The Value of Mediocrity in Professional Sports

By Fionn mac Cumhaill

This year, 2026, a time better than any in history to be a professional athlete. Money literally grows on trees. I’ve seen it. The old adage of the “hard-earned dollar” is no more. Doctors and lawyers by the thousands are giving up their practices and trying out for professional sports teams. And these geeks are making them which is why mediocrity is so prevalent in sports today. Recently, some guy on some NFL team became the highest paid NFL quarterback in league history. Some Guy.

But you really don’t even have to win to get the Shekels. Not in today’s world of sports. Jordan Love, Trevor Lawrence, Joe Burrow - $55 million per year, ZERO Super Bowls amongst them. Womp. Womp. Some guy makes even more than that- $64 million shekels per annum. Suck on that fat blow pop for a minute. The median lifetime take-home earnings for a typical U.S. worker is approximately $1.7 million over a standard 40-year career. It would take you about 37 lifetimes of work; 1,480 years to earn what Some Guy makes in one football season, which is not even a full year.

The average NFL viewer, paying about the salary of a non-Super Bowl-winning quarterback just to watch these fabulously rich 20-year olds lose games and date models, could never comprehend the value of being average in that world. I don’t even know how to properly word that for it to make sense.

Are we, the average swells, bitter? Hell no. I call for $100 million-dollar a year salaries and automatic entry into the Hall of Fame for mediocre careers.

Jonas Salk, Alexander Fleming, Nikoli Tesla, or Albert Einstein, ha! Ha! Get off the front porch with that slinky, small-time talk!