Pro Football is ‘Big’ Business: Twenty Percent of NFL Players Now Weigh Over 300 Pounds

Blogging the National Football League, Blogging the NFL

The National Football League is more popular than ever. In fact, I just received a press release today announcing that the league set a paid attendance record for the fifth straight year. But not only is the game itself big business, so are the players. Fellow b5er Miki Saxon (who writes for LeadershipTurn.com) brought this interesting factoid to my attention. From the Timothy R. Clark book EPIC Change: How to Lead Change in the Global Age:

“Consider the changing physical profile of linemen who play in the National Football League (NFL). In 1976, there wasn’t a single player who tipped the scales at over three hundred pounds. Ten years later, there were 18. During the following decade, the number of players in this fleshy category swelled to 289. Fast-forward to the present, and that number has nearly doubled, with no fewer than 570 players on NFL rosters weighing in at not a biscuit under the three-hundred-pound threshold, constituting fully 20 percent of the player population. Yet the beefier trend isn’t new. Players have gradually been getting bigger since the early days of the game; for example, the average lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers weighed 210 pounds in 1946. Beyond the girth, however, what catches the eye is the astonishing acceleration of the trend.”

Sadly, along with that weight increase comes some danger. Grave danger. The heaviest athletes are more than twice as likely to die before their 50th birthday than their teammates, according to a Scripps Howard News Service study of 3,850 professional-football players who have died in the last century. Most of the 130 players born since 1955 who have died were among the heaviest athletes in sports history, according to the study. One-fifth died of heart diseases, and 77 were so overweight that doctors would have classified them as obese, the study found. So while the NFL and its players are enjoying tremendous popularity, physicians are increasingly questioning whether, by bulking up for their shot at fame and fortune, players are sacrificing their health later in life.

I plan to pursue this topic more in the offseason and talk to some of the 300+ pound players (like Tennessee Titans All-Pro DT Albert Haynesworth) about their thoughts on this information. I’m wondering if there’s a feeling of invincibility or if they really are concerned about the dangers of weighing over 300 pounds.