NFL's Unproven Get Highest Salaries

How many bank tellers have starting salaries larger than the bank's president? Do city garbage collectors receive starting salaries twice as much as the mayor's? Can an hourly applicant at McDonald's expect to make more in their first year than a regional manager?

Of course not! Yet, this is what's happening in the NFL.

Rookie players, who have yet to play a single minute in a regular season game, are given multi-million dollar contracts. They end up with starting salaries that exceed those of players who have been playing 5, 10 and 15 years in the league.

Two key examples include Jake Long, drafted by the Miami Dolphins and Matt Ryan drafted by the Atlanta Falcons. Long signed a five-year, $57. 75 million deal and Ryan signed a six-year, $72 million contract that includes a guaranteed $34.75 million.

What a slap in the face to the league's veteran players. These are the players who have worked for years to establish themselves as professional football's elite. The players who have endured week-after-week of physical pain and struggle to keep their position in an extremely competitive workplace.

The NFL must do something to control these outlandish salaries before the league implodes. Not only does this ridiculous salary system for unproven players destroy veteran player morale, but it digs a deeper hole of resentment held by the NFL fan. And, without the fan no league can survive.

As a loyal NFL fan myself, I already resent I can't watch every NFL game unless I subscribe to Direct TV, that it costs hundreds of dollars to attend one regular season game and that tax payers and communities always pay the price each time a new stadium must be built. Plus, as entertaining as NFL football is, it's never easy to see exorbitant amounts of money given to those who play a game when we regular people struggle to make ends meet. Now the NFL shows the fan that the least proven players get the most money?

If nothing else, the NFL needs to protect itself and all its players by implementing a pay structure that includes a respectable starting salary with increases based on quality performance.

After all, isn't that they way the workplace is supposed to operate?