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Comment by tomjakubowski | Hacker News Reader

No, I don't think so.

Including practice squad players (who are paid peanuts), the NFL has about 2,240 roster spots. About a million US high school students play football any given year. The average NFL career is 3.3 years.

So from 3.3 graduating classes of a million high school football players, you'd expect somewhere around 0.07% to make it into the NFL. Fewer even will have something resembling a successful career.

Then look at how many high paying "smart person" jobs there are. There are about a million doctors in the US, two million engineers, and four million computer professionals.

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Your logic/math doesn't make any sense.

Almost every student studies math, almost none of those ever become a mathematician - who are compensated much less than NFL players.

> There are about a million doctors in the US

Comparing # of doctors to # of NFL players is a very false equivalence. Try comparing # of athletes in all sports combined to number of doctors - that would be more reasonable. Or compare the number of brain surgeons to the number of NFL players - and the difficulty/time in becoming either.

Being a doctor is a much more stressful and difficult job, which requires more years of training/education and provides far more real value for society.

What point are you arguing here? That it’s more difficult to be a doctor than an NFL player? That is highly subjective depending on what one finds “difficult”. For instance my dentist in SF and even primary care or dermatologists don’t have very stressful jobs and although they had many years of schooling, they didn’t have to subject their bodies to the intense and unrelenting physical rigor of first HS football, THEN college football and then the NFL. I would say for low level or intense stress maybe surgeons, oncologists, anesthesiologists or cardiologists have more stress day to day but that’s just my subjective opinion as well, as to them it may be as easy as flying a kite.

So what do you consider difficult? Having a linebacker smash into you at a full sprint over and over in practice and then not choking in a real game? Or studying relentlessly, writing grants, doing essentially free work as a resident for years while being on call. They are just stressful in different ways, but again, different humans have more fitness for one or the other.

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