The Median NFL Player and the Lockout

Hank Koebler of the Huffington Post disputes the assertion that NFL players are overpaid and greedy.  He does so by examining median salaries and median playing careers, which are $770,000 and 3.5 years, respectively.  After taxing out taxes and agent fees, that salary works out to just under $50,000 for 22 years. (The figure is amortized to see how many years an NFL players earned the median US salary.)

Not all NFL players are Peyton Manning, but the math described above doesn't really seem to work.  Just think:  in working for only 3.5 years, a median NFL player can earn the median US salary for over two decades, which places them in a much better position than the median US worker.  I'm not sure that makes the point Koebler thinks it does.  He seems to argue that because the bottom half of NFL players aren't financially secure for life as a result of a few year swing through the NFL, they players are just like you and me.  They aren't.