I understand your enthusiasm for Rugby Union, an awesome game. But you will never see me calling an NFL player a "pantywaist" or "overpaid", even in jest: http

I understand your enthusiasm for Rugby Union, an awesome game. But you will never see me calling an NFL player a "pantywaist" or "overpaid", even in jest: http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/8419.html http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/8419.html The level of angst that players live with was shocking. It’s something I’ve never seen in baseball or basketball. In football, everything is compressed. You enter the league right out of college; there are no minor leagues or places where you can apprentice. It’s 90 guys in the locker room fighting for 50 jobs. And the physical nature of the sport means that even if you make it, you’re looking at an average career of three years. By the same author: http://www.slate.com/id/2200305/?from=rss http://www.slate.com/id/2200305/?from=rss Professional football is an absurd proposition. Players collide, physicist Timothy Gay reports, with a force equivalent to the weight of a small adult killer whale. Injuries are constant, and players live with the knowledge that they may wind up crippled, depressed, or with Alzheimer's disease in their 50s. Coaches are merciless jerks. Contracts aren't guaranteed; you can be fired any minute. The media say a lot but know little. Fans scream and curse. The surprise isn't that a player like Quinn Pitcock quits the NFL. It's that it doesn't happen more often. "When I tell people that I left after five years on my own, you should see the looks on their faces," says Ed Cunningham, an offensive lineman with the Arizona Cardinals and Seattle Seahawks from 1992-'96 who's now a college-football analyst for ESPN. "Well, hey, man, it sucked. It was not fun. And oh, by the way, I was getting beaten up every single day at work." With the possible exception of a few top-shelf quarterbacks and receivers, NFL players are indentured servants. Their whole lives are circumscribed by their employers and coaches. (Now they aren't even allowed to use Twitter, for god's sake.) And, though you don't always see the evidence onscreen, every single one of those players is sacrificing decades of their futures -- their brains, their joints, their very lives -- in order to entertain you.