The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit or the most eloquent became the most highly considered; and this was the first step toward inequality and vice: from these first preferences arose vanity and contempt on the one hand, and shame and envy on the other.
Jean-Jaques Rousseau
In an effort not to die, I recently made a few lifestyle changes.
First, I stopped reading my Twitter feed and easily lowered my blood pressure by a few points.
Similarly, I also was able to stop the nightly ritual of bashing my head against the wall when I gave up watching political commentary. Take it from me, you won’t arrive at a science of man that explains and predicts human behavior by listening to the likes of Whoopi Goldberg and Ben Shapiro.
Finally, I started “The Nutritarian Diet.”
So, for the past three weeks I have eaten a diet consisting of beans, nuts, leaves and seeds. So far, my digital scale at home has delivered mostly good news; however, excessive bean consumption syndrome has led to several unpleasant side effects that I won’t describe in a family newspaper. Also, the salt and sugar withdrawal symptoms started two weeks ago and getting off heroin can’t be any more dreadful.
It has made me slightly crazier than I already was.
In fact, due to my current disconcerted precarious emotional situation—to borrow a line from Tom Waits—I probably shouldn’t have access to a keyboard at all.
But I do. And what follows will either be a love letter or a rant, but nothing in between is possible.
Over the weekend I was thinking about equity in the NFL and how to make sure team owners divide up the obscene profits the league makes so that second-string guards make the same amount as the starting quarterback.
People act as if the quarterback represents some sort of game-altering presence with supernatural abilities, but these men are protected by massive human beings who collide with equally massive human beings on every play. The delicate quarterback merely tiptoes into the pocket, looks for a receiver, and, not finding one, can always throw the ball away. There is even a rule against mistreating the quarterback.
Have you ever heard of a referee throwing a flag for roughing the left guard?
Yet seven quarterbacks make more than $40 million per season and not a single one of the offensive guardian angels protecting these prima donnas make more than a paltry $23 million.
Fourteen quarterbacks have contracts worth more than $100 million, while only one OL can say that.
Wide receivers—who spend most of their time running from people or out of bounds—also make substantially more than offensive linemen. According to Spotrac, the top-16 salaries for wide receivers are all at least $18 million. Only 10 linemen make that much.
But there are equity issues within the quarterback position itself that are troubling.
It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Patrick Mahomes signed a contract worth $450 million, but Marcus Mariota of the Falcons could leverage only $18.75 million out of Arthur Blank. Both men do the same tiptoeing and bailing out when pressure demands, but is Mahomes $431 million better than Mariota?
How can any one man be worth that much more than another man. (For clarification, please refer to the Rousseau quote above.)
It also won’t surprise you to learn that until now, Tom Brady has made more money tiptoeing and bailing out than any other quarterback with a career take of $332,962,392 according to Spotrac. However, in all likelihood, by the end of this year Aaron Rodgers will surpass him.
On top of that, Rogers and Mahomes make even more money by doing State Farm commercials, while Jake Browning of the Bengals can barely keep his family fed on the measly $705,000 per year he is paid.
But the inequities don’t end there. If we’re talking equal pay for equal work among quarterbacks, a few signal callers have made bags of money for doing almost nothing.
If you break down salaries based on how much a quarterback made per pass thrown, Chase Daniel of the Los Angeles Chargers is literally stealing money.
Brady had thrown 9,375 passes in his career by the end of the 2019 season, making only $22,631 per pass, while Daniel threw just 154 total and made $183,794 for each one. Jimmy Garoppolo of the San Francisco 49ers has been nearly as larcenous, throwing only 361 passes and making $125,924 for each one of them. And our old friend Matt Ryan made only $28,819 per pass attempt through 2019.
Meanwhile, Hall of Famers like John Elway, Jim Kelley and Dan Marino took in just a little more than $6,000 for each pass they attempted.
This system of inequality must be torn asunder with each player assigned a salary (and a gender) when drafted. The expropriators must be expropriated.
(By the way, if you found this column to be mean spirited, understand that all I’ve had to eat for the last 24 hours is flax seeds and kale.) Selah.