According to http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/nfl/salaries/2008/all.html http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/nfl/salaries/2008/... -- easiest dat

According to http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/nfl/salaries/2008/all.html http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/nfl/salaries/2008/... -- easiest data I found to mine, and 2009 and 2010 were weird years. Salary cap info isn't out this year, but it as gone down. In 2008, there were 2095 players in the NFL according to , and 64 made the rookie league minimum $295,000. 895, or 40%, make less than $500,000. Are you telling me you couldn't find 900 consultants making 300-500,000 dollars? That's billing 2,000 hours at 150 to 250 an hour. Or, it's an IBM or HP high level architect. So, our upper bound compares reasonably to the 1,243 best paid player in the world, and if we stretch definitions to CTO and business owners (a la Page and Brin), the top end of software engineering is similarly lucrative if you are one of the top 1,000 programmers in the world. Further, the average NFL career lasts 3 years, and most aren't able to convert their NFL success to other areas, becoming bankrupt. I will make more in my career programming than many NFL players, for a lot less work and risk of brain injury. I think I got a pretty good deal. :)