere from biographies to the Bible (Ecclesiastes 2:10-11 can be very useful for those of you who have, in your minds, already spent the money you’re going to make in the NFL).

So is success all about money?  It’s a big part.  That’s because another large measure of success, family happiness, is dependent on it. The ability to provide shelter, food, clothing, health care, and education to the families you all will someday have is financially expensive.  The inability to provide these necessities, let alone some of your future family’s desires (entertainment, vacations, etc.), is psychologically and personally expensive/destructive.  The earnings from an NFL career, if managed properly, give young men an enormous head start on this front.  An NFL career with a college degree helps even more as you will have more potential to earn gainful employment after your playing days are done.  Whether an NFL career happens for you or not, developing a hunger for education, both formal and informal, is highly likely to create an immense number of options for work that is not only financially rewarding, but also personally fulfilling.

This personal fulfillment is, to me, the last measure of success that is enhanced by education.  This can pertain to your daily work[i], your faith, your health, etc. In terms of daily work, uneducated people not only have a difficult time finding work in this country, they have a difficult time finding rewarding work.  The examples go on and I assure you they all point to a direct relationship between your willingness to educate yourself and the richness of your financial, family, and personal lives.

So what’s stopping us?  We have the time.  We have the intelligence.  We just prefer not to use our time and abilities to educate ourselves.  I get it.  Passing up on a night out on the town is hard.  Reading a book or sitting in class can be boring, sometimes even painful.  But think about this: who is better than us at dealing with activities that are hard or painful?  As football players, we live in a hard, painful world.  Running hills until our legs give out, taking on someone twice our size, chasing after someone half our size, sitting in ice tubs, the list goes on.  Why do we put ourselves through this?  These parts of our game are certainly not fun, but we do them because they increase our chances for success.  Just like we bow up and take on the painful parts of football, we can bow up and take on the painful parts of education.  Whether you realize your NFL dream or not, the fruits of your educational labor are sure to be, in the long run, your greatest rewards.