A quick search shows there's ~1M high school players, and only 7.1% become college players https://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/football-probability-co

A quick search shows there's ~1M high school players, and only 7.1% become college players https://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/football-probability-competing-beyond-high-school https://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/football-proba... and then from these ~73k college players, only 1.6% become professionals https://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/estimated-probability-competing-professional-athletics https://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/research/estimated-prob... I think high school and college players work really, really hard. Getting ahead of 92.9% of other hard working players, followed by beating 98.5% of this already small group, is certainly a feat. Sure, it's "basically consistent hard work", but distilling years of practice, coaching, diet, personal life sacrifices, into just "so really all it takes is working hard" is an oversimplification that doesn't do justice to the actual reality involved.